Part 4: Closing Thoughts

Not really closing thoughts any more because I moved a section after this one. But I can't think of a better title.

This is part 4 of a 5 part series; the index with links to other sections is here.

Trusting a bot dev is extremely unsafe

I’ll just paste what I openly told people on Discord several times.

This is a ponzi

This game was always a ponzi. I knew that going in, and my original goal was to get at least my initial out and then see how long I could push things. A lot of people lost money on this ponzi, as one does.

The battle game is actually pretty fun, interesting, and well done, but the idle game was awful and literally just a thin wrapper around a ponzi. If you lost money on this, you have no one to blame but yourself.

The loot point change

Users of my bot were understandably pissed by this change, but I actually thought it was a pretty elegant fix for the issue. Bots were undeniably causing a lot of anger in the community and this was a way to open that up to everyone.

I do think they goofed by not tweaking the settings a bit. There were just too many mines going unlooted, which probably caused a lot of unnecessary inflation.

Subnet / Battle Game

I find the whole subnet delay very suspicious. There’s zero chance they weren’t warned in advance by Avalabs to swap over. Combined with the fact that it felt like many of the battle game details weren’t fleshed out even days before the launch… it makes me feel like it was used as an excuse.

If the battle game is entirely off chain and they are going to nerf rewards for the idle game like this to drive people over… why not just deploy on the c-chain?

Results for my bot users

You would be surprised how many people who used my bot broke even or lost money even though it was up to 3x as profitable as mining.

This is mainly due to investing too late, over compounding / averaging down, or just straight up not selling their TUS as soon as it hit their bank account. One person accumulated 1.6M TUS on the way down from 20c to .8c and then dumped it all at the very bottom.

A lot of people (myself included) also sold their TUS but held their CRA thinking it would eventually rebound, which was clearly a bad choice.

Results for me

Although I frequently and repeatedly warned people not to over compound / invest in this game, it did work out pretty well for me since I took a percentage of their earnings.

Someone recently pointed out the old saying, “It’s profitable to sell shovels”.

I took about 300K USD to stables; used 100K to repay a Trader Joe loan and deleverage (thank god just in time) and 200K to USDC safely stable farming. I also accumulated about 5,000 AVAX, which given the recent drop from $80 AVAX to $29 AVAX seems to have been a very poor choice.

Up Next: Part 5: My ‘investments’ in Crabada