Today I bring you a true story. A story of deceit, downvotes, denial, and other disgusting behavior on this very blockchain. This is...
The CryptoBrewMaster Debacle!
So... I'm guessing most of you at this point have heard about this new game on Hive called CryptoBrewMaster?? It's essentially a card game where you can buy (with Hive), or earn through doing daily in game tasks, these ingredients cards. Water, barley, hops... things like that. Then when you get all the ingredients to make a beer you can play those cards and you'll brew a beer card (either over time or immediately if you are willing to pay). The beer cards have a monetary value and you can sell them in game for "CBM" which is a second layer token tradable on Hive Engine. That's the basics of it anyway. Technically all you need is a Hive account and you can play for free, but unless you buy in you will quickly get bored with how long it will take to get enough ingredients using only the free beer energy accumulation and especially with the lack of availability of certain ingredients in the daily quests... but now I'm getting ahead of myself... let me back up.
One morning I was scrolling through my feed on Torum and I saw a post about a new game on Hive. I'm always trying to keep up with what's new on Hive so I decided to check it out. I really liked the concept and the graphics were cool. And I love beer, so I was all ready to jump onboard and start playing! The game was simple to play, but I kinda liked that. And there were promises for lots of game expansion in the future.
I was playing everyday. I even started setting alarms so I could get my daily tasks going as soon as possible. I invested quite a bit of time, but I was having fun and I was earning crypto. And as I kinda mentioned earlier... I invested some money to buy cards because you just can't do really well without buying some ingredients to keep the brewery running. I was brewing beers, selling them and building up a nice little stack of CBM! But eventually I saw that with the high costs of the daily tasks and beer energy and the low costs of the beer cards... I was making very little CBM in profit from each beer. And with the low price of CBM it would be totally impossible to ever earn back even just a portion of what I had put in... so I was a little put off when I realized this and I questioned the CryptoBrewmasterStaff about the high costs of tasks and low costs of Beer Cards and I was told not to worry because the prices of those beer cards would go up as the game got increased adoption.
So I kept playing. And even continued to promote the game on places like Discord, Facebook, and Torum. But now instead of selling all my beer cards for CBM right away, I decided to HODL them. I figured why sell now if the price is supposed to be going up... right?? I continued brewing like crazy. Saving up a nice stockpile of beers. And I even achieved the rank of #1 Master Brewer for a couple weeks!!
And then it happened...
I woke up one morning and logged in to get my daily tasks going and claim my beer cards and I see something very alarming. All of my beer cards had severely dropped from a price range of 29-40 CBM to some now being worth less than 5!! 😧
This was drastically opposite of what I had been lead to expect. So I immediately went to their Discord server to see what exactly was going on and why my cards had lost over 80% of their value!
The admins response...
It's a game in Alpha mode...
we do not ask for any investments here...
just play as it is or just leave.
Really?? So... I just said Bye.
Being in Alpha mode is not an excuse for screwing over your users. That's just bad business. Wether or not they "ask for investments" (which in my opinion they do by asking you to purchase the ingredients cards) is irrelevant to the fact that users do invest both time and money. And in my opinion that response was quite far from anything resembling good customer service. But it gets even better.
Another admin jumps in and blocks me and starts talking trash and making jokes. They're really mature as you can tell. Also as you can see another user chiming in asking about the low beer prices.
I told them they shouldn't treat me like this after I had been so dedicated to playing and promoting their game. They of course made stupid jokes that I wasn't dedicated, and that I was really just an addict. Their jokes seemed pointless to me and I tried to move the conversation along to actually address the problem.
Unfortunately I got no satisfactory responses beyond "that's just how the game works"... and "it's not an investment" ... which to me is admitting your game is severely flawed and likely just a scam. I was getting quite frustrated at this point and started warning the other users that had arrived with questions as well as tagging the advisor/partner role in an attempt to get someone with a little more professionalism (which I'm guessing upset the admins who were still busy trash talking me).
I got to leave a few more frustrated comments... but then they banned me from commenting unless I verify my phone number... ya... that's not happening.
I wasn't really personally concerned about the small amount of money that I invested... I'm definitely not going broke because of it. But to me it's all about the principle. And I was highly disappointed with the unprincipled behavior I saw from the BrewMaster team.
And worst of all I felt quite guilty for promoting such a horrible product. So I made sure to go around to all the places where I had promoted it and made posts to let them know about my experience with CryptoBrewMaster and how I felt about it now. It was the least I could do. And I honestly thought that would be the end of it... until the attack started.
