Drug Wars has created a new type of incentive for users to create their own botnet. This isn't to drain the reward pool but to take advantage of the flawed reward structure of Drug Wars.
Drug Wars is still less than a month old and over 90% of the player base have broken even according to the devs. Drug Wars allows you get rewarded for producing drugs, a resource you create or steal inside of the game.
You can play for free and upgrade your buildings (would take years to make the progress you can make with just 50 Steem in 60 seconds) or pay with Steem. Depending on how far you upgrade your buildings, you can estimate how long it will take you to break-even on your "investment" in the game. The first few tiers you could break even in less than a week. As you upgrade higher and higher, the break-even point gets longer and longer.
A large amount of the 11,000 players figured this out and started to create alt accounts to take advantage of this and make small accounts that break-even very quickly. If you did it right, you could make 8.5% ROI on a daily basis in the earlier days.
All the money that comes into Drug Wars gets split between the players and the devs. 80% goes to the players and 20% goes to the dev. Originally 8% of that 80% was distributed daily to Drug Wars players and the rest was saved to maintain "sustainability" of the game. Early on chats with the dev and community, I have said this is not sustainable and similar to a ponzi scheme where early players do really well and depend on new money coming in to fund it. At some point, there are no new players or money, and a large portion of the late players end up in the hole.
But it is just a game!
On the surface, it may be a game (despite the "game" elements were disabled for weeks) but it was initially promoted as a way to get paid and many people saw this opportunity and jumped on it.
To date 247,627.5320 Steem has been sent to Drug Wars. A majority of this (205K or so) in the first two weeks.
You can see the new money is drying up, yet over 90% of users have made an ROI and continue to make more on a daily basis, albeit smaller each day.
Drug Wars income
(Updated, had wrong chart before)
| Date | Steem |
|---|---|
| 20190211 | 12148.3530 |
| 20190212 | 16825.7310 |
| 20190213 | 15694.7270 |
| 20190214 | 19320.6520 |
| 20190215 | 16132.0950 |
| 20190216 | 16488.7240 |
| 20190217 | 19933.9810 |
| 20190218 | 13937.5570 |
| 20190219 | 17613.1560 |
| 20190220 | 13332.9010 |
| 20190221 | 16350.3120 |
| 20190222 | 11286.4930 |
| 20190223 | 7909.3790 |
| 20190224 | 6747.3270 |
| 20190225 | 4858.5410 |
| 20190226 | 4556.3670 |
| 20190227 | 2029.4350 |
| 20190228 | 2271.3400 |
| 20190301 | 3116.0720 |
| 20190302 | 2206.7950 |
| 20190303 | 5262.4720 |
| 20190304 | 5500.5930 |
| 20190305 | 3329.1160 |
| 20190306 | 3010.3130 |
| 20190307 | 1054.2600 |
| 20190308 | 2167.6620 |
| 20190309 | 1816.8800 |
| 20190310 | 1070.2170 |
| 20190311 | 634.5940 |
| 20190312 | 390.5190 |
You can see in the above chart the declining income to the game. The users who are making a daily ROI are being financed by the 27 or so players who spent over 1,000 Steem into the game.
This brings me to my original point of the post. It was brought up in a Steemit Abuse channel that there is a large number of similar transactions going to Bittrex and questioned if it was a bot farm using Steemit Inc delegation.
| From | To | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| kalinaa | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| irinaa | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| miroo | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| adelinaa | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| radka | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| emoto | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| viktoriq | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| nadeto | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| simeoni | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| radofer | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| samsunga | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| lojito | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| radincheto | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| kateto | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| katincheto | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| sneji | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| rosenn | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| asiaa | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| stankaa | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| danailov | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| yavorov | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| veliz | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| bmwto | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| merjana | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| pastet | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| timsot | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| elince | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| sofche | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| gergana | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| alekssa | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| genadii | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| kliment | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| boian | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| galena | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| savata | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| vikito | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| yosifov | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| audito | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| pejoto | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| smsa | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| razera | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| gogera | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| aneliq | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| mladenn | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| vaskoto | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| bojko | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| andonov | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| vladko | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| jivkoo | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| sisoto | bittrex | 0.4650 |
| pambi | bittrex | 0.4650 |
Example bot user
I looked into the transactions and noticed they are not using Steemit Inc delegation, they are not even using the reward pool. They are farming Drug Wars using small accounts that reach breakeven in a matter of days to milk the Drug Wars reward pool (which has been as high as 7000 Steem daily).
I have mentioned weeks ago in a previous post the daily payouts for Drug Wars decline at a rate of 92% in a 30 day period. It is quickly reaching a point that the larger investors will never reach breakeven until they move to other blockchains or something changes and smaller players are making far more than they invested.
While I love the idea of Drug Wars and in fact had planned on something similar myself, I am disappointed at a lot of the decisions made by the developers, most importantly the way it was built akin to a ponzi.
The developers are now scrambling to get themselves out of this situation by adding battle sharing functionality in the game, where players can share their battles and a vote from Fundition.
What wasn't disclosed is these posts have a 35% beneficiary on them, 20% going back to the player pool and 15% going to the developers. In most cases, if a post makes more than $1 the player is actually losing money on their post. What 
The $0.28 cent vote from Fundition claims $1.428 of the rewards from his post.
More importantly, it means the chain is going to be flooded with up to 12,000 of these posts from each of the players potentially up to 3 times a day (the current limit in the game). The majority of Steem and outside visitors do not care about Drug Wars and the posts offer no value and certainly no proof of brain. They are also extremely low effort and only require pressing a button in the game. Could potentially be 36,000+ of these posts a day.
I do not see a situation where Drug Wars will survive much longer at this rate. It's already reached a point where it desperately needs an injection of new players (aka a new blockchain as planned by the devs) to keep afloat and a majority of the players are frustrated with the declining rewards, constant abrupt changes in gameplay, and lack of communication about these changes, and the fact the game is really time consuming and boring.
I am not happy with the decisions made by the dev team like creating units for their dev out of thin air to enforce their ninja changes made minutes before.
666 Mercs is virtually impossible to acquire in the game, especially after he was wiped out just minutes before.