Still locked into playing this game.
Not only has price not crashed yet, it's gone up. I've been active in the Discord the last couple days and the hype for this game is a thing of legend. Of course there was one guy in there today talking about how unsustainable it is and how rewards at the top-end are exponential and a single whale cashing out will tank the entire economy.
Funny because even I'm not that bearish.
It's one thing to be able to recognize that an economy is unstable and potentially volatile, and it's entirely another to be able to predict a good timeline and actually profit from it. If Drugwars lasted two months before completely imploding and draining the reward pool obviously this game can last at least twice as long as that. After all, all the value is stored in a separate token determined by spot price. Quite a bit different especially when considering sellers are essentially forced to reinvest 75% of their farm back into the game at a minimum without penalty.
In any case, the game has been interesting and has a lot more strategy to it than I originally anticipated. Judging by the Discord there are all kinds of poor strategies being employed by a lot of people. At this point with the PART token towering over the 2:1 PART:HIVE ratio I feel pretty confident about easily turning a profit on this one. Although I am doubling down on the one last ace-in-the-hole that the game has to offer.
Relatively speaking I've been speculating pretty hard on the SHARD token that does absolutely nothing at this point. @Yixn (lead dev) just got back from a weekend vacation and development should be kicked back into high gear soon. Shards are selling for less than half the price of parts, and they are like x5-x10 more rare than parts. If my gamble pays off like I want it too I'll easily be able to sell shards back into the market at something ridiculous like 10 Hive for 1 shard. Easy x10... either that or I lose everything. One of those. Will be fun either way.
Laying out some of the strategies.
There are a couple of binary options in the game in which players must decide one strategy or another. Anything in-between seems to be sub-optimal in my opinion.
Types of Attacks:
Smash and Grab
This is how most people attack in the game. The majority of players want to attack when their 8-hour claim window is available. They find some good targets, attack them, and claim their rewards ASAP. This prevents other accounts from seeing their honeypot (stash) and trying to take it from them.Attrition
I've been trying out the attrition method and this is one that hardly anyone does. Rather than attack right before a claim, we attack right after a claim when we have no parts left. Why do it this way? Because if you lose on an attack roll: 10% of your stash gets burned to "repair" your golems (minimum 0.1 parts). If we have nothing in our stash we can attack and lose with zero penalty. This allows us to attack anyone we want even if you have a low chance of winning. The tradeoff is that the chance of your stash becoming a honeypot 8 hours later and being stolen out from under you is high. Still, I like to try. Both strats are valid.
Another funny thing about the attrition method is that you can leverage it to create the honeypot on purpose and bait a bunch of people into attacking you on purpose. I've won several times against people attacking me and every time they lose money and their parts get burned it's pretty satisfying. Not a financially viable strategy but fun nonetheless.
Types of Leveling:
- MIN/MAX
- Balanced
A MIN/MAX strategy means you want an account that is either focused on farming or attacking, but not both. In my opinion focusing on farming without the ability to attack anyone seems like a waste. That's because when you're farming you automatically need ALGO/CHARGING/FORTITUDE skills. Not getting FAITH can be dangerous as well because if someone does attack you and win they can steal most of your stash if you have none of this mitigating stat point.
At that point you're a farming account and you've already got 4/5 of the main skills (and one that helps you steal more on attack)... it seems like a no-brainer to buy some cheap attack power as well so you can actually sweeten the deal and play the game (punching down). The only drawback is that burning parts and leveling up skills increases your character's rating. Once rating gets to 100 and above you get penalized for attacking opponents that are out of your range. Thus, if you're a farming account you might want to MIN/MAX only the 3 main farming abilities to make yourself a smaller target for the attackers. Higher level players will avoid you because of the rating penalty.
But what about MIN/MAX on attack accounts?
MIN/MAX on attack makes a ton more sense, because then you can just stack POWER and FAITH and you're pretty much good. Whenever your stash claim is available you can attack quickly and claim the reward before any counterattacks come your way. This is a more active playstyle but perhaps you want an alt account to be an enforcer or something that strikes fear into the hearts of anyone who'd dare attack you or a guild member.
Fear campaign?
The ability to steal from other players creates a gamified defi experience. It's kind of like downvotes on Hive, but on steroids. For the most part players will act in their own best interests financially and try to get the best returns, but emotions come into play as well. Whales at the top end get into pretty nasty brawls and hold grudges like no other. The top players are spending thousands upon thousands of dollars. It's unclear when they'll run out of steam.
Some notes on attacking.
Attacking gives 1-x rewards upon a successful roll into enemy territory. The 'x' is determined by your FAITH, the opponent's FAITH, and your opponents total stash available at the time. From memory it's your faith divided by both faiths added together. Then this is multiplied by a 1.2 constant and then again against the stash.
I didn't realize it worked like this for a while and it creates an interesting dynamic. After you win a raid and steal parts there is a second dice roll to determine how many parts you stole (between min and max). This is a roll from 1% to 100%. If you roll 100% you take the max possible, while if you roll a 1% or any other percent that would result in less than 1 part: the minimum is 1. Many new players end up asking why they always get one part, and this is almost always the reason.
Conclusion
Thus far Golem Overlord has been an interesting experience. I wish I had bought in right at the start when I heard about it so I could have justified a bigger gamble. I feel like I'm not risking enough for how much time I'm putting into this, but that's okay it's fun to try a new thing even if it's just a basic idle-mining web-game. Development is swift and the Discord is constantly buzzing with excitement.
Everyone knows that the 2:1 price on parts is totally unsustainable, but just because a product is unsustainable and potentially geared toward rewarding early adopters doesn't really make it a Ponzi by definition. I ruffled a lot of feathers with my shit-talking on the last post so I'd like to roll it back a bit this time around.
Lot's of players are actually having fun playing this game and many of them truly want the price of parts to go down so they don't have to spend an arm and a leg to get the upgrades they want. No one is promising a return. No Ponzi here fam. Just assume you're going to lose everything you put in like every other video game out there :D.
I still have a little bit to learn in terms of how the game works. A lot of the under-the-hood stuff is actually undocumented and figuring it out requires inside information or in-the-field testing. Still learning stuff by spending time in the Discord with the diehards. After enough time has passed I'll be sure to do another update for everyone and try to keep anyone who's interested up to speed.