I had left a comment on my friend @jaynie's post. All completely unrelated to CryptoBrewMaster. And I suddenly received a barrage of downvotes from some "cleaners". I"ve criticized some of the cleaners before so at first I thought that's probably all it was about. But then upon further conversation with them I realized it was because they had seen my comments in the CryptoBrewMaster Discord server and were all upset that I had dared to speak the truth.
Although I disagreed with him, @enforcer48 made his argument and I can respect it. He was even willing to admit that their downvotes were far less damaging to me than people hearing my opinions was damaging to CryptoBrewMaster. Thank you for that inspiration to continue speaking out about it! lol. But then @nathanpieters showed up. With a giant ego, no manners, and not a tiny speck of any understanding of argumentation.
I'll spare you all the details, but I gotta tell you... @nathanpieters is probably one of the sickest dirtbags I've ever talked to. Just full of hate. He hurled baseless insult after baseless insult at me while I tried to make logical arguments. Racism, misogyny, victim shaming, slander... some truly disgusting stuff. Luckily for me I did't let any of that mind numbingly stupid crap he said bother me for one bit. He couldn't find an actual argument if it was an elephant sitting on his nose. It was extra funny to see him going back to the CryptoBrewMaster Discord server later to brag about telling me off. 😂 I really think it's hilarious that he thinks he's such a tough guy!
So to wrap this all up... despite probably continuing to receive malicious downvotes (from people that claim to protect Hive from scams while simultaneously defending them), I will no longer be recommending anyone play this game and will continue to tell anyone I talk with about it that I think it's a waste of time at best and a scam at worst.
I was quite happy to see that my complaints did get them to add a new "terms of use" that you must accept in order to play now. But as you probably could guess at this point... I won't be clicking accept.
And honestly I'm afraid that scam games like CryptoBrewMaster are not good at all for the future reputation of Hive as a blockchain. If the future of the Hive blockchain is crappy CBM type scam tokens... I'm terrified.
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lol...
dude... it's a free game in it's early stages of development!
I can agree that the recent changes to the games internal economy have been executed a bit haphazardly and that's certainly not the best way of improving the game's balancing aspects... but you making a big fuss about some cents you think you could have earned without the changes... well... that's on you.
i saw you bitching and complaining on the discord like a three year old having a temper tantrum and the five year olds reacted accordingly...
y'all need to grow up
and stop "investing" in games...
Dude... I know what it is. And everyone keeps repeating that as if it changes the facts that this "game in it's early stages of development" screwed it's users. I'm just sharing my story so other people don't get screwed over too.
I will agree that I should stop investing in games. That is quite childish and I've learned my lesson now.
The game didn't "screw" it's users at all. They haphazardly (again, this could have been handled a lot better) fixed the game's economy to prevent the whole thing from devaluation due to excessive token farming... actually you should be happy they tried to protect your "investment" and you immediately jumped to calling them a scam because you felt like your short term earning prospects were diminished...
And besides the situation with CBM in particular, it's a game after all, and games are usually designed to have people spend money, not to earn. So really, what did you expect? Free tokens for life? How much you think those would be worth?
A have a few pointers:
1st - You are a cry baby
2nd - You are a MALE KAREN
3rd - If you treated this as an investment, you should have known that investing involves RISKS. Investments GO UP and it goes DOWN.
4th - There's no debacle here. There's no deceit (lol, how can you even call it DECEIT).
5th - Showing our names in your post just shows your un·scru·pu·lous personality. You just can't get over the fact that YOU MADE A MISTAKE and you are trying to VENT IT TO THOSE WHO THINK HURT YOU. Go back to my 2nd point, that's A KAREN right there.
Don't be all mad just because you got called out for acting like a dick. Maybe try being nicer to people in the future.
LoL, I'm not mad Karen. I think you are the one who's mad for posting it in the first place.
Duh. I'm mad because I got screwed by CBM. You're mad because you called called out for being a dick. That's the facts. I'm a victim. You're a dick.
So.. you have nothing of any real substance to say. I'm not surprised.
There's been some nerfing on Rising Star as well as this, but nobody is complaining. These games need to be sustainable and I guess @rollie1212 was looking at that aspect.
We have all seen what happened to DrugWars (the first time around). Maybe he was trying to avoid history repeating itself. I can't say I'm happy with beer going from 29 CBM's to 4, but then again I have not invested anything in the game... yet.
Just walk away if you don't like it..., why all the drama?
Sounds like he's one of the people who's exploitive strategies were affected by the update.
I already walked away. Screwing their users out of their card value and then treating them like crap is a sure path to not being a sustainable game. I'm just sharing my story so other people can know whats going on over there that's it. This isn't because I want drama.
