(this is the #16 giveaway enabled post - check the giveaway details below)
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Didn't even had time look around and it's already end of the month. Geeee, what's happening to life? 🧐
Highlights for me were... work, work and work. Some 🤒 illness here and there, but nothing major and mostly not much time to relax. Winter is coming and I have a ton of tasks on where I need to catch up in order to prepare for the end of year stuff that its incoming.
...ok ok ok, maybe I am not being fair, there are some other highlights 😎
What a ride... and to think that I missed one entire year, just blows my mind even more. Although the really important fact is how much I've learned with this community over the years. I can't really grasp the value of it, but its huge!
And in 6 years time, its going to be interesting to look back. I am saying Hive will be at least two orders (100x) of magnitude bigger than the current active user base (100k users). And we might have been attacked again... but we will survive once more as one of the most cohesive and decentralized communities in crypto.
Can't even forecast the number of apps and businesses by then running on this blockchain, but certainly its going to be impossible for me to know about all of them. I am eager on how all this is going to evolve and will be here certainly to find out how its all going to look like... 🤩
Many of you might have already heard that there was some sort of an attack to the Hive-Engine chain (a level-2 chain of Hive). Yep, it's true!
We indeed got several times attacked during the last week, and to be honest, thank you, whomever you where. It just made us go stronger again, proving this decentralization of community really works, where everyone joins together to actively help and defend the chain.
There were several types of attacks and the exercise was obviously planned as it had specific targeted locations. This was his/hers last attempt, with a little message to us... 😎 - at least it has some humor!
The scale of these things can quickly take huge proportions, and potentially incur costs to witnesses... and I am not going to dive into the details of the attacks, but just this last goodbye had in matter of seconds, 481 calls:
$ zcat node_app.log.2.gz |grep "You Win For Now" |wc -l
481
And from 481 different IPs... 😱
$ zcat node_app.log.2.gz |grep "You Win For Now" | awk '{ print $8 }' |sort |uniq |wc -l
481
Currently most of the problems were resolved, otherwise mitigated and we are still working on it for other adjustments, with focus on perceiving future attacks (yes, there will be always people trying to destroy things... unfortunately or not, the human race is too creative).
The importance of all this, is proactive and adaptive chain protection. And that can't be sustained with servers or codes meant to be deployed like on normal small businesses, that are usually installed on a "set and forget" manner. On the chain, everyone benefits from what everyone is doing good to protect it, and then, all of that on top of the "time based" best super power, decentralization!
Hence, how disruptive level-1 and level-2 DPoS based chains can be in terms of a good harbor for small to medium businesses, making it easy to startup any adventure at a very small entry cost (usually and mostly skills based, or basically time based).
This is a good time to stress how important is to vote for witnesses. Check my end of the post links for some easy examples.
Right, now that we addressed the most intriguing part of the post (maybe). Let's dive into some of the things I have enjoyed seeing this last month.
One of them was definitely seeing Golem Overlord quickly adjusting the game based on users feedback and by adding features that reduce bot activity, improve automatically user experience... even if active players going down is something we don't want to see.
I am still playing the game, and to be honest, I can already tell how much difference this made to the game, as in the beginning I was constantly being attacked after going above certain threshold of $PART in my "to be claimed" stash. This made completely impossible to attack players, because the moment you would go above certain limit, you would be instantaneously attacked by a bot.
Right now, that's not the case... so objective achieved! Thank you for taking the balls to implement such measures and de-prioritizing the lucrative rabbit hole.
On Terracore things are a little differently implemented and they allow for some other strategies that can still accommodate the presence of bots or multiple accounts.
Let's make this clear... I am not against bots or multiple account holders as long there is a balance and feel for the game experience. After all, if there was no NPCs on some games, it would be VERY boring! It all needs to have a human based experience, otherwise if we can't compete, it's gamifying juice is gone and eventually no one will play that game.
Terracore, implements some limitations that allow for users to compete against bots, simply because there are lots of randomness into the game actions and given that bots always choose (usually) the most profitable action, it's easy to avoid them if you want. Either way, feel free to let your feedback reach the team and don't just take my opinion as the best one.
I have enjoyed though, seeing the almost double growth of the user base...
That spike of users was when the game changed the mining rates... it was obvious what would happen. Still, it gave a chance for another level of adaption to take place. And basically if you sell out, what you now get as extra, you will feel it later! 😁 - just saying...
dCrops! Well, the game has now what I call, enough to be enjoyable for a very long time, and from here there will be probably way more, but since I such gamification to try, I decided to open all my packs back in the beginning of May and see where this would take me.
I am now producing every 2 days, a bottle of Watermelon Wine!
This allows you to gain some extra CROPs shares by converting what would be watermelon shares into a product of it, that has higher value in shares.
Yes you consume a little of GAS, but even on the lowest quality of cask and ingredient, you still get more shares. Plus, its when you get the chance to use a good terrain, to take advantage of the extra shares and if you use a legendary one, you don't even pay for GAS.
Yes, it takes a while to plan everything, but that's probably one of the things that might improve on the future I would guess. Let's see... for now it works, and if you have as many terrains or more than me, think about how much time you want to deposit on the game first, before going opening packs! 🤣
Note: The hive-engine attack does not change these because it was not done via the CloudFlare FQDN, hence not impacting these numbers.
This month we only went from 732 unique users to 908, but the rest of the stats almost doubled. Traffic went from 1.32M requests to 2.23M and from 34GB of data to 55GB 😎 - hopefully is helping some.
I have done some modifications on the IO subsystem this month, so if you previously had and experience when accessing my Hive-Engine infrastructure, let me know if that changed. Especially because of the measures we have implemented during the last week.
There are a couple places where you can select a specific node, and this is from where I would be coming on this feedback. For most users this might not be a thing... but eventually it will come more broadly, especially when there are problems with specific nodes (which is when selecting another node helps with decentralized chains). In the future this will likely become automated... but for now it's an optional feature I would love all apps to implement.
Have fun, good luck on all the gaming, learning, and when/if you are up to it, teaching new things to newcomers, and showing them how interesting is this place.
Follow for #news about the #HIVE #Blockchain, and other stuff. I sometimes get crazy with what happens around social media. I am following all HIVE users! No promises of behavior. 😁
In addition, if you are looking for a nice place to either reach out, share or just have a great time, come along to 
(⚡Vote) - Hive-Engine here - voting uses staked WORKERBEE
(⚡Vote) - HIVE here - voting uses staked HIVE
(✍Delegate) - 3Speak Network - You win 0.015% SPK tokens if you delegate LARYNX to other nodes, as opposed to only 0.010% from your powered LARYNX!
Any feedback/problems, please contact me or check if there their status via the UpTimeRobot Monitor.
