(reposted with permission from original author)
SnailFarm — a brief history of the latest Ethereum craze
If you have been paying attention to Ethereum this week, you may have noticed an increase in gas prices, caused by network congestion.
Investigative reporters delved deep into the issue and unveiled the root cause of this problem: the elusive hacker known as 4chan.
SPOILER ALERT.
They’re wrong.
The recent network congestion is caused by a series of “airdrops”; that is to say, offerings in which users are required to send a transaction to a smart contract to get a few tokens. In the last few days, this has proved so popular on the bitcointalk forum, several “cryptocurrency teams” are following the trend for free publicity.
The highlighted address belongs to the TrackChain offering. It consumes a staggering 11% of all current transactions on the network.
Here’s the “official” TrackChain presence. One newbie account with one post, with vague promises, no website, no whitepaper. Nothing save for a coin offering stirring onlookers to get in as quick as they can for maximum rewards.
Take a system where the first one in gets the most, add the appeal of getting something for “free”, and you have a recipe for a traffic jam on the Ethereum highways.
Given the ease with which naive investors are persuaded to spam transactions, there is speculation these coin offerings could be a front for organised attacks on the network.
This is out of scope for this article. Instead, let us go back to a more interesting point.
Where did the mistaken belief idle farms were clogging the network came from?
Easy: they are popular.
In fact, they are so popular bystanders started to assume idle farms must have been the cause for network congestion.
Eth Dragon Farm, SnailFarm and Ether Shrimp Farm are all examples of these types of games.
On Tuesday the 15th, a dapp called EtherShrimpFarm released without fanfare.
The concept is simple. Send one transaction to the contract, and you become the proud owner of 300 creatures who immediately get busy doing… what they do best. That is to say, they lay eggs at a rate of one per day per individual. The maximum of eggs a nest can hold is similar to the number of units owned, so players are encouraged to act at least once a day.
Once you have eggs, you can hatch them into more units who will in turn produce more eggs. You can also sell them to the contract for ether, at a given rate automatically determined by a similar equation to the ether pyramids you may have heard of. Additionally, you can buy eggs for ether, to increase the size of your nest faster.
Of course, this is a zero sum game. The goal is to turn a profit, and to do that you must decide when to hatch and when to sell, and time it well relative to the other players.
Rise and fall
EtherShrimpFarm graph, from inception to current block. Flying under the radar, explosive growth, slow bleed
Unfortunately, the original idle game had several flaws severely restricting its potential.
As the initial starting units were free, their only limiting costs were the gas transaction fees tied to the Ethereum network. In essence, free users are siphoning any ether they profit from the users who buy eggs.
Bots quickly made use of this loophole, creating hundreds of accounts in order to sell eggs one day later.
Savvy readers may have an intuitive grasp of the second problem: the mechanics of the game result in hyperinflation. If a player hatches once a day, he doubles the size of his nest every day. If he hatches once per hour, the growth balloons to more than three times in 24 hours.
There is no end to this infinite growth. Even when players sell, they only stop their growth temporarily, keeping their egg production intact.
This means the barrier of entry for newcomers is increasingly high, as early adopters hold millions of units hatching thousands of eggs per minute.
Last but not least, the developer collects a 4% fee on every buy and sale of eggs.
This is a significant cut for a relatively simple smart contract. As the shrimpfarm had over 340 ETH of volume, the developer received above 12 ETH in fees, over USD$8000 at the time of this writing.
Is this level of compensation appropriate for the effort involved?
The question is of course controversial. You can justifiably argue the market has spoken, and values the labor of the original developer this much.
But smart contracts can let us embrace decentralization in more than just a way to secure transactions. We have an opportunity to rethink financial models. We can move away from topdown ownership, and allow players a bigger stake in the game.
Enter the next step: SnailFarm
Created Friday the 18th, SnailFarm is an attempt to improve upon the formula with minimal changes; making the game less vulnerable to bot exploits, and longer lasting.
So far, it’s been working out.
Here are the changes in question:
There is now a 0.001 ether cost for the 300 starting snails. This is roughly similar to the current cost of a transaction given the current gas prices. This ether cost goes to the developer’s fee — more on that later.
In essence, this protects the game economy against wide fluctuations in gas prices, and the exploitative strategies that might result. For example: a bot using hundreds of accounts when the gas price is at 1 gwei operates at a full order of magnitude of efficiency higher than a regular user paying 10–12 gwei.
