Our main focus this year on the Econ Team is compensating creators for their contribution to Rec Room. Part of the problem with exchanging tokens for real money is potential “botting”, aka farming, of tokens. Besides giving people a way to essentially steal tokens, it creates instability in the economy, and prohibits us from compensating creators. To solve this problem, and to spice up our reward system, we’re introducing/re-introducing a new/old way of rewarding players for playing the game: Items!
Items!
If you’re wondering why it sounds so familiar, it’s because we actually used to reward players by giving items—just ask the OGs. We changed it to tokens without knowing the kind of impact it would have years later when working towards compensating creators. Now, it turns out to be a great solution that the community loved in the past, so we’re bringing it back with a few improvements.
Before, you’d max out at about 300 tokens a day. Now, you can earn over 3,000 tokens worth of items! THAT’S 10X THE VALUE! But wait, that’s not all! You’ll also have three choices of rewards, so you’re not stuck with yet another dice skin (I mean, why are there so many??).
And it’s not just items - you’ll still get tokens from rewards. They’re in the mix of things that can show up as one of the options you pick from.
These changes apply to the most common reward sources: completing daily challenges, playing your first rec room original game of the day, and finishing a rec room original game. Rewards from leveling up, Frontier Pass, and completing weekly challenges (more on those later) remain as is.
More Rewards
Daily Challenges
Before, you were rewarded for each of the three challenges you completed. Now, you’re rewarded once for completing all three. Before you submit that post in the subreddit, just know that you used to get 50 tokens for completing all three challenges, but now you’re getting 255 tokens worth of items. That’s 5x the value!
Weekly Challenges
Another repeat? Yes, we do this because there are newer players that deserve previous skins, but what about those that have been grinding since the Camper Backpack skin? Well, if you already have the weekly skin, you’ll now get a 4-star box for completing the weekly challenge! Why weren’t we doing that before?
Value Comparison
Other Token Rewards
Good news! All Rec Room Plus members can now earn tokens for selling inventions and keys. If you haven’t already picked up the Maker Pen, now is the time to give it a shot. To learn more about the feature, visit the Community Commerce page. It breaks down how selling works and gives you some tips on how to make the most of it. SoonTM you’ll be able to turn the tokens you earn from selling into real money, but that’s a topic for another blog post.
Before, gave out hundreds of thousands of tokens to the top Room and Invention creators each month. Now, we’re still giving out hundreds of thousands of tokens to the top room and invention creators each month - no Rec Room Plus membership required. There are also contests and challenges every month that continue to reward tokens. So seriously, grab that Maker Pen!
What about the non-creators? If you're more about competition than creation, you might look to leagues. You can apply for your league to be officially sponsored by Rec Room. If your league meets the guidelines and is approved, we’ll grant you gold skins (if available) and 10,000 tokens to be awarded to league participants. You can learn more on the League Sponsorship page.
Conclusion
These changes mean you get: more value from rewards, more choice in your rewards, the potential for compensating creators, and us spending more time building fun features and less time fighting bots. As with everything we do, we’ll see how it works, listen to your feedback, and adjust accordingly over time. So let us know what you think.