Nope this isn't a post about Chrono Trigger.
But maybe it should be!
Rather, this particular Golem Overlord (GO) is a "game" built on Hive that's been in operation for a week or two now. I use the word "game" pretty loosely here because it's an idle-mining pay to win dumpster-fire ponzi product but that never stopped us from getting excited about such things before! Should you play the "game"? Absolutely not! Will you play the game? Maybe!
Just in case anyone else does want to play this game I gotta write this here post so that you'll buy in after I've already bought in. Classic ponzinomics. Pump my bags, plebs! Edicted commands it. And his alt.
Now that we've gotten that unpleasantness out of the way and I've hedged against any potential reputation losses going forward, there are many other things to say about this game. And you know I don't really mean to talk trash because I know the lead dev is working very hard on this project and making a lot of updates and changes, which gets the small community and the Discord channel excited... to the point of lots of people thinking they gonna get rich from completely unsustainable yields. Is the bull market back? Must be. How else could FOMO be this out of control?
Skip to 6:24 of this video
Now tell me what other game on the Hive blockchain or otherwise with an investment of about $100 can net you $50 per day... I'll wait. Put um in the comments if you can think of one.
lol who is this guy?
Yeah I'll tell you a crypto game making 50% ROI per day: every crypo ponzi that has ever ponzied. How you can possibly make a statement like that out loud without addressing the obvious unsustainability of it? That's so blatant. I guess I wasn't done talking trash. My bad... I hope I'm done now. Let's move on to the actual game part.
https://go.splex.gg/
So the first thing you'll see when you try to log in is that you have to pay 30 Hive just to get your foot in the door. That's a pretty steep price to pay for a game that has definitive free-to-play & pay-to-win vibes, but it's completely necessary to mitigate Sybil attacks where one person is farming like 20+ accounts. With the high overhead cost the devs get some money in their pocket and more accounts will exist on a 1:1 basis.
https://go.splex.gg/?ref=edicted
This is how the referral link works. Pretty standard stuff. If you were to use this link when paying the 30 SWAP.HIVE cover charge I'd be kicked back 2 Hive for my troubles. This is actually a bit low and should be increased in my opinion. Referrals like this should be at least 10% (3 Hive) up to 20% (6 Hive). If it was up to me I'd jack up the referral links to something like 4-5 Hive per signup to make it more worth people's time to drag others into the ponzi.
Still unclear if you can just change the ref link to any account on Hive even if that account hasn't paid the 30 Hive. I assume this is possible but haven't actually tested it. It's possible you might even be able to set your own account as the referral for a 2 Hive kickback. Also untested. If you want to use my link for a kickback be my guest, and if I see a memo in my transaction history asking for the 2 Hive back I'll probably refund you.
I must say I am slightly annoyed at users on Hive masking their referral link using markdown.
(example: go.splex.gg)
(example: [go.splex.gg](https://go.splex.gg/?ref=edicted))
I prefer transparency when it comes to most things.
Probably one of the main reasons I go so hard on crypto.
Whatever though if you want to claw and scrape for your 2 Hive go for it.
No shame in this game.
So when you finally get past all the bells and whistles and pay the 30 SWAP.HIVE entry-fee: the main page will be revealed to you. As a new player who hadn't looked up anything about the game I must say that even as a gamer I was a little taken aback by what I was supposed to do. I assume this feeling would be much more pronounced for others who don't have as much gaming experience. Probably wouldn't hurt to eventually make an in-game tutorial to guide the newbies on their path to 'victory'.
But then again even the website reminds us that this game is in the alpha stages and is subject to change without notice. I've personally been playing less than 24 hours so there haven't been any changes yet but I hear over the last couple weeks quite a few things have been improved. Just random upgrades that the community asked for and whatnot. Trying to prevent exploits and "punching down" and what-have-you. More on that later.
So far you can basically do two things:
- Farm PARTs
- Attack others and try to steal their PARTs.
It's an idle mining game so your farm just stacks up over time just like we'd expect. You can level up your Algorithm and Golem Charging Station to increase farm (PART token on HiveEngine) generated over time. But if you want to prevent other users from stealing your phat lootz you better get some fortification to mitigate their attacks.
These are the stats you can power up.
The number on the left is the level of the ability and the number on the right is the cost in PARTs to get to the next level. We can see it would take me 16 PARTs to get level 5 Algorithm. Would that be worth the extra farm I receive? Pretty unclear, but like most idle-mining games there is a sweet spot where one number is profitable and the next isn't because the cost of levels tends to rise exponentially (or at least by some multiplier). That's how they getcha!
Maths
This game is pretty much all basic math, but the equations can get a bit jarring... especially this farming one because it's calculated every 3 seconds on every Hive block produced. Golem Charging Station upgrades get added to your base production and then multiplied against an exponential Algorithm variable. Common sense would tell us that exponential is better than additive but really the only way to know for sure is to plug in the equation and check the number for ourselves. Which I actually haven't even done yet for my account so let's check right now.
