Pixels has released a significant new Chapter 2.5 update, introducing a number of changes designed to improve the experience and transform the game's meta and balance the economy. From major reputation changes to the previously known tasks.

Balancing the Economy and Empowering the Community

The Chapter 2.5 update focuses on two main goals: balancing the game's economy and empowering community engagement. To achieve this, the following have been modified:

• Improved Reputation System: This new system rewards active and engaged players, reducing market fees and paving the way for future features. Reputation is now dependent on each user's in-game activity, off-chain and on-chain movements. In my case, I have 3600 reputation without a land owner.

• With the new reputation system, the new fee in the market also comes into action, depending on each player, which can go from 1% (if you had the VIP before the update) to 15% (which is the maximum found so far, without VIP, but with 2017 reputation)

• New Task Board: One of the most anticipated changes came with this update, it is expected that all players will have a total of 40 tasks for each skill, of which, only a maximum of 4 can appear on the board at a time. Right now, just like with the cooking and stoneshaping tasks, there are a lot of decoration item tasks, which are found in the market above 100k up to 500k, so it is advisable to wait for corrections by the team or the in-game market itself.

• Players can now buy coins directly in the game, which at the moment costs around 7 dollars per million coins, which is equivalent to 40 Pixels at today's price. It is not yet a competitive price for the OTC market, but it is a new bet from the same ecosystem. It is not known if it will work the same as the VIP membership that fluctuates with the market price or will be stable: 20 Pixels = 500k coins, 40 Pixels = 1M, 158 Pixels = 4M.

• New quest: Reputable Banker: Spend $PIXEL to buy a coin voucher at the bank shop to increase your reputation score!

• Energy System Updates: The introduction of Berry Blast (capsule that offers 100 energy for 5000 coins) and the removal of the exchange of energy consumables (wines) seek to prevent exploitation and maintain a fair balance. This is the biggest blow to the meta in this update, every player must now craft their energy or buy it directly from Pixels.

• Land Ownership Changes: Land owners are now straight up VIP (after owning the land for 7 days) and have more control over their property, they can now block up to 100 players from their land. Additionally, overage rates have been increased from 2-4% to 4-6%.

• Crafting Improvements: Crafting mix has been reintroduced and Voidite Matrix has been replaced with Voidtonium in recipes that require it, to restore balance to crafting.

• The wine cellar in Terra Villa is now nerfed, only allowing you to craft 4 types of wine and becoming tier 2. With this, new recipes from the different remaining tiers can emerge, only providing value to the Wineries in the NFT lands, which are still tier 4 and allow you to craft all wines.

• Some emails will have an expiration date, so keep an eye out for that.

A Focus on Constant Evolution

This change is one of the biggest to come to Pixels since Chapter 2, which shows a great commitment from the team to want to improve the experience of the players, however, there is still much work to be done. The most important thing is to listen to the community, because although they fulfilled their promises, the mechanics and the meta of the game are still lost, since the new tasks and farming are affected by the market that has been in imbalance for some time now.

The Pixels team is now open to suggestions to continue building or transforming the changes to improve the quality of life of the players.

See you in Terra Villa!