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The Forge is Down: What does it mean?

Greetings everyone and welcome to another Gods unchained post. It certainly has been a moment hasn't it people, and during all this time the forge has been in complete disrepair. For those of you who aren't aware the forge is the utility within Gods Unchained that allows you to mint cards you acquire in game into NFTs with a small $GODS fee (the in game currency), and ever since migration this service has been unavailable to everyone. This has meant no cards get forged and no cards get forged up into shinier tiers aswell, this has resulted in a bit of a stagnation and lull on the market and in game aswell. But we're going to get into all the particulars of that in a second.

Migration Growing Pains, Excruciating

The game has been growing through various growing pains since it's recent zKevm migration. Card metadata is bugged so all marketplaces split cards into random groupings,fees, there is no forging, and to top it off there are no benefits on the player-end yet. One of the biggest issues has been the forge, the metadata bug is annoying but not as gamebreaking. The fees have been minimal, in the dozens and dozens of transactions I've done maybe I've spent a penny or two. The promises that came with the migration (like chests, packs, and mass forging) are still nowhere in sight. So yes Gods unchained didn't get left to rot and was ported over, but as of now we are only experiencing the cons of doing so.

Will it be back? When? What now?

There is a tendency in Gods Unchained for issues/items to be resolved too little too late. The world tournament, the current state of chests, and other stuff that I won't get into right now. So when it comes to the forge, which should be a core in game function always available, the time in which it may take to resolve might be much longer than what we would like it to be. The same way chests are still "being resolved" years later this may suffer the same fate. I certainly hope they fix it promptly, but what if they don't? I've talked about how the shine of cards works for dp2e and how to calculate it before, so as many of you already know the shinier the better as far as your in game earnings are concerned.

If the forge doesn't come back soon: What next?

If the forge doesn't come back quickly cards of shiney rarities will be worth more and all cards will become more illiquid as a result. Gods Unchained loses it's card sink. Players will no longer be forging 2 plains into meteorites, 5 meteorites into shadows, 5 shadows into 1 gold, and 5 golds into 1 diamond. All to earn more in dp2e or just for absolute collectionism/flex. There will be no mass meteorite card rarity buying sprees to forge something up, since in the current environment doing so is actually just praying to the gods that forge comes back soon. There's a fair chance it won't be back for while. It's time to brace in like the chaotic times before the forge when all cards were the only ones available. It may be a prioritized issue, but it may take quite some time for it to be implemented aswell.

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Forgeless: The Consequences

The economic consequences aside (card demand for forging etc.), the forge being down makes the game feel/look incomplete to a web3 user and have no real "grab" for a web2 user. It will have entering users (of all demographics) think along similar lines of "I can trade my cards I earn in game? How? Oh I forge them up? Cool, how do I do that? What do you mean it's down, when will it be back up?". GU's inventory freedom is one of the appeals of the gameplay loop and having this feature be unavailable severely stifles it.

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Talking Tidbits: To Shine or not to Shine?

Before the migration the price of meteorite cards directly effected the price of diamond cards. In the current environment they seem to not be related in the slightest due to the forge being down, and sellers being confident it won't be up again for quite some time. The real question I ask myself every day (that I actually even do my dailies) is should I even be shining at all? Or should I just be collecting a meteorite playset and renting from lootrush so I assume no risk buy buying cards? I definitely am considering taking the jump. The freedom of being able to play with whichever card is more valuable to me than just earning more per day. I played this game because it's fun/competitive (or at least it used to be). Now with the forge down, maxxing out shine potential seems a very mediocre prospect.

What are any of your thoughts on this? Are you in it for the dpe, collecting the cards? do you prefer to play variety or the challenge of shine building? Regardless of what you enjoy the forge being down effects us all and I hope they fix it soon. I can't help but be antsy like the rest of you. Cheers everyone, thanks for giving this post a look and I'll see the rest of you all out there in Eucos playing some terrible shiney deck. Stay safe out there.