DRUGWARS on the brink of hitting the wall big time! Or: It's the economy stupid!

Drugwars is a very good example of problems that many crypto projects encounter.
The first idea is great, execution is OK, UI, graphics, and actual coding is sound..
However most teams have NO economic experience at all...
From the most recent actions by the drugwars team (and also by some extent by the steemmonsters team) it is IMHO obvious that non of the core team members even has the slightest touch of economics 101...
.. not speaking about real cryptoeconomic experience... and that is even more demanding than "normal" economics...

you need to have basic economic and business administration knowledge, experience with financial markets and with online marketing...

so what did they do wrong in my humble opinion?
1.) the general idea with a reward pool / kickback mechanism is great, however payout and pool have to be sustainable..
a 0.5% / 0.5% daily (or even less) payout would have secured the reward pool sustainability for at least three month, kept some hot money away and would have induced daily increasing payouts due to new inflows.
2.) reliability: core economic components of a game must not be changed arbitrarily!
In any computer game while advancing in the game the human brain is stimulated by an reward effect. This can be new quests, more power, better weapons, etc.. or as in this case steem...
If you take away the prior given rewards and do not replace it by a better reward - which is exactly what you did, you replaced steem by hot air - the whole game is broken...
3.) Introducing of new rewards / own crypto currency..
while you keep to the old payout you could have gradually implemented your new token by issuing it on top of the steem rewards, or for quests, missions, ranking...
and only if you see that it is accepted by your customers and has some real value you can introduce it gradually and replace the steem rewards in little steps..
4.) do not forget your core product.. this is a social strategy mmog...
the battle system is still completely screwed up, major components are still not working (gang system), and there is a lack of strategic depth and fun in the game...
IMHO 95% of players active atm are here for the steem rewards.. if you want to change this then build a better game.
if your core product isn't running smoothly do not change other working components...

seriously you had a great idea, fine coding and UI.. with an amazing start (7,000 users) but you are about to screw it up big time!
Listen to your customers!
If you want advice ask them (or me)... nearly all ideas wrote down into the drugwars blog are better than what you guys did and are about to do!