Hey guys!

It's been a while since my last post but I have definitely not left the blockchain! In fact, I've been as active as ever on Discord talking to many Steemians every day about none other than the biggest game in blockchain: Steem Monsters!

Recently, Steem Monsters have been rocking in the sales department, with cards shooting up in price! I used to sell my alpha decks for around $1000 with no buyers, literally 0 sales in the past three months in terms of full alpha sets. However recently, I sold a deck for $1600 to @abrockman and $1800 to @j6969 and they're worth around $2150 now!

The Steem Monsters team have so much going for them and after seeing @aggroed's presentation at Dreamhack, I agree that they are in the forefront of blockchain gaming. However, there are some minor issues I feel like we need to fix that are basically just blockchain limitations that we should fix before we move on.

1. RCs
2. JSON character limitations

RC Issues for New Players

One thing @j6969 was very concerned about was RCs. He didn't know what they were so when he finally ran out after buying thousands of dollars worth of cards from the market, he was shocked! He couldn't do anything anymore, couldn't even sell his cards. There appeared to be a bug where he was not delegated more SP.

After contacting @yabapmatt about this, he managed to resolve the issue within a few hours. If you check the RC requests channel on Discord, you'll see there's been pretty much no issues in the past few days since Matt fixed it.

Ultimately, the grand vision is to allow new players who know nothing about Steem, SP, RCs etc to play as much as they'd like for as long as they'd like without ever having to worry about RCs. The @steemmonsters account will be able to dynamically delegate and undelegate to players based on their activity so new players who don't understand anything will be able to play. If someday the game gets big enough that Steem Monsters run out of SP, they can simply power up more Steem! After all, it is the whole use case of Steem and Steem Power. Of course, if a player wants to learn about and chooses to research Steem, they'll have the pleasant surprise that they already have an account on all the Steem related dapps with SP/RCs provided by Steem Monsters.

Custom JSON limitations

Right now, we can't create a tournament with too many characters, we can't combine, buy/sell too many cards at once. However, this can be fixed by chaining transactions together. This can save players a lot of time when managing their collections. Furthermore, this will allow buttons like "combine all" or "transfer all" which will save players even more time.

This could really boost the market volume as more players are willing to interact with the market. At the moment, I'd be very willing to list my cards at above market price just to provide extra liquidity but that process takes so long I just don't have the time or (mainly) patience to do it.

Ultimately, we are trying to integrate the convenience of a centralised game with the freedom of a decentralised ledger.

If we can manage to do this, we can start really advertising to the masses by paying for advertisements, contacting streamers to try our game, paying content creators to feature us and from there I'm sure a snowball effect of unpaid streamers and content creators reaching out to US to promote the game. Especially with the mobile app coming, I'm sure there'll be many curious minds who see it on the app store trying it out

Overall really excited about the future of this game! Once I'm done with exams I'm planning on making a series of tutorials on all aspects of Steem Monsters which will hopefully answers many of the questions a new player might have!