The Hash Rush ICO has been announced and while the excitement from the community has been great, a few valid questions have been asked that sparked some lively and positive discussions over our various channels and communities.
The topics of these discussions ranged from questions about how the game works, the background of the team, and general questions about the ICO – and we feel that it would be beneficial to everyone to have the answers in one place.
So, let's dive straight into it.
The Hash Rush Team
The ethos of the Hash Rush team has always been to be as open as possible, and so knowledge of who is in the team has been in the public domain since the start of the project back in 2017. You can find a list of the Hash Rush employees over on the VZ Games LinkedIn page, and read various team interviews on our Steemit blog.
You will quickly find that the Hash Rush team consists of highly respected veterans of the gaming industry and fresh blood that bring new and exciting ideas to the gaming scene. If you ever want to talk to a member of the Hash Rush team one on one, just join our Discord server and we’ll be happy to talk to you publicly or privately.
Changes to the Mechanics of the Game
Back when Hash Rush was first announced in mid 2017, one of the core ideas was to tie the game to an individual hash rate (per player) to decide individual reward payout. While the idea sounded great on paper, we came to realise that there were many problems with that approach, a number of which were deal breakers as it would have directly harmed the fun factor of the game.
The key point surrounded the player reward pool. If the game was designed in a way that each player had an individual hash rate based on their units and structures, we would have had to dilute the value of the mining farm's hash rate to such a low amount that payouts would have been close to insignificant. Furthermore, we ran the risk of not being able to grow the mining farm quickly enough to keep up with the growth of the game - and limiting player count and unit types was not a route we wanted to go.
As a result, we decided that having players compete for a predetermined amount of cryptocurrency that was supplied by the VZ Mining farm each month would result in a much more fun experience. This approach also allowed our game design team to be a lot more flexible when designing in-game challenges and various gameplay mechanics, such as resource gathering, combat and quest rewards.
Finally, it has always been a major goal for us to open up the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency to gamers from all around the world, regardless of their crypto-knowledge. A straightforward, leaderboard-based Player Reward Pool system is a much simpler concept to understand than adding the complexity of Mh/s or Gh/s per unit, and we see Hash Rush as being an easier onramp into the world of blockchain thanks to this change.
How the Reward Pool Works
The reward pool is straightforward in that each month's Ethereum payouts are determined by the previous month's mined amount, and each player's ranking in the leaderboard is based on their own in-game performance.
Each player will be ranked by how many Crypto Crystals they accumulate in a given season, so the more Crypto Crystals that a player mines, earns as quest rewards, or claims as a result of killing enemies, the higher their position will be in the rankings.
We are in the process of writing up an article that fully explains the player reward pool and how it works, which we will publish in the coming days.
The final point on this subject is that even though players are competing for a pool of cryptocurrency, the game is still tied to real world mining. We have established a team at our sister company, VZ Mining, who are working hard to grow our mining farm and the hash rates along with it. Nothing has changed on this front: we have a mining farm churning out Ethereum, and we don't use our players' GPUs to mine cryptocurrency.
Changing the Rush Coin to RUSH
This change was directly as an effort to list Rush Coin (RC) on exchanges and CoinMarketCap. Unfortunately there are numerous other projects that make use of the RC ticker, for example Russia Coin, and this has lead to a lot of confusion and problems with the community, efforts to list on CoinMarketCap and efforts to get listed on new exchanges.
After deliberating extensively on how to rename the ticker, the team looked at various options and settled on RUSH. This is because it is both on-brand and because the only other RUSH token we found on Etherscan appears to be entirely inactive. We have previously covered this in our ICO blog.
The second ICO: The RUSH Coin Token Sale
The purpose of this ICO is also straightforward: to reach further milestones that have been a part of our roadmap since the project's inception.
The Hash Rush project has reached many milestones already: we released the pre-alpha on schedule and are currently running a hugely popular alpha test of the game. Looking forward, we are on track to release a beta version in late September and for early access launch in late December.
The funding from the new ICO will allow us to develop additional content and features, most notably porting Hash Rush to mobile.
We still consider our first ICO that raised $1.8m to have been a success as it was our seed capital. The second ICO is our series A capital, which is a very common element of ambitious projects like Hash Rush which require additional funding to reach additional goals. In the traditional gaming scene, and much more commonly in the start-up world, one can find similar examples of games that are funded to reach a certain point and then later funded again via Kickstarter to reach further goals.
Token distribution date
The final point with regards to the ICO that has come up in the community relates to the token distribution date. Note that the new RUSH Coin tokens will be distributed on the 2nd of December. This is after the release date of the current, locked Rush Coin (the 1st of December) as stated in the original whitepaper. So, while the token sale itself runs in September, all RUSH tokens are only distributed after the Rush Coin tokens in the original smart contract are no longer frozen.
We hope that this article will serve to answer your questions, but if you have more we always welcome you and invite you to contact us directly, or just leave a question in the comment box below. Along with our highly experienced team, Hash Rush has the privilege of working with a number of highly engaged and excellent advisors from some of the biggest names in the gaming industry. On top of that, the growing list of established partnerships (such as WAX and OPSkins) and our major push to promote Hash Rush at the largest gaming events in Europe and Japan are all testament to the dedication and commitment we have to seeing this project through.
Have more questions?
We've always wanted to ensure that those who have invested in the game, would like to invest and those who are just eager to play have transparency towards what goes on at Hash Rush HQ. This is why we've decided to run a series of live AMAs and posts over the coming weeks. This will all be communicated via upcoming blogs as well as on our social media channels and Discord.
We look forward to bringing you an amazing game that you'll enjoy as much as we do.
The Hash Rush Team