Drug Wars pulls massive bait and switch

themarkymark (80)in #drugwars • 5 years ago (edited)

When Drug Wars came out they promised 80% of the Steem would go to the player reward pool and 20% would go to the devs.

The first few days of the game the reward pool was pretty huge due to the massive buzz the game got.

The buzz was largely related to the fact they had over 6,000 Steem reward pool daily that was getting paid to players. Many users during these first few days were getting 8-10% of their money back on a daily basis due to the poorly designed reward system.

Within the first 2-3 weeks over 90% of the players had already reached a break even and were starting to make money playing the game over their initial "investment". This was due to a handful of players who invested heavily in the game. A large number of users created optimized accounts that only produced drugs to increase their daily payout and ignored all aspects of the "game".

During the first few weeks all the gaming aspects of the game where disabled when battles we re-worked and this remained the case for around two weeks. This increased the appearance the game was more of an investment vehicle than an actual game.

It is no secret I have been very vocal about the flaws in the game, most importantly the Ponzi-like reward system. As predicted, as time went on the reward pool in the game shrunk rapidly along with daily payouts. When I first started playing I was receiving around 98 Steem a day. As of yesterday that was down to around 2.4 Steem a day.

A few weeks ago Drug Wars attempted to switch all payouts to Future tokens, a token valued at 12.17 Steem per 1,000 if you buy from the Drug Wars team but worth about 0.4 Steem if you buy outside of the game or try to sell your own. There was massive blowback and the team put it on hold until they could do some more work integrating into the game.

As of yesterday, all payouts switched to paying out Future tokens instead of Steem. They also reduced the reward pool from the current 986.610 Steem to less than 36 Steem daily.

Reward Pool prior to Future Token

Current Reward Pool

When the game was first announced, the team stated 80% of the rewards would go to the players and 20% to the devs. The recent changes to using the Future token for payouts reduce the player's cut to 3.6% and increases the developers cut to 96.4%. A reduction of over 2200% from the previous day.

When asked about the change, the response was the payout is the same.

But the key thing is this

They are using their price for Future, which is 2000%-3000% higher than what people are paying them for. I understand the need to sell at a higher price than the market, that's pretty standard, especially in gaming. The difference is almost 30x higher, but more importantly, the reward pool was reduced by this same amount. Regardless of what they decide to sell or buy Future for, the reward pool should not have shrunk almost 3000%.

The game that claims to have over 12,000 players went from 6,300 Steem reward pool to now under 36 Steem using a token no one wants.

To date, the Drug Wars team has received over 272,000 Steem.

How have players taken the change?

I could keep posting responses but I don't want to post their entire Discord history, I think you get the point.

An attempt to reduce the reward pool hemorrhaging they started to upvote thousands of Drug Wars battle ~~spam~~ posts with record-setting 35% beneficiaries where a significant portion went to the developers and not the reward pool. This was eventually changed to 10% when people found out about the undisclosed beneficiaries.

The Drug Wars team (aka Fundition) has made one poor decision after another. At one point they were using their 1M Steemit Inc Delegation* to vote 100% on their posts and their developer's posts and stopped when people started to notice it.

I would have been a big fan of the game if it wasn't for the flawed reward pool and endless track record of poor decisions from the dev team.

#drama #baitandswitch #fundition #busy