My Take On Drugwars

It's Wednesday and the sun is shining.

Drugwars

So what is going on with @drugwars, really?

There have been a lot of heat on Drugwars lately, angry comments from users, and a lot of changes from Drugwars themselves.

For myself on occasion the Drugwars website have been very slow to complete anything, like upgrades and stuff. One time it took over 45 minutes to make an upgrade that would have took my merch to below safe levels, and in that time somehow someone was able to start a fight and take all of that away before it went through.

Then there is all the changes with the Future Token and the new Forum, and also the tone in some of the posts that they have done.

So I really wanted to know all of this for myself, and try to figure out what is really going on here.

And to do that I have read up on all the recent posts that have gone out from Drugwars, and also on some of the comments that have been made.

Now the big changes really started with the Introduction of the Future Token, this started a lot of speculation and angry comments, that was not in any way helped by the tone in this post in particular, Why we are Leaving Steem!, but rather the opposite.

The tone of the conversation then got a lot better after this post, Drugwars changing direction: introducing new Editorial director, last update postponement, and more, where they introduced an editor, and also the new Forum.

And the communication from Drugwars have been civil ever since as far as I can assertain.

So the Forum is where you are now able to share your battles and get those posts upvoted, and it seems to work.

My Take On This

Well, to start with, the instability of their website I will give the benefit of the doubt to just say that all of these changes took some time to stabilize, and the website could therefore be a bit shaky from time to time.

As for the Future Token I really believe that they nailed it themselves in the Introduction post, and I quote

The sustainability of the game was one of the motive for this change and to reduce the cost of each items, buildings, and units in Drugwars. Above that, other revenue streams are coming but the motivation to tokenize the game was primary to us. Furthermore we are taking another step forward in the tokenization of all of our active and upcoming projects that you can find here by introducing the FUTURE token in every applications under Futureshock.

And I do want to emphasize the first part "The sustainability of the game".

So Drugwars have been giving out Steem to it's users, and anyone with a brain can hopefully do the math and conclude that if they gave their users more money back than what the users where investing, the whole thing would just fall apart.

Then why did they do that in the first place?

To boost the userbase, plain and simple. Drugwars would have not been able to get this many users in this amount of time without paying them to play the game.

This of course makes a lot of players angry, especially those with heavy investment in the game, to no longer be able to get paid in Steem, but in a Token that noone really knows what value it will have.

But we also have to remember that it is a game, and the house always wins, however the way this was done was not handled in a very good way.

It smells a bit actually, Drugwars should have seen this coming a mile away, and that smell will stick to them for quite some time, and fewer people will trust what they do, even apart from Drugwars everything else related to @futureshock will recieve much less trust from now on.

So onto the introduction of the Forum, for a time before this the players had the ability to share their fights on Steem and get upvoted, and thereby get rewarded with Steem for those posts.

Why a Forum?

Well it's Drugwars own Steem powered Forum, it means all Drugwars related posts in one place and easy to just browse for other players, and they get upvoted kind of like the old posts.

It also came with sharing buttons for many more social media, so that players can share their fights more easily on those and reach much more people than just the ones on Steem.

To be honest, in my personal opinion, this would have been the reward structure to go with from the start. Rewarding players with upvotes allows you to give them money for playing the game without spending your own, it would have been ideal.

My Conclusion

So I really don't know if they where naive with their rewards structure or not, but they should have seen these sustainability issues coming, and because of this they will have much less trust in the Steem community.

Whether or not they will shut down or leave Steem behind, I don't think so, but in all honesty I just don't know.

They seem to have taken steps to really communicate a lot better lately, so that is a good sign, and if this transition work they should be fine.

As for the players with heavy investment, it's a game, always was. The fact that you got paid to play it was never going to last forever, it just wasn't sustainable.

And to reveal my own investment, according to @bookkeeping I currently have a balance sheet of -13.534 STEEM in Drugwars, although that does not count the upvotes on shared fights.

Well this will have to conclude this post.

Thank you for reading, share any comments below, and have yourself a really nice day.

Sincerely,
Erik Gustafsson