It would cost me 16 PARTs to get level 5 algo and 15 PARTs to get level 4 charging.
0.0003 + 3(0.00003) * 1.1^5 = 0.0004449459
0.0003 + 4(0.00003) * 1.1^4 = 0.000475692
So not only is Golem Charging Station one PART cheaper than algo but it also results in a higher yield over time. Didn't see that one coming. I'm sure most will not do the maths of course.
While these might seem like very tiny numbers we also have to remember that this yield is generated every 3 seconds so it adds up pretty quick. There are 28800 blocks a day so for me I can farm over 17 parts a day which are currently being traded for 2 Hive a piece because the supply is so choked (for now). Of course I spent 100 Hive leveling up the account out of pocket so if I even make my money back I'll be pleasantly surprised. I did join the ponzi late after all; not a smart move. Always get in on day one, fam.
The last time I engaged in ponzinomics on Hive was back in the Drugwars era of February 2019 to April. Ah those were the days. Luckily with this game I won't have to waste nearly as much time because of the way it works (and I'm not trying to juggle 20 accounts at once). Also I won't be posting about it insufferably for two months straight like I did back then. What an embarrassing hyperfocus! Oops.
So what makes GO different?
Well there are a lot of burn mechanics in place. To start simply leveling up costs a bunch of parts, which is the standard. But also if you end up not burning at least 75% of the parts you claim you'll start getting penalized and earning less parts over time. That's a pretty fun Ponzinomics choice: force users to reinvest 75% of their yield back into the system. Very cool. Honestly I have no problem with this I'm still actually burning 100% of my yield back into the game to level up a few things.
Attacking
A lot of PARTs are also burned when users attack someone else but that attack is defended and inevitably fails. Attacking someone else is basically just a loaded dice roll depending on stats.
If you have the same attack as someone else's defense your chance of actually winning the fight is slightly worse than a coinflip. This leads players to search out and seek weaker targets that have less defense but still enough resources to steal.
If you have 1 attack higher than their defense you're winrate will be in the 60%'s and 2 higher will be 70%s. This seems like the sweet spot because if you stack the dice any more in your favor those accounts tend to have smaller farms to plunder. Also you can only attack once every four hours (with a bank that allows them to stack up for later).
So attacking people is pretty fun as you get to steal actual money from them and it also creates nail-biter scenarios hoping that you don't get attacked when your farm is about to unlock. Once you claim the farm (every 8 hours) it becomes impossible to steal by other marauders playing the game and you can reinvest to loot into upgrading more or sell the tokens on the open HE market.
There's also situations like this where I would not recommend attacking these accounts (even though they have 1 fortification) because they are accounts specifically designed to attack only without farming. Piss them off and you become a target. Even if you win they are farming very little and your bounty will be smol.
Faith is the most understated skill.
The tooltip says it allows you to steal more, but what you don't learn until later when you start attacking people is that the equation for how much a player can steal on a successful attack is modified by both the attacker's and defender's faith ability.
So if you stack up a bunch of faith it mitigates the losses incurred by anyone successfully attacking you. This ends up being a very key stat because if you don't have it and get pillaged you'll lose everything, while if you stack it up you might only lose a third of your farm. After losing a third of your farm you become a much lower priority target and the chance of getting attacked again is lessened so you'll still get to claim tokens at the end of the 8 hour window even in the event of a loss. So it ends up being good for both attacking and defending, and even helps farm SHARD tokens.
What do shards do?
Eh well nothing yet but apparently you'll be able to use them to buy and open crates full of loot later. Right now the market is purely speculative and for the most part shards seem to be getting dumped onto the market. The value of shards is about half that of parts even though they are much more rare than parts. I've been speculating on them a tiny bit and placing limit orders to acquire a few just in case they moon when they actually have a usecase. Buying them seems to be much easier than farming them at the moment, but again they don't do anything so it's just 100% speculation.
How much to spend?
Well the game already costs 30 Hive, so if you plan on playing this game (don't do it fam!) (do it!) you should be prepared to spend AT LEAST double that to level up your account a little bit to get past the cheap and easy levels without having to farm them for days while getting attacked. Spending like 60-100 Hive total on one account seems appropriate considering what I'm seeing.
This is simultaneously a lot of money and hardly anything because the game is obviously not worth over $40. There are plenty of free games that are clearly way more fun than this. But you don't play this game because it's fun you play it for the gamble gamble ponzinomics, amirite?
You're expecting at least some kind of return on your "investment", even though it's not an investment at all and the devs would certainly claim you were paying to play the game and not to make money. That's how we get around those pesky unregistered securities laws, fam: "Utility Token" confirmed.
