I started playing Rising Star sometime in late January 2022. I saw a bunch of people posting about it while trying to figure out the Hive Blog frontends and eventually stopped by to check it out. I pressed that [START] button and the rest is history!

As a lover of spreadsheets, I was soon doing some min/maxxing and tracking numbers. The first entry on what would become my mega tracking sheet was Feb 3, 2022. So yesterday, when I reached the Feb 2, 2023 row, I figured it was time to commemorate those efforts.
 

🔧 Tools and method used

The MVP of this effort is the simple, effective diary tool by @pinkfloyd878. Paste your diary results here to get a count of STARBITS and Skill and other things. Some errors tend to pop up, but it still works (I suspect it hasn't been maintained for some time though).

NOTE: The tool will not count the 10,000–11,000 STARBITS earned from the Millionaire mission. I assume this is because the diary uses ALLCAPS for those entries, and Floyd's code is looking for sentence case.

The other tool was Google Sheets, plus daily(ish) discipline (both in recording the amount and playing the game).

Method: 7-day rolling average

The chart plots the 7-day rolling average of my daily SB earnings. So a data point for, say, March 7 averages the amounts from March 1 to 7.

Doing it this way helps smooth out the data by blunting the visual impact from random dips or spikes. I also used it to help me fill in blanks on the rare occasions when I forgot a day and the diary had moved past the data points. For missed day I just took the last average and plopped it in, assuming I had played like I usually did.

Same chart is below for good measure, saving you a scroll!

 

🔎 Exploring the data

Some highlights:

• 🔥 The latest data point is also the highest: On average I'm making 184,000 SB per day. The absolute daily max I have on record (not shown) is 211,737.
• ❌ The red X on the chart sits below the slope of the linear trendline. In English, that's how much my average increases every day. At 408*x, it means I can expect the next day's average to be about 400 higher. However, astute observers may notice that my growth rate has two distinct slopes... before and after the A. On the current trajectory, I'm much higher than 400/day!
• 🅰️ The red A sits at a major inflection point. Sometime shortly after October 1 (in fact it was Oct 20) my average growth explodes then settles on a steeper trajectory. What happened? Three things actually, all at once:
  • 1️⃣ I unlocked Fan Club card FC28, which adds 5K fans
  • 2️⃣ Having done that, I stopped dedicating 3–5 hours/day to the 'Promote Fan Club' mission, which is how you earn the FC cards. That time went back into STARBITS generating missions.
  • 3️⃣ Coincidentally, I unlocked Zone 4 right around this time too, which soon gave me access to the critical fourth 5-minute mission (a huge source of STARBITS income). And soon after that, the second 15-minute mission (another biggie).
• 🅱️ What about that big ugly dip above the red B? Simply put, that was a holiday vacation. I didn't play as much nor record as much, because I was busy being on boats and stuff. However, you'll notice this did not impact the average growth rate much (if at all). You can picture the orange line continuing on over the gap to meet on the other side without 'bending' much, so the only detriment to me was fewer SB while on vacation. It was worth it 😎

 

💪 Growth approach

I don't do anything too fancy to grow the account. I use RSGfam.com by @foxon to keep an eye on the price per fan (in SB). If I'm feeling utilitarian, I'll scope it for deals and preferentially nab cards that also have strong ratios in the other stats. (E.g. when price per fan is equal, I then look at price per Skill/IM/Luck and try to optimize those).

🎉 If I'm feeling like having more fun, I'll grab some packs (and I stockpile at least a hundred packs for New Cards Day at the top of every month).

🍀 I will also buy up the Luck stat every now and then, so that I only need to run a Skill mission about once per day to counter my Ego growth. This is more boring than the "Lucky Drunks" strategy, but I find that approach to be too variable for my tastes. Maybe it's much better, but I like the steady 'n' consistent way.

🎴 I've not tracked my pack luck in the same way as STARBITS, but I can do some napkin math to see how lucky I've been in pulling Legendaries! First, you can get a sense of your lifetime total packs opened with an advanced search in the RSG Discord:

 
Search in: the 🎲 card-pack-stream for @yourname — the number of results will reflect how many times the Discord bot logged a pack opening. Whether that's 100% accurate I do not know, but I'll trust it for now!

• So for me: ~2,291 packs (est. 19M SB worth)
• At 3 cards/pack that's ~6,873 cards from packs
• Legendary odds per card roll have been roughly cited at around 0.05% or 1 in 2000
• Based on those odds I "should" have 6,873 / 2000 = 3.4365 Legendaries (three going on four)
• I actually only have 2 Legendaries
• Therefore, I've been unlucky in this respect 😜
• Pls send luck vibes 💖

 

💸 ROI?

I don't play RSG with the intent of turning it into a personal revenue stream. I like it for the incremental gaming aspect, and it's a pure bonus to me that I have the option to liquidate assets into stuff if I need to.

However, I can't say that I don't think about the $ implications from time to time! So here's my perspective on this year's ROI:

• Since I started, the crypto winter's been tough on RSG, and the SB price has gone down considerably, both in terms of SWAP.HIVE and USD. So on paper, I'm in the red on RSG despite the steady growth in the SB generation.
• However, I encourage one to read this essay on The Future of RSG written by @risingstargame itself, wherein you'll find some promising ideas about the STARPRO currency and other measures they're taking to weather the bear and counteract the overzealous SB faucets.
• So my plan and outlook is along these lines:
  • Use my healthy SB generation to keep playing 'cause I like RSG just as a game (dopamine drip feed mmmm)
  • Also use those SB to buy STARPRO once I see how important or valuable it will be for Raves (either "staking" or buying RV cards). The SB is also a shortcut to buying up the FA cards on the market (key for Raves). I'll do the math to see how to split SB between STARPRO, more fans, or more FA cards
  • Bet on RSG to survive the bear, and expect all metrics to rise again if and when another bull cycle graces Hive with its presence. Everybody stacking and building and being patient will probably enjoy some nice profits when that time comes 🤞😉

 
That's it for now! Happy to answer any questions about this analysis or RSG itself to the best of my ability. Oh, and

"Will you keep tracking SB every day?"

I kind of assume that after a year I'd only check on it every now and then... but it's become such a habit and a nice daily "affirmation" that I may just keep at it, haha!

Thank you for reading. The images in this post are my own with exception to the Rising Star Logo used on the chart. I also write a bunch of fiction on Hive that rewards engaged readers with Hive tokens! I recently gave away 180,000 STARBITS and I'll do it again eventually.