Loot Project is a Giant NFT Slot Machine

Loot Project isn’t your everyday NFT hype train. It has all the common attributes of one - there’s a collection of things and you tell other people how valuable they are, then your believers make you a little bit richer.

The funny thing about Loot is it isn’t even a game. There are no rules or images and the items you buy don’t come with any instructions. In fact, they’re not even items at all but rather lists of things that could become items somewhere in the future.

These lists contain names for adventurer gear you often see in a fiction novel or a fantasy role-playing game. They are randomly generated by the system and placed in a Loot “bag.” Each of these bags is sealed in an ERC-721 as a non-fungible token. The items listed usually come in different rarities from Common to Mythic (rarest) and the ratio of them will determine the value of your bag. Some Loot bags are worth as much as $800,000. Collectors can also choose to spill the bag and mint each of its items and trade those, instead.

In terms of mechanics, Loot Project is an epitome of a shrug. You can pretty much do whatever you want with the Loot bag. Trade them, make games and put them in, or just marvel at the 1KB text in 4k. 

Essentially, Loot Project is selling you your own imagination.

The Loot Mechanics

Initially, there were 8,000 Loot bags each containing a list of fantastical weapons and armor. These were given for free and the first collectors only had to pay for the minting and Ethereum gas fees.

As the project developed, there are now more types of bags you can mint and own among other features. The first 8,000 bags have now become the Original Loot Bags and will cost a minimum of 3.5 ETH to get your hands on one. The items they contain are exclusive from the rest of the project and basically in a league of their own.

Latecomers can still enjoy Loot with Synthetic Loot and More Loot bags, which are available to claim for free. Simply connect your wallet and grab a list of adventurer gear. The items in these bags can be used to customize your Loot characters and join Loot realms to hunt for more valuable items. Characters and Realms both will cost at least 0.2 ETH to mint plus gas fees.

There are also premium Loot bags for players who have an open relationship with their wallets. These are the Genesis Loot and cost 0.25 ETH a pop (plus gas.) Items found in these bags can grant you exclusive access and rights to certain realms.

The Loot Items

The value of the Original Loot bags depends on the items they contain and the value of those items depends on how rare they are. Each bag comes with 8 items with random rarities. 

There are six rarities among the Loot and modern gamers will recognize them from any game, especially mobile games, they’ve played:

• Common

• Uncommon

• Rare

• Epic

• Legendary

• Mythic

Common is the lowest rarity Loot with hundreds of duplicates in the system and Mythic is the rarest with only one of each kind. Each item has a “greatness” score that is shown in every bag next to its name. The higher the greatness score, the more expensive the bag becomes.

For example, if you unlock a bag with one Mythic item worth 20 greatness but the rest are Common worth 3 greatness each, you’d have a score of 41. Another bag with no Mythic but three Rare items worth 6 greatness each and the rest are Uncommon each being worth 5 greatness will have a higher score at 43.

But things don’t always work like that. The reality is, that one Mythic item is still worth more than all three Rare ones in the other bag. So your bag may end up costing more for people who would be willing to pay just for that super rare item.

Below is what’s inside an Original Bag #2423 currently on sale for an affordable price at 3.9 ETH:

Based on what we see, this is a pretty hefty bag - decent scores for even Common items, two Rare, a high level Mythic, and a high-level Epic. Well worth the $16,000 price tag if you asked anyone.

The Loot Purpose

Perhaps the most questionable part about Loot Project is what we should do with the items we have. The developers claim to have envisioned a community owned platform where NFTs are traded and used in whatever way their holders want. There’s a lot of implications behind that claim, most of which people haven’t realized.

The Loot bag mechanic isn’t a new concept by any means. Mobile free-to-play games are the king of monetizing random number generations through what they call “surprise” mechanics or loot boxes. 

Those companies understand one thing - the items in their loot boxes need to have a purpose. The value of the rare item and the thrill of finding one entices the players to spend money. But what that item can do is what makes them keep on spending. As of now, there isn’t a concrete system to what the Loot items can do or will be able to do.

Conclusion

The rare items will eventually have to prove their worth and the ones holding the rarest of them all would tend to be super creative when the time comes. 

One of the most popular ideas right now is a game similar to Dungeons and Dragons and it will use the items in Original Loot bags. While that sounds fun, it has no practical value for something that expensive. In other words, there needs to be - will be a way for the collectors to achieve returns on their investments and we’d most likely see something similar to CityDao or Infinity Axie.

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