DrugWars: Battle of the Bots
Yesterday it was almost like I could see the @drugwars bots being developed in real time. If any account is ever left undefended, 10 bots know about it now. With the financial incentive to game the system and very little strategy involved in combat, this game was made to be Sybil attacked by a few experienced programmers.
The first bot I noticed was @ahnimolsecs. This account was attacking me literally the second my immunity was gone. This bot can steal hundreds of thousands of resources a day just by attacking inactive accounts that have no defense. For a while I was "curation training" and attacking alongside its targets.
It turns out an account can get attacked multiple times in a row before immunity kicks in, so that 30% limit on theft is irrelevant because a bot can attack the account 10 times from ten different accounts and steal 97%.
When it really comes down to it this game was made to be Sybil attacked:
- You receive resources without having to do any kind of proof-of-work in return.
- Combat has no strategy, and even if it did, the resources to create units is essentially free for bots to farm; undermining proof-of-brain.
- Financial incentive to game the system has created an army of bots much more quickly than a normal game.
- Issuing commands in the form of JSON ops makes it very easy to bot when zero strategy is involved.
- Soft caps on resource production encourage bots to simply create new accounts in order to increase the overall production of the botnet very cheaply.
- Gangs have no purpose; a motivated lone-wolf bot developer will be far stronger than a gang of real players.
- A well programmed bot will never lose resources, ever. They have 24 hour surveillance across multiple accounts. If they are going to lose a fight (or lose too many units due to a fight), they can attack a dummy target to avoid battle and then spend all their resources at home so they don't lose any. Then, they get the benefit of account immunity.
Not all gloom and doom!
This has been quite the learning experience for me. We are getting first-hand experience of what works and what doesn't. In fact, I've thought of a new blockchain-based tug-of-war battle system due to @drugwars.
When it really comes down to it, @drugwars has been, and continues to be, an interesting little experiment.
Those bots can't possibly be making that much money, right?
Posted using Partiko Android
Not to mention that in an their post 3 days ago, the shield was to be active for 12 hours. Now it's down to one.... and the multiple battles launched at the same time. I logged in right in time to block the second attack.
However, as long as I make the slightest profit I'm good.
Big Mamas > bots, which is true for real life as well as online blockchain games.
I was actually in Palm Springs (too busy hiking) when the floodgates opened, my main had enough defenses and was fine, but my alt was totally reamed for about 20 hours... and now is fine with defense and hasn't been attacked since. I've only launched one attack which was successful but only got 700 drugs because I imagine a thousand bots had already beaten me to it... so battles are effectively useless to me... and as long as I have enough defense to scare off any bots, I should be able to build my empire in peace.
Bots have always been an issue in Steemmonsters too. At the moment there is a bug where people might list a Level 5 card for sale, but the system gives it a Level 1 price... and someone has made a bot that scoots along and buys it before you have a chance to cancel.
I really need to learn how to code properly...
i noticed that they have changed the attacking. No ur resources can carry a set amount of loot. If u send only one unit, it will only carry somewhere between 100 to 500 resources. Also shields are shorter.
Haha, that's one of those things that seems obvious in hindsight... this ROI on this one guy...
The "game" is running off a cliff
Posted using Partiko Android
Ahahaha. It was so obvious from the start that's how the game would end. 😂😂😂
Indeed, the only reason why I started trucking down this rabbit hole is because I knew I could beat the greater fool's game theory.
To be fair there was only a REALLY good chance of it happening :D
with whales as crash test-dummies burning their funds to accelerate towards the impact-wall... lol
I'm still not sure if the devs really just didn't expect "investors-without-reading-glasses" to spend so much so fast.. or if they actually intentionally designed a funnel from the whale wallets through us users right into their own wallet... hmmm
ah well... I'm in the green and the drama is very enjoyable :D
!bookkeeping drugwars
Hi @mongshter!
drugwars
Received:
Spent:
Total:
First transfer was before 21.34 days.
Your ROI per day is 9.23 % and you are earning approx. 2.30 STEEM per day.
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Sad but true
Posted using Partiko iOS
Do you know any api to retrieve user data for drugwars. I was trying to grab it from html but they dont have any ids attached plus its slow.