You really are a selfish little fuck.
You’re crying like you had something stolen from you when you’re being given free money to play a free game.
It’s @rollie1212 money and it’s him paying for the hosting, development, token, ALL of it.
You are a giant piece of whiny big breasted shit. Go tie off.
You're such a nice guy. I love you too.
I’ll be as nice as you have been in the two times I’ve encountered you.
YOU are the reason we keep running into each other. Your toxicity and shit talk is what makes people retaliate.
You didn’t show the entire conversation you had in CBM. Nor will you ever tell the truth about your behavior.
You are not the victim.
Calling a free early beta game that never asked for your money scam is too much. Flagged.
Should I instead call it a free early beta scam? Would that be better??
BTW. Your flags just make me laugh. lol.
@fraenk @schneidy @nathanpieters Do you guys think you might owe @derekrichardson an apology, or at least an acknowledgement that he was on to something now that @rollie1212 rugged us? First moved the CBM token off HIVE, sold a bunch of worthless "equipment" NFTs, then when nobody fell for his move to lure people to his centralized exchange, Cryptex24, he just gave up and walked away from the dumpster fire that was CryptoBrewMaster.
I also spent money on this game and promoted it to people, because I thought it was a really fun concept that I wanted to support the Hive ecosystem. I don't really care about the money, but am just really disappointed that the CBM team clearly were just trying to leech money off the community without adding anything of value, and pulled the rug when it got too difficult. Also disgusted with the sycophants who resorted to name calling and mockery when Derek raised legitimate concerns.
I was even voting for @cryptobrewmaster as a witness which really concerns me, and has made me put a lot more consideration into who I vote for, so I guess that's a good thing. I hope we've all learned something here and can be better in the future. Rollie, you have my condolences for the situation in your home country, but it still doesn't excuse the way you behaved here.
Dang! Sorry to hear it went that way @robvector, but I can't say I'm surprised. Rollie is a scammer and unfortunately he's a pretty good one and is gonna run off with all his illegitimate gains from CBM now. And there's not really anything that can be done about it. I'm not expecting any apologies or acknowledgement from any of these people. I don't think honest and humble is really their style, although I am open to being proven wrong about that. Anyways, thank you so much for commenting and I wish you better luck with avoiding scams like this in the future. And hopefully some of our fellow Hive users will see what happened with CBM and will be able to use it as an opportunity to learn from it as well.
it's your opinion, ofc, you have a full right to express yourself in any way here, but you probably hardly can understand what investments were made for game creation, how much money were spent monthly for the dev team and infra. Game never earned anything specific from Hive, and saying that it didn't brought any value to the ecosystem - is really unfair.
Me being a co-founder and a guy that did marketing I wasn't in charge of the main investors ideas, that they implemented to switch the token off Hive Engine and other IMO not really cool ideas that started killing the game.
Maybe I'm unfairly assigning blame to you because you did a lot of the marketing; I thought you were the primary developer of the game.
I was a guy behind the idea which wasn't implemented the way I wanted from the start!
We had a game designer and a team of coders
I haven't written a line of code there
And yes my idea of bringing the whole beer industry to the Hive blockchain failed. Anyway I should say I tried my best.
fair enough then. Not every project can succeed; hope your next project goes better. Cheers.
Rugging - is the thing, when you create a scam, with only 1 option, to get huge money fast, take it and disappear, is that something you think we did?
As I said before, the money we get from sales weren't covering even the server costs(
rugging is when we buy NFTs for a game that's in development, then development stops and we're stuck holding useless NFTs. Which is exactly what happened with CryptoBrewMaster.
I'm not losing my shirt over it, obviously I didn't put in any money I didn't expect to lose, I'm just really disappointed that you guys didn't follow through with the game. I thought you had a great concept, great graphics, and were working out the kinks to make the game more fun and engaging.
I understand that bear markets are tough and developing any game, let alone a web3 game, is very challenging. But the fact is, you took our money and then bailed on the project. We were rugged.
Wether an intentional scam or just a blundering failure CBM most definitely did not bring value to the Hive ecosystem, so that claim is totally fair, and IMHO it not only didn't bring any value but was actually damaging. And not just damaging to the users that got screwed, but also giving Hive a bad reputation of having games that are scams or at best games that are so crappily constructed that they fail and everyone involved gets burned. Not a good look. But now by the looks of it you are powering down and cashing out your account as well as the CBM account so at this point you probably couldn't care less about the damage you caused. Personally I hope you sell all your Hive and leave and never come back. Hive is better off without losers like you screwing over our users. Wether intentionally or not.
