For a while I played a game called Evony. Let's face it I've always enjoyed hanging out with geeks and nerds. I enjoy and admire intelligence and strategy. That is who played Evony.
Evony, Free Forever.. was the games tagline at the time... and it was true you could play for free, but most didn't.
It's a pretty simple game a bit like DrugWars only more mature. The interface wasn't very graphically intense, but had enough to it if you had an imagination you could picture the battles taking place. Stage one of the game was to build resources and armies and join strong alliances for protection and shared resources. There were war units like archers and cavalry. There were march times from different places on the maps. Once the building phase of a server was complete it was pure warfare.
However, you could speed up the building phase by buying things from the company that built the game. You could buy a daily package that reduced your building time and fed your troops free food you didn't need to farm that day and could spend time and resources building instead. Once a new server started the building phase went faster and faster and the race for owning map started.
Of course those who bought Speed Ups and other advantages USUALLY ended up ahead. They called us "Coiners" and it was meant to be derogatory. The "coiners" will always win, they said. The non-coiners failed to understand the "Coiners" were paying for the game developers, the new servers and the limited customer support the company provided.
There were some who were so good at the game they figured out how to win anyway, but to be fair it wasn't often.
We also had several live chat options. At any given time you could be in World Chat or Alliance Chat also private chat. WorldChat was a huge and highly entertaining place for banter between alliances, calling others bad players or virtue signalling that you were a non-coiner.
After a new server was launched on Evony there were specific phases, building, conquering the map, holding territory and once one alliance was too far ahead, the other groups would go join new servers. There was a rhythm to it and if you played for any length of time you knew who everyone was and who they played with.
The bots came and changed everything. So, if you could automate the building process and keep troops building at all time, while sending out farming troops you could win without coining.
Many didn't like this phase, but I thought it was fun. We declared our server a botting server so that those who didn't like the bots wouldn't waste their time playing and the game changed entirely. Now the game changed to whatever alliance had the best bots to automate building, farming and even attacks was the strongest alliance, and would ultimately own the server.
The team I played with had a guy who figured out the power of every troop, the marching time, how many troops you needed of which type to conquer anything and the most effective farming techniques.
We dominated every server we went to and we no longer had to buy Speed ups to win. We never took over non-botting servers and we always were honest about the fact we botted, but honestly the game became boring. We all had 5 bots running on our computer all the time and there was no need to watch the game. David (the intelligent hacker) even programmed our defense if we were getting attacked. I would hear my bot notifying me... "You are getting attacked"... and I knew that David's bot could play my defense better than I could, even though only few months before I was considered a strong attacker and a strong defender.
We downloaded Sharkwire and tried to figure out how to send data back and forth to the game servers... Our bots became so user friendly the some of the UIs were better than the games UI, because you needed 200 every day people in your alliance to be able to use the bots effectively to have the greatest alliance.
So, they (the company) added some things to the game which broke our bots, started new servers that were botless and the cycle began again.
People are going to figure out how to game every economy whether it is in the US or Evony or on Steem. The key is to change it up and keep it fresh. There is no perfect math and there is no bot free online settings. You have to change things up to keep it interesting you need fresh players to keep it fun and you need to constantly change things up so that people have something to work on.
Steem isn't meant to be easy, you can play for free and do well, but you are unlikely to dominate. There will always be bots and alliances and gaming the system.
Change it up, bring new people on, market it, be honest about it... Content matters, but only a little.
Again I realize Steem isn't a simple internet game, but there are some elements that remain the same.
You can play for free, but it is slower and that isn't wrong. You can network, but it gets boring without new faces and things get stale if the rules don't change from time to time to stop you from getting too comfortable.
@whatsup