It's been only a couple months since I first started playing Steem Monsters. Since then I've gone through the whole spectrum of initial excitement, fun-filled obsession, perseverance through disappointments, and eventually frustration. This trend can be seen in the tone of my first, second, third, and last Steem Monster posts. Before hitting the final stage of boredom, I decided to get out and started selling my cards. So far I've gotten rid of my Death Splinter and soon will continue with Earth. Pretty soon Steem Monsters will be all but a memory of a short but sweet addiction. But there is something new on the horizon: the highly popular DrugWars!
One of the things that intrigued me about Steem Monsters was what early adopters told me about the first months of playing the game. Back then you really could build up your deck with nothing but quest rewards. Since I arrived to the party only in mid December, I missed out on that. Interestingly though, just when Steem Monster was losing its appeal a new game showed up on the block, where I could be one of the early birds. So I went to check it out.
The game play is a trial-tested format: you build up your resource-producing facilities, train some troops, and... continue building them. Eventually you'll go out and use your troops to take resources from other players, but that function is still turned off, letting us concentrate on resource building... for now! Meanwhile you get a daily reward in STEEM for how much drugs you produced, compared to the overall drug production of all the other players. So the more drugs others produce, the less your overall share is.
The resources we're talking here are drugs, guns, and booze, fitting the name and the overall atmosphere of the game. And just as anywhere else, you start out small, building a humble crack-house, hoping to have enough resources to build a hydroponic farm soon. After the first day it became clear to me that it would take forever to accumulate enough in this step-by-step way, certainly running out of time. Before I knew it, there would be raiding parties at my door, just waiting to farm my meager production. No, I had to capitalize on being in the game early, so I got out my wallet. Eight STEEM later I had myself a castle for alcohol, a black market for weapons, and most importantly a cocina for drugs. Suddenly the STEEM also started rolling in...
The game offers various types of rewards, including daily bank heists, where you invest your surplus of drugs produced, as well as through a referral program. In literally less than a week I had gotten back all the money I'd put into the game, making me think that I should have spent 80 or even 800 STEEM. However, the changes I saw in how much STEEM the same amount of production got me, kept going down quite rapidly, so I'm not even thinking about spending any more.
At the same time posts started popping up left and right, praising the game for its high ROI, in other words, how much of a gold mine it was! Sure enough, other people must have made the same discovery: they broke even faster than expected, and making pure profit afterwards. But in order to quit their day jobs and become full-time virtual hustlers, they still need some more players to join through their referral link. The pyramid is starting to take shape... But hey, it's still not too late! If you're interested in joining, please use my referral link. ;-)
It should be clear for anyone who has played games of this type, that eventually the only winners will be those with the biggest enterprises, or those who have joined the biggest gangs. Since the former certainly does not apply to me, in spite of being a relatively early starter, I decided to join 
Apparently the team behind THE Cartel is a group of German speakers, which can still be seen in some of their interactions on Discord, though quite typically for Germans, they prefer to stick to English for the sake of non-speakers. A German Mafia? How cute! Unlike the classic Italian Mob, Mexican Cartels, or the recently infamous Russian Mafia, you never hear about German organized crime groups... other than in the movie Die Hard, of course. They're still recruiting, by the way, so if you'd like to join THE Cartel, please visit them on Discord.
It's all been here before: Call it a game or an investment scheme, we've seen projects come and go, where early birds catch the fattest worms, while the late comers get shorn for all they're worth. And the world of crypto seems to be full of these things. Remember the big hype on Digibyte around two years ago? It was such an obvious pump-and-dump that I had to get in on it. Cashing out early, I managed to make a pretty penny, though half a year later I landed on my nose with Bitconnect. Not that I didn't see it coming, I just didn't expect it would hit me so suddenly (which is exactly what the train-dodger said too).
So here we have this game that is becoming the latest craze, with lots of folks pumping their hard-earned STEEM (or simply bought STEEM) for us well-prepared early players to steal from them. Great for us, and great for the price of STEEM, provided these "investors" are actually buying STEEM to get it on the game. But what happens after the crash? Once new players start realizing they've missed out on the bonanza, and are just paying to be robbed? What happens to the price of STEEM when people start leaving in droves, the same way they came? Then it won't matter how early you came, and how much ROI you made producing make-believe drugs. It will suck for all of us, not just for those playing DrugWars. But that's hardly a reason not to play. If you're interested, here's my referral link.
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