Can’t say I feel anything. Lol
I am one of those who appear in your screenshots in the chat and also invested money in the game, which I find entertaining and simple, I am not a player and I will not be able to give a qualified opinion about it, but when the problem that caused the changes arose and they said it was not an investment, I took out my money and left it in CBM in my engine, I had no problem doing it, I can't speak of bad faith on behalf of the creators even though someone told me that a user had mentioned me in some answer that I didn't take the time to look for since I don't hide anything. To the people I invited I gave the advice to remove their CBMs but not to sell them but to keep them in their engines waiting for new updates or a change that enhances the activity in it. Personally I disagree with many of the actions taken, they seemed rash but to err is human and I suppose they will be straightened out in the future. I am still in the game, regardless of who I invited and who was invited by whom I invited. I understand your position and I respect it, but I have not seen bad faith in those who run the game, sometimes the best thing is to wait.
Well said. I think that is great advice.
Really in my opinion, they had to take drastic measures because of unscrupulous people.
We all had a couple of accounts and the game was going well.
But the greedy people fucked us all up.
I think the article failed to mention, the people who created more than 100 accounts, taking the liquidity out of the game. That should also being mentioned so the author would be fair and his readers could make their own decision if the game scam or not.. The token price is back at 0.06 Hive after all...
I don't know any of the details about those people with hundreds of accounts who were taking the liquidity. And I can't really talk about something I'm not informed about. Otherwise I would have no problem adding it. But in all honesty I think screwing over all the users because the game they built had flaws that could be exploited is way wrong. They should pay the price to fix the exploits that are only there because they built a flawed game to begin with.
As an initial measure I think it's the right thing to do. And little by little I imagine that they will be adjusting the prices. The game is in phase alpha and it is normal that there are failures and changes that we do not like.
I think that sometimes you have to put yourself on both sides. What would you have done in their position? What measures would you have taken?
Maybe, contributing ideas to the game would have been a better option.
@sashas all this idiot did is give the game more press. It's the blockchain. We can all see what's happening.
Hey, I am sorry that you think you are being scammed here. It's always your decision to play or leave if you do't like the rules.
I can only tell and stand behind my actions so I am staying with the game. I don't see it as an investment.
Anyways, I did withdraw and sell around 300 CBM. Just to see how will it play out. I got 5.5 Hive out of it which I find a decent amount.
Yes, rewards are lower now. Yes, there was milking going on. Yes, they learn and react as they go.
To sum it up, I will stay with the game.
Good luck.
That's your choice and I think that's fine. Even if you decide to keep playing the game I am glad that at least now you are aware of my experience with it and my feelings about it. Hopefully they won't treat their users so badly in the future
Hopefully. Have a great remaining of the weekend.
Sorry mate, I don't agree that this post discussion should bring you pool rewards.
About your post statements, I mostly respectfully disagree with them.
No further comments.
Whew.. I dodged a bullet on that game it sounds like. Thanks for the heads up.
It's a free to play game, that was abused badly so they reduced rewards drastically. Nothing like scam.
The whole "it was getting abused and needed to be fixed" argument is really weak. If it's true then it should be the developers fault for creating a game with flaws that could be exploited and they should pay for it. Not the innocent users. And honestly I don't really think I even believe that story.
Joke of the day. I liked it.
Just wondering how much money you put in to raise so much hue and cry.
Not sure why innocent users (in this case victims) is funny, but ok.
And to me it's more about the principle of it all than the actual amount of money.
Still you dodged my original question with your so called principles.
Anyway Period.
I'm not sure the exact amount. But it was small. I'm not complaining because I lost a bunch of money. I'm complaining because I think what they did was immoral.
Ya you did. I'm glad to hear you didn't waste a bunch of your time there like me. I just took a rip of some bomb Cookies OG to celebrate your good choice. lol.😝
@enforcer48
@rollie1212
Funbags wants to get milky.
If game decided that your "free clicks" are not that much worth then game became scam.
When I invest my time and money on their cards just to have them arbitrarily devalued over 80%... I'm feeling pretty scammed.
If stock market crashes, you get scammed.
This was your thinking that it will gain value with time and you only responsible for thinking.
None of tribe token here come with any backing, I purchased PAL token, it devalued to 98%, I did not make hue and cry like you,
Should I create a post the PAL team scammed me?
Even I bought steem at 85 cents and someone have bought Hive at 97 cents, so they all got scammed?
