It's quite strange that it's just a day when Hash Rush announced their ICO 2 and you have started assuming things by yourself. You have been with this project from the starting and it took just an announcement to shake your trust and faith in the project which they earned from past year.

Also regarding mining pools and hash rate you are absolutely creating a FUD, which you wouldn't have done if you read the latest whitepaper. They are releasing public mining pool in which everyone can participate. The game is still tied to mining farm and payouts from it. The only thing that changed is that instead of every colony having a hashrate, their ranking and rewards are calculated by amount of crystals they mine. That actually makes more sense in a game. Things change quite a lot from the initial concept phase to development and deployment stage. Concept of "colonies having hash rate" made more sense if there were mandatory monthly subscriptions or sale of say Ernack units. But since that would have made the "pay to win" factor really strong and decisive, they had to exclude it. Also subscriptions don't really work these days. Mainstream gamers are not a big fan of "pay to win" stuff. I'm sure you'd know that. Demand these days is for skins and cosmetic items or consumables. Plus your point regarding payout based on factions is again totally wrong. Payouts are based on individual rankings.

Yes Beta is not launched right now, but Alpha is going strong. Team has been making regular updates and fixing bugs and adding new features. In fact they have been announcing their Beta plans everywhere. Beta has a prize pool of $30K which probably no other crypto game has initiated. Even in mainstream games you don't find so much progress in Beta.

Also Hash Rush is considered one of the top blockchain projects in Latvia.
https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/business/5-things-to-know-about-blockchain-in-latvia.a279080/
https://irishtechnews.ie/baltic-blockchain-allstars-latvia-10-to-watch/

I think they have a lot at stake if they wish to scam.

I recognize the fact that no one needs to be a blind follower. Even I am not. I had some issues and I cleared them up with Craig and Darkfall. Also your point regarding the "timing" might be discussable and debatable, but calling them scammy, untrustworthy, sketchy etc. is kinda assassination attempt of the project. Craig pinged you for discussion on Discord but you didn't answer. So your view is pretty biased. But, Craig mentioned that he will come up with answers to your questions pretty soon. But I hope you'll be back at Discord for a meaningful fact based debate.