This month, the developer of free to play FPS Shockwaves announced the release of FirstWaves, which they describe as the first ever surf 2 earn game on Telegram, and this week, they just launched a new tournament for it to reward the top leaderboard players with tokens and more. Here’s how you can play to earn for free.
What Is FirstWaves?
FirstWaves is a free new Telegram mini game about surfing and collecting XNeuros to top the leaderboard. You surf in a 3D area in third person view, and you have 2 minutes to collect 10 XNeuros before time runs out. Each XNeuros is like a large chip floating above water with a ray blasting above them to the sky to help you figure out where to go next. Simply surf through them to collect them, earning 100 points for each XNeuros collected.
As you try to collect all of the XNeuros as fast as possible, you will find obstacles in the form of large naval mines floating about. While you might expect these to basically end your run, you can actually hit them and still continue playing, but if you do smash into one of these mines, the timer will be significantly reduced, so you’ll be under even more pressure to find and collect all of the remaining XNeuros. What does end the game however is trying to go out of bounds, so if you try to go past the grid surrounding the map, it’s game over. While this grid isn’t really visible from a distance, you will start seeing a red wall if you get too close, but you can also see yellow objects lined up from afar that signal the end of the map, so don’t get too close to those objects or the red wall if you want to collect all 10 XNeuros, as touching any of those two boundaries instantly ends your game.
That’s basically it when it comes to gameplay, it’s a simple surfing collectathon imposed by a time limit that also affects your score at the end, so the faster you collect the XNeuros before time runs out, the bigger points bonus you will get. This doesn’t mean that only your highest-scoring attempt counts though. In this game, each attempt adds points to your total score, so the more you play and the better you consistently do, the more points you can rack up to become among the highest-scoring players. And if you’re going to play this as a completely free to play web3 game, then you’re going to be limited in the number of attempts you have per day. This is where things may get difficult if you’re trying to win bigger rewards for free, but it could overall depend on the number of players there are that are trying to compete differently. Let’s take a closer look.
Free Daily Attempts & How to Get More
Everyone starts off with 3 free attempts per day, so after you play 3 times for the day, you’ll have to wait till tomorrow to continue increasing your score. However, you can double this limit by simply connecting your wallet, so you can then play 6 times a day. If you want to play even more than that, you will need to have $NEUROS tokens in that same wallet. According to the official Medium post for game rules and rewards, here is how many tokens you need to get more daily tries:
- 100 $NEUROS: +1 attempt
- 200 $NEUROS: +2 attempts
- 500 $NEUROS: +3 attempts
- 1000 $NEUROS: +4 attempts
- 2000 $NEUROS: +5 attempts
- 5000 $NEUROS: +6 attempts
- 10,000 $NEUROS: +7 attempts
- 20,000 $NEUROS: +8 attempts
- 50,000 $NEUROS: +9 attempts
- 100,000 $NEUROS: +10 attempts
- 200,000 $NEUROS: +11 attempts
- 500,000 $NEUROS: +12 attempts
- 1,000,000 $NEUROS: +13 attempts
By giving players the option to gain more attempts by holding up to 1 million $NEUROS tokens, it’s possible to technically have up to 16 attempts a day, which definitely gives you a significant advantage over a F2P player who has 6 attempts a day. To put things into perspective though, to buy 1 million $NEUROS tokens at the time of writing would cost you around ~$18.3k, if not somewhat more depending on liquidity. While this may seem like a nice way to reward holders who bought tokens last year or months ago with some new utility, newcomers are likely to see this as a pay to win system. On top of this, players can also share their referral link to get 50% of their friend’s score. Based on the rewards being given out though, it doesn’t seem likely that there will be many, if anyone, willing to spend that much on the token just for this game alone – you can check out more details on the $NEUROS token in this whitepaper for the free to play flagship game Shockwaves to find out more of its use cases.
New Tournament Is Now Live – What Are the Rewards?
This August 26th, the studio announced the start of a new Telegram tournament for FirstWaves, giving players another opportunity to earn rewards, this time until September 9th. It seems to feature a 3x points boost, and the top 30 players with the most points will earn 3 lootboxes, 900 xNeuros and $NEUROS tokens from a 30k $NEUROS prize pool. Lootboxes and xNeuros tie into the team’s main FPS game, Shockwaves, so xNeuros is actually an in-game currency that you need to open lootboxes which can contain weapons and armor, and maybe more, so you’ll want to use the same wallet as you use in the web3 shooter to use your rewards in the blockchain game.
Next to these rewards, the tournament also uses a level system to essentially reward most if not all players who participate during the competition. There are a total of 11 (or 10) levels designed to determine the rewards you get, with the levels based on your leaderboard percentage ranking. Basically, if you are among the top 50%, you’re already at level 6, which rewards you with 2 lootboxes and 400 xNeuros. I already got to level 7 after just one attempt, ranking me among the top 33%, but it’s still early days so things could change a lot depending on how many players join in. You can check out the loot table in the image below to see what you can get in each level.
