Drug Wars Caught Breaking Blockchain Verifiability

in #drugwars5 years ago (edited)

Well, this is disappointing. As many already know, I have been playing Drug Wars for quite a bit and got addicted like everyone else on Steem. But the last week or so, the Drug Wars team have been embroiled in controversy after controversy.

They released a completely new UI alongside the reenabled battles system, which brought with it a plethora of issues of stability (needing to force refresh using F5), API constantly going down and generally being super slow (it's still slow now).

It all started when @themarkymark posted a screenshot in the Drug Wars Discord chat

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On the surface this might be seen as a valid number of units. However, the soup thickens as it is revealed these units magically appeared out of thin air after previous units were wiped out

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The TL;DR is the main Drug Wars dev (presumably) "hightouch" manufactured resources out of thin air to create 666 units, attack and then remove the units from his account. It doesn't matter if it was testing, it was a real attack killing other players real units which cost resources.

This is wrong on so many levels and it also highlights one important fact about Drug Wars: it's not a true blockchain game. While you spend real STEEM in Drug Wars to rush buildings and units, the only aspects of the game using the Steem blockchain are when you initiate a transaction.

This situation really highlights while the game uses parts of the Steem blockchain, the game itself does not run on the blockchain and on a server and presumably a MongoDB/MySQL database. Many parts of the game itself have no visibility or accountability and as we've seen, it can allow the developer or other people associated to create resources and units out of thin air.

The crux of the issue here is that all transactions in the game are clearly not verified against actual transactions on the Steem blockchain.

What has occurred here is a massive breach of trust within the community. Given this game has made over 230k STEEM in the last couple of weeks, I would say that warrants the developers being a bit more cautious in how they run the app.

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Uh-oh. Glad I break even early.
Almost 1M resources down the drain :(

Not surprised, but still disappointed. Sounded like a Ponzi scheme to me ( I know people say the same about any crypto, but BTC and STEEM have real value).

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