My Experience With ArtByte (ABY)

I've written a lot of articles, but this is the first time I'm writing about a cryptocurrency. I hope it's an interesting read! Any and all feedback would be appreciated.

Baby's First Cryptocurrency

I've been aware of cryptocurrencies for many years, but only started investing in them just under two years ago. A friend of mine explained the concept to me, and I made the decision to invest in a lesser known cryptocurrency with a purpose I could really get behind - ABY, or ArtByte, previously known as AppleByte. Its stated goal was to be used as a way to pay artists, which was especially relevant to me as a freelance artist.

And so it was that on 4 December 2017, I bought cryptocurrency for the first time in my life - about 20 euros' worth of ArtByte on Litebit. A very small investment, but we all have to start somewhere. At first, I simply reveled in the experience of being part of something new, but I eventually started participating in the community and even using their specialized faucet.

A Lost Art

For a while things seemed to be going alright with the ABY. It's tough to find any hard data at this time for reasons we'll get into later, but as its listing on Coinmarketcap reveals, it reached a high point of $0,049949 on January 11th 2018, just two months after I bought it. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly. Its community was vibrant, people were tipping ABY to artists on Twitter and Reddit, and it all seemed to be reaching ever new heights. But then some cracks started to show - first their faucet closed, and their forum followed soon after. I'm not entirely sure why this was, but I speculate that it's because people were just in it to earn ABY. You see, the forum rewarded members with ABY for making many posts, which led to a lot of spam, people posting low effort responses or even making topics with copy-pasted Wiki articles. The forum was replaced with a simpler system of 'artist profiles,' pages artists could post updates and artwork on, which still exists today but isn't particularly active.

Of course, getting rid of a forum or a faucet won't kill a cryptocurrency. But nothing could prepare ABY for the crypto crash of 2018. I don't know if things were happening behind the screens that we don't know about, or if the crash just hit the ABY at a vulnerable time, but it never recovered. After a steady decline of many months, we finally reached the middle of 2019 with no signs of improvement and no real news from the people behind this once-promising cryptocurrency. And the few ambitious platforms that had hosted ABY to buy or trade slowly began to delist it, starting with Litebit on July 10th 2019 (https://twitter.com/litebiteu/status/1146744394332155904) - which means it was no longer sold anywhere and could only be traded on the last remaining websites that allowed it. One of those websites, Nova Exchange, ceased all trading just over a month ago as of writing this article, leaving only Yobit as a place to trade ABY. To make matters worse, Yobit's ABY wallet has been under 'maintenance' for a long time with no updates, which means ABY buying and trading is as good as dead.

And that's the awkward position this once-valued cryptocurrency is in today. With no word from the developers and no place to buy, sell or trade, ABY will simply stay in people's wallets and continue to decrease in value as it has been doing for a long time.

Lessons to be Learned

Regardless of all the signs that it was time to jump ship, I stubbornly held on to all my ABY. By the time I finally thought of selling it, it was barely worth doing so anymore, so I still have about 28 000 ABY just sitting in my wallet. At this point, it's worth about 7-8 dollars in BTC in total. I never invested too much money into it, but ABY's current state still feels like a major disappointment because I invested a lot of time in the community around it, only for that community to disappear. My experience with ABY proved to be a lesson not only in investing money, but in investing time and energy as well.

Of course, though the situation looks hopeless, there is still a chance the ABY team is working on a revival behind the scenes. Maybe this article proclaiming ABY to have been a bad investment will look ridiculous in a few years? That's just the way it goes with these smaller, specialized cryptocurrencies. If nothing else, we can at least look forward to Yobit finally finishing maintenance on their ABY wallet. That should revive trading in some small way. That's why I'll hold on to the ABY I still have - most likely, it'll just diminish in value even more, but at least it'll be an interesting relic of the past if nothing else. And if it ever does make a comeback I can pretend I knew it all along.

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Though my experience with ABY was very educational, I actually made similar mistakes with other cryptocurrencies shortly after investing in it - this was before everything went wrong with ABY, mind you. One cryptocurrency I invested in that proceeded to fade away was 2GIVE. If people enjoy this article about my experience with ABY, I might write an article about that one as well. As I said, all feedback is appreciated!

Resident Evil - Saving as a Limited Resource

I recently started playing the Resident Evil games, starting with the HD Remake of the first installment in the series. The game is often discussed as a great example of survival horror, and most of its qualities have been thoroughly discussed. That's why I want to take the approach I did for my Mario Odyssey article and focus on something specific I thought was interesting about the game: The fact that there is a cost to saving, that keeping your progress is a finite resource. 