If you’re building your dapp as a game handling money on the first layer, it’s probably a good idea to include “dust” costs with economically significant actions. Would players mind paying 0.0001 ETH when their transaction costs 0.0006 eth anyway? There is no data to answer that, but hopefully we will see developers explore these ideas.
One third of your snails die if you decide to sell any amount of eggs. With this, endless inflation is no more, as players take a step back in their production when they take profits.
In the original game, whenever someone starts selling a significant amount of eggs, this can start a movement downwards as other players may feel this dump is sure to herald the end, and as they scramble to take profits themselves they only amplify this phenomenon. Essentially replicating what we see in stocks and cryptocurrency markets.
In SnailFarm, this third of your snails disappears regardless of how many eggs you sell. Therefore, players who want to sell have strong incentive to wait a full day since their last hatch. Following a dump at an inappropriate time implies a much greater loss.
Discourage panic reactions, encourage long-term actions.
The developer’s fee is now transferable. Any player can choose to become “the Snailmaster”, by sacrificing a given amount of snails. After this sacrifice, he becomes entitled to the full 4% fee on every egg buy or sale, as well as the 0.001 eth cost on starting snails.
With this change, there is no more passive rentseeking. The original developer works on providing a successful launch, and gets rewarded in proportion. As the game takes off and becomes more community driven, the most involved players can share in reaping a greater share of the rewards.
The Snailmaster requirement starts at 100,000 snails (an amount calculated to represent roughly a week of constant hatching from the starting snails), and increases by an additional 100,000 snails every time a new Snailmaster is crowned. This snail burn adds to the snail death on sale to fight inflation.
The Snailmaster title opens several strategies: players can try to reach the minimum amount to get the title, and sacrifice their production for ether rewards (one user has made this choice, and was rewarded handsomely as nobody challenged his reign so far). Players can also hoard a much greater amount of snails, in order for their production to remain intact once they go for the title.
Being a Snailmaster becomes a question of timing and strategy, as the title can be swapped back and forth between players, or remain untouched for a while.
But then, why wouldn’t you want to touch it?
Conclusion
Gamification is a key contributor to the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency. The practice of trading tokens on exchanges already had a game element to it. Pyramid smart contracts took a step further in that direction. Now, we see the beginning of idle games.
There are numerous Ethereum game projects with much more ambitious goals and presentation. To name but a few: Chibi Fighters, Ether Three Kingdoms, Blockchain Cuties, Etherbots, Cryptage, Ether Online… Why is it these games get so little attention, while simple contracts go viral with people pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars?
The answer is simple: complexity.
When you deal with real money, flashy graphics and complicated game mechanics get in the way of players understanding the ins and outs of the game. People do not bet money on World of Warcraft duels the same way they do with Poker.
If you’re making real money investments a critical part of your dapp, the game rules must be as transparent as possible. A link to the smart contract should feature proeminently on your webpage, and most importantly, your game needs to be simple enough people don’t feel utterly lost. Nobody wants to throw money in a black hole!
Even if we sometimes have to.
Accessibility and responsiveness are key. The current batch of Snail-like idle games were preceded by a more elaborate game called EtherGoo, in which players can buy a variety of units and upgrades to collect a resource called “goo” and attack each other. The best players are rewarded through daily ether dividends relative to their productive level, and can participate in raffles and fights with each other.
From a game design perspective, EtherGoo is vastly superior to SnailFarm. Yet it only experienced moderate success over the course of the month and a half it has been online. This is because several features made it harder to access for new players: initial ether investments were high. Delayed daily dividends don’t give the direct positive loop feedback selling eggs has on SnailFarm. Finally, the relative complexity of EtherGoo led to a few “whale” players dominating the gameplay, discouraging new entrants from even trying.
And so we’ll never get an answer to the question, “how did these farm animals break into the lab and what are they producing goo for?”
Ambitious game projects deserve credit for aiming high. But there is also value in keeping things simple, to explore the new dynamics this combination of “game” and “money” make possible.
For now, the winds bring a series of pyramids and idle games, and we are only getting started.
Why not try your hand at the snail farming life yourself? Check us out at https://snailking.github.io/snailfarm/, and pop in our Discord channel to discuss the merits of outdoor pens versus plastic tunnel houses.
