I was writing up a very detailed idea I've been brainstorming for a while. When I woke up in the morning all the text was deleted with no way to recover it... so that's cool. I didn't even turn my computer off or even to sleep; just locked it. I guess I'll be rewriting that today.

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In any case, even though we are all competing for a share of the @drugwars prize pool, I thought in the spirit of transparency I would give an update on my @drugwars exploits concerning extracting maximum value from the reward pool.

I finally got some use out of those free pending accounts I've been collecting. I created three new accounts to currently use as alts in @drugwars: @dexturd, @irated, and @lottoshi. I'm pretty mad because I created the account @irate but the password field was blank. I assume this account is lost to the ether, unless someone knows how to access an account with no password (if that's even possible or what happened). I used this service:

https://codebull.github.io/AccountCreate/

These three account represent services I wanted to bring to this blockchain but apparently I'm far too lazy to work that hard. I'm still pretty hopeless when it comes to JavaScript. We'll see.

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@drugwars investments:

My final decision on what buildings are worth it to buy and what aren't has been completed.
I bought these buildings with Steem:

• Cocina (level 1 and 2) ($0.7, $1.25)
• Pharmaceutical Lab (level 1) ($2.5)
• Industrial Distillery (level 1) ($1.5)

For a grand total of $5.95. I scraped together all the liquid Steem I had and now I'm running 6 accounts at the same time. Obviously, the stakes are quite low. After all, how much can one expect to gain from a $30 investment? I'm thinking like $10 or $20 :D

I'm officially done pumping money into this game. It's time to extract.

While the Industrial Distillery doesn't give you any drugs or direct income, it speeds up the account massively, and you can leverage it to get all the level one production buildings very quickly. You can get a black market in as little as 8 hours to increase weapon production from 350 to 13000. A day later you can afford level 1 Castle and a day after that you can afford 3D Metal printing. It spirals very quickly in your favor for no extra cost after the initial investment.

Once I have enough weapon and alcohol production I rush Level 2 phara lab. I just got this on my main account last night, but that doesn't really count because I pumped 41 Steem into that account instead of the standard 20 described here.

Tomorrow on my main account I will have to decide if I want level 3 Cocina (which would give me a bigger payout from drug production) or 3D Metal printing level 2 AND Industrial Distillery level 2. At first I thought more drug production was the obvious answer, but this leaves my account in a bad place for the future.

I can either choose:

• +13k drug production
  OR
• +35k weapon production in addition to +35k alcohol production.

It becomes pretty obvious to me that it's not a good idea to start upgrading level 3 buildings before upgrading everything else to level 2. The level ups have significant diminishing returns. That's how these games get you; they constantly encourage you to take the bad deal and try to scramble to get ahead. Slow and steady wins.

As predicted, battles have been officially disabled allowing this strategy to really thrive unhindered by you plundering bandits. The servers have started to stabilize and twice as many devs are working on the project for a grand total of 2. Still, this is significant. We can expect the devs to use some of the funds they've generated to scale up and work out the bugs.

Personally I still think that a 20% rake for the developers is way too high. I would suggest 5% with a 10% maximum. These are the kinds of numbers you see in Poker, which allows the best players to become professionals. However, I'm way ahead of myself, because this game lacks any type of strategy for the time being, making it impossible to "go pro".

Conversely, games like this in the past have siphoned 100% of the reward for themselves, so perhaps we should be grateful that the rake isn't something crazy like 50%. Besides, this project obviously needs time to scale and can't even handle the volume that it has already.

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Many fans of the game are already throwing out ideas about how to make the game better. Like I said... I also had my own long post going but it somehow got deleted :/

Steem and generic opt in mentality show us once again that people are willing to work for free on projects that they are excited about. The development on this game continues, and we can see that interesting things like "search warrant" are going to be implemented.

This is very similar to an idea I had concerning my RPG brainstorming. It's the whole "crabs in a bucket" mentality that can be found in our whitepaper. You can basically pay to get your enemies into trouble. My idea was more like a bounty to kill a rival but this feels very similar.

It's still blatantly obvious that the payout structure of this game needs to change in a big way. In as little is 2 weeks the vast majority of todays prize pool (already up to 44000 steem... GD) will be sucked away by the players who entered the market first. Leaving little incentive for new players to enter the space.

My next post (rewrite incoming) will be about a system I think we can use to add a lot of strategy to the combat system to deter bots from entering this monetized space and sucking it dry with a Sybil attack.