DrugWars Review - A Major Problem With The Game

I've been playing text based online games for over 18 years now. I love the multiplayer aspect for the human connection and for the competition. Two noteworthy favourites of mine over years were Utopia, a high fantasy empire builder. And Netropolis, a business and crime empire builder.

This is my first impression of the game @Drugwars which can be played from here https://drugwars.io you can sign in with Steemconnect to connect your Steem account and earn while playing. It's worth keeping in mind that the game is still apparently in early access, so hopefully this big problem will be fixed. I predict it now, if not fixed it will easily kill the game. I also want to point out that I'm making this post because I do have high hopes for the game, I feel like it could be a really fun experience if they get a few things right.

DrugWars like many other text based games. The goal is to collect resources and use them to improve your buildings and therefore the rewards they give, grow an army of units to fight with your riches and use them to fight with other players. You can connect with other players in gangs which is the equivalent of a clan or guild in many other games. They're yet to add jobs which seems to be a PVE method of gaining resources. Right now the only methods are to generate your own through buildings or to attack other players.

Naturally fighting is part of the game and it should be. My favourite part of Netropolis was logging on and having a full on live war with another player, or even better a great big team fight! In DrugWars when you attack another player and win you get to steal resources as your winnings, you can take away as many as your living units can carry. Each type of unit has a different specialty and they can carry different amounts.

When a new player starts the game what mechanic is there to stop larger players from constantly farming them? Some games have a cool down timer where after a player is attacked they cannot be attacked again by the same enemy, this gives a small grace period the rebuild and stay in the game. Others have diminishing returns on loot of much weaker players so it becomes a waste of time for a larger player to try and farm the incredibly weak. In DrugWars there is loot protection, depending on the building level of your storage there will be a protected amount of loot that cannot be stolen. I think it's a good system made even better with a unit that can reduce the defenders storage effect by a small amount, giving the attacker more loot.

The problem with DrugWars that has no doubt already driven many people away is that it rewards high level players for destroying the units of a weak player. At present there is no real mechanic to protect the weaker players from losing what is their whole force to a significantly bigger enemy. This is really due to two things. Firstly the attacks on DrugWars are very quick in relation to other text based games, in around 10 minutes you can have a massive force 5,000 strong at your target systematically destroying their puny 400 units, basically for free. This is a far more lucrative return than fighting other powerful players and losing their own force in the battle.

The second reason it sucks for the very weak new players is due to the quick nature of the incoming attacks you only have a very short window of opportunity to realise there is an attack coming before you lose your entire force and with it, your ability to progress at all. You can send your units on an attack of their own so when the large army arrives there is no one home to kill. But that means I need to be online during those 10 minutes where I'm going to lose hours / days of unit building.

During my few days playing I have already been raided several times by players from a large gang. To put it in perspective the total resources gained + lost from one individual player attacking me several times is 14.68k Weapons, and 8.58k Alcohol gained. The value of their loses attacking me are 138.4k Drugs, 234.2K Weapons, and 496.4K Alcohol. They are so large that they will earn those losses back within minutes. I am so new that even though my force was many times smaller it will take a full day to rebuild.

All it takes is one toilet break to lose it all again with no way to defend or keep my forces, all the while it still remains profitable to wipe me out as they are rewarded in tokens for having fights. When I went to my job, I lost my entire force. After I rebuilt and had a meal, I lost my entire force. Both times to the same player. Add in the fact that another player from the same gang also attacking me there is no fun and no reason to continue playing.

@kreesher posted this on a recent DrugWars post that was highlighting one gang.

This illustrates my point perfectly. I'm too new to even be accepted into these gangs, but they are rewarded for absolutely destroying new players, so why wouldn't they? Other strong players might be leaving the newbie alone but it only takes a handful of selfish players to abuse this and kill off all the new players until you're inevitably left with a dead game that cannibalizes the remaining players.

The live chat feature in the game has some bugs but I have seen a few new players in there complaining that they keep getting wiped out, then you never hear from them again.

The strong should be able to beat the weak, but the weak shouldn't be in a position where they have no opportunity to ever become strong.

I also saw @wakeupnd and @justtryme90 talking about @berniesanders down voting a DrugWars post. @mjmoonbow was also calling for flags. Maybe I should just get out now and save my time? I'm usually quite hopeful when it comes to games like this but what do you think?

Gaming on the block chain has always been a really exciting concept to me. With games like @steemmonsters really setting the bar high already what can we expect in the near future? I think there's a place for free to play games too, but they can't be low quality.