So I have two accounts and I spent 100 Hive on both of them. Again both a ton of money for something like this and also a very tiny tiny amount considering what people are willing to spend on degenerate gambling in the cryptoverse. At least this degenerate gamble has been gamified unlike the meme coins that spike to the moon and are nothing other than a meme and a joke.
It's basically all about how much you spend for PART tokens.
Like today and yesterday part tokens cost 2+ Hive a piece (and I paid that price begrudgingly), but like a week ago they were 0.3 Hive a piece. That's a huge pump that may already signal that making money on this game is pretty much impossible at this point (although the price does seem to be holding steady around 2:1 for now. At the same time this alpha version has had very little exposure and marketing thus far and maybe the devs have an ace in the hole and are planning something on that front. Also there are a lot more updates to come including shards/crates, exploration, and boss fights.
All in all the Ponzinomics on this game are x100 times better than the last Ponzinomic gaming token I participated in (Drugwars) for a lot of reasons. There are many burn mechanics and many reasons to reinvent. If you get greedy the chance of being attacked by someone else and having your parts stolen is high, which keeps more people honest and trying to fly lower under the radar.
Speaking of that...
When you click the battle button you can search for players with the defense and faith levels that your looking for. Players with better stats usually have bigger stashes to raid but are also harder to assault with your loaded dice rolls. Again it takes a healthy balance to pick off the right targets. So far I've been looking for targets who want to farm and don't yet understand the significance of faith as it relates to the battle system (mitigation).
Hm, what else...
Right the last stat I didn't talk about: Banked.
Banked is a unique stat in that it is powered up parts. So if you bank your assets here this is the one place where you can actually unstake the tokens and get your money back later. A bigger bank of parts means a bigger bank of rewards you can stack up before claiming. I haven't talked about this skill until now because I tested it a bit and thus far is doesn't quite seem worth using. The bigger your unclaimed stash is the bigger of a target you become. I was also displeased to find out that my tokens were locked on the standard HE schedule, so it's going to take 4 weeks 25% a week to unlock them. Live and learn.
It's also a bit unclear as to what increasing your level will get you. Does it increase the effectiveness of all your skills? For now I'm enjoying being level 1 because I heard a restriction got added that doesn't let you attack other accounts that are much lower level than you. You can burn parts to speed up the leveling process but for now I'm good with just letting it increase automatically on its own. Looks like I'll be level 2 by the end of the day maybe I'll figure out exactly what it does by then.
There are also guilds. Each guild can have something like 12 players in it and there are "5 workbenches", whatever that means. I was thinking about making a guild but it's 25 Hive and I'm not sure if I want to go that deep. You also seem to get some kind of farming bonus for being in one so maybe it's worth it? Unclear.
I'm also playing the game on Chrome and Brave because if you try to play 2 accounts within 2 separate tabs on a single browser the game will log you out automatically on the old one. By using a separate Hive Keychain compatible browser for each account you won't get logged out like this and can play two or more accounts at the same time without having to log in and out (although it's pretty easy to juggle them using only one browser using the "accounts" button in the bottom right corner).
Conclusion
Even though this game is quite simple and basic, there are clearly a ton of moving parts to pay attention to. I'm actually a bit shocked I just spent 3000 words trying to explain this game but here we are.
It might be weird considering my explanation of the whole thing but thus far the game has been captivating my attention and keeping me hooked in, albeit most of that has to do with the money and crypto aspect and the fact that it's built on Hive.
While this game is clearly a ponzi and basically no one should play it based on fundamentals and principals alone, it's still nice to support people building on Hive even if this particular project can't possibly have much staying power as it stands now. I will say that is pretty interesting how popular this idle-mining genre is when paired with crypto. Gaming has truly made a full circle back to the beginning of the development cycle. Now it's time to build it back up from nothing.
The entire idle-miner genre is basically a ponzi no matter how it's organized. Doesn't really matter if it's connected to crypto or not. That's just the nature of the beast. How do you stop players who got in early from dominating the pay-to-win mechanics and eventually bleeding the entire system dry? How do you stop bots when people use bots even when there isn't a financial incentive in play? Game economies are kind of my specialty, so when I say I've never seen this problem solved before what are the chances that Golemancer on the Hive blockchain is going to end up being that breakthrough solution? Essentially nil.
Still it's nice to see people programming on Hive. I am able to play this game with an alt account that has ZERO resource credits delegated to it (@gunrun). The only on-chain transactions are Hive engine transfers, which are small enough in size that any account on Hive can participate no matter their RC level. All other transactions are still signed by your private key with Hive Keychain but exist on their centralized server. This game is actually a pretty good example of how our security/account system can be leveraged to great effect without actually bloating the chain with data, and that alone is probably worth supporting. Kudos to the devs of Golemancer and I hope to see more development and sustainability features roll out before the music stops.