If I was saying I got scammed because of a drop in the CBM price on Hive Engine your argument would be correct. But that's not what happened. The market didn't devalue CBM... the developers arbitrarily did. I don't know all the history of the PAL token. It would depend on how and why it was devalued. So maybe you should make that post, or maybe not. That's for you to decide depending on how you feel about it.
Wtf? What made you believe that the beer will go up in value?
Even before beer prices dropped I was saying that the costs of the tasks was too high compared to beer prices and I was told not to worry because those beer prices would eventually go up. So I foolishly took their word for it.
Everyone can join the CBMs Discord server and read what you have been wrote about me and my team before I suggested you to leave. Everyone can read the full context there.
Terms of use were there like 2 month ago. It’s in the left bottom side of the screen. Just FYI.
In a lot of countries, terms of use have no legal status and as such are void. This includes for example most of European Union member states.
Since Hive forked from Steem, there has been bunch of people who just like trolling just for the sake of being childish... I just ignore them and focus on more important matters...
I've been playing CryptoBrewMaster for few weeks now and noticed various issues that should be resolved before the game can seriously be promoted to any normal people.
Looking at the names on CryptoBrewMaster's Discord, I noticed some known scammers from other (shady) projects. I'm not saying all (or even most) of the people are scammers, but even one scammer that hasn't been blocked brings bad reputation to the admins of the Discord server.
I agree. I could do a lot better at ignoring the trolls.
I'm not sure exactly which known scammers you're talking about, but I also agree that having them in their Discord is not a good sign.
As Hive is public blockchain, I won't mention any usernames here... That person did have a token on Steem Engine that was supposed to be linked to a cryptocurrency, but when people tried to swap the token to equivalent amount in the cryptocurrency, they received nothing. A lot of wallet addresses were also deactivated because the official wallet required linking the wallet address to social media accounts, but the actual linking didn't work reliably.
I like the game, It's still being developed.
Not a scam and never been asked to invest.
That's cool. If people still want to play the game I'm not gonna say they shouldn't. I just want people to know my experience. And I hope it does improve with further development. But as you saw in my post I gotta disagree with you... I got scammed. And they could do it again, so players beware. As they have said to me now several times... play at your own risk... rules can be changed at any time. Which IMO basically just leaves it wide open for them to screw their users at any time. Which is not the kinda game I wanna play.
I made a friend because of you. Thank you, Karen.
Losing money is an awful feeling, I've lost literally thousands in crypto from unrealised gains to hacked funds and I've learned not to be emotional about how any money or effort I put into this space isn't rewarded.
I don't know this game nor have I played it but expecting any sort of NFT to hold any kind of value doesn't seem like its a scam,
I think anyone invested in crypto should be okay with losing everything, i know I am. Many of us get into the space and think only upside and never price in for the downside.
I am not really interested in who is right or wrong or what we perceive the value of said item would be only that I hope anyone who reads this and participates in these things learns to price in risk and understand that they should be hedged and ready to lose it all.
Learn to take profits when you can or offset profits somewhere else, this is the nature of the beast as far as I've learned. Has it been an expensive lesson? Yes, has it been cheaper than a 4-year degree lol absolutely
Sure, I agree. I accepted the risk of losing it all. That's not the big issue to me really. It's when I went into their server to ask about what was happening and all I got was trash talk, followed up by sending out their downvoters and trolls to attack me. If they had just explained to me their reasoning in a civil manner I probably would have simply agreed to disagree and this post would never have been written. And honestly, to me that kind of defensive response really raises red flags.
GREAT POST!!!
Thank you for publishing it to the PHC community feed!
Compliments of the PHC founder @jaynie...
I have upvoted and reblogged it for you.
❤ MWAH!!! ❤
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No, It is not a great post, just some baseless accusation.
You guys @steemitbloggers ,@jaynie and @zord189 need to do your homework properly.
Baseless? Really?
Zero. You are just embarrasing yourself.
Did you even read the post? Doesn't sound like it.
Yes i read it. You are posting out of context pieces of the chat, then you are making your (valid) opinion. But if we are talking about argues, you dont have, you dont even know what happens. You say it, not me.
You just simply ignore the entire cause of what happens?
But there is not a single argument in your entire post. ¿Do you read my comment? ¿What would happen if cbm coin dumps? The same, your beer would worth less.
You are just anger, as i wrote (and you refuse to read) Absolute zero solid ground to do a scam acusation.
Im restraining myself to keep the good ways. Because you are acusing someone from steal, scam, fraud. Those people are real, have feelings, and are just developers doing a game.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Thank you ❤ MWAH!!! ❤