Running out of Ink

Resident Evil is possibly the biggest horror franchise in all of videogames. The first game didn't just define what the rest of the franchise would look like, but had an effect on the genre as a whole. One of the cornerstones of this survival horror classic is limited resources. There are only a finite amount of healing items and bullets, and only a few spots of inventory space to keep them in. I was aware of that, but I wasn't aware of one other resource the game limited.

In their journey to escape the zombie-infested mansion, Jill or Chris - depending on who you picked to play as - need to use typewriters to save their progress. But it's not as simple as approaching a typewriter and hitting the button; you actually need to use an Ink Ribbon to use the typewriter. And Ink Ribbons are a resource you need to find, put in your inventory and take with you just like bullets and healing items. And once you've used them, they're gone.

This idea really caught me off guard. I've seen games that reduce your ranking if you save, or games that have a super hard mode with finite save points like LISA: The Painful, but never a game that requires you to use a specific finite item for each time you save.

Inky Black Horror

Limited resources have a way of building the tension. You don't want to waste all your bullets, but being too stingy will just get you injured or slow you down a lot. It's the same for healing items, and in this case, for the Ink Ribbons as well. Waste too many Ink Ribbons and you'll have to go long periods of time without saving until you find more... but if you're too stingy and wait a long time before you save, you'll lose significant progress if you run into trouble and die. I both loved and hated this idea.

People with a passion for videogames often declare that the best games communicate their atmosphere or aesthetic with their mechanics, not just their presentation. To clarify, for example, a horror game shouldn't just be scary because it looks and sounds frightening - playing it should be a frightening experience in and of itself due to how the game actually works. The limited Ink Ribbons definitely made playing the game a lot scarier because every enemy was now a huge threat to my progress. In one of my streams of the game I ended up stuck for a few hours and wasted too many Ink Ribbons on small bits of progress - I ended up having to cross two new areas filled with new enemies before I could finally save, and that hour of excitement was one of the scariest experiences I've ever had with a videogame. Because your progress hangs in the balance, you need to be twice as careful about your other resources and be intimately familiar with the layout of each area - and even that won't protect you entirely, because some rooms in the mansion change over time.

Good ideas and effective scares, however, can eventually turn into mere frustrations when you're exposed to them too often. We saw a bit of this in Silence of the Sleep, where a certain frightening monster appeared so often and reset your progress so often that it lost its impact and turned into an annoyance. The situation with the Ink Ribbons eventually became similar, though not quite as bad. You see, the fear that comes from limited Ink Ribbons is at its strongest when you haven't lost your progress yet. The true brilliance of the idea shines in those moments of tension where you decide to bite off just a bit more and see if it pays off, or when you're desperately going from room to room with zombies on your case. But once you've actually died and lost your progress, the tension is released and replaced with frustration and disappointment. Now you have to retrace your steps, and though you're more efficient about it, it gets old fast if it happens multiple times.

The Ink Ribbons really are a double edged sword in this regard. Ideally you'd have a situation with the same tension, but not the resulting frustration, but there's no way to change the Ink Ribbons that would make that a reality. The fear of losing your progress and the frustration of losing your progress are two sides of the same coin. If you died and you didn't lose your progress, then the tension wouldn't be there, but the fact that you do lose your progress inevitably leads to frustration and repetition. As a designer, a possible middle ground I could suggest is that the Ink Ribbons are required to save major story progress, but minor things like killing zombies and gaining resources are preserved. Of course, this could easily be exploited and break the game, so I understand why they didn't go for that.

All in all, Ink Ribbons really increase the tension and really put the survival AND horror in "survival horror." But having something as necessary and usually taken for granted as saving depend on a finite resource could be very frustrating for some people. The threat of losing progress is great for horror, but actually losing your progress can lead to repetition. I think how you feel about Ink Ribbons will ultimately come down to preference, but while it's a love-hate relationship for me, I love it more than I hate it because of the exciting experience it gave me. I'm excited to experience the rest of the Resident Evil franchise and see if the way resources are handled changes much throughout.

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October's over, but I couldn't resist writing another article about a spooky game! Since I'm planning to do the whole franchise, you can probably expect more Resident Evil articles in the next few months. I hope you'll stick with me as I experience another series I missed out on. I want to thank the people on Steem again for all their support; you've made writing a lot more fun for me.

What do you think? Is it fair to have a function like saving your game depend on a finite in-game resource? Is that brilliant horror design or irritating artificial difficulty? Would love to hear your thoughts.