Author: @0xMavWisdom

Note: This article is only for information sharing, and has no interest in the project under discussion.

Recently, The Rug Game, a special game based on the Cult.DAO ecosystem, received a lot of attention from the community and drove up the price of CULT for a while. This game not only fuels the burning of CULT, but also caters to speculative players looking for excitement and aggression, as there is only one winner and the loser will really get Rug.

Play Method

There are 10 Tokens in the game, which are: T, H, E, R, U, G, G*, A, M, E*. These Tokens correspond to the name of the chain game itself, namely The Rug Game. Officials have announced future airdrops to dCULT (Cult.DAO), uRVLT (Cult.DAO’s Revolt 2 Earn), and holders of at least one alphabetic Token from The Rug Game.

The transaction fee for game tokens is 4%, of which 1% is sent to the burn wallet, 1% is used to buy back and burn the Cult.DAO Token CULT, 1% is used to buy back and burn the game governance Token TRG that is to be released and to be airdropped, and 1% is saved to the contract in the form of ETH.

The Rug Game will be played in rounds of 30–60 days, with each round eliminating the lowest scoring Token (the Token with the lowest amount of burnouts in Game Token, CULT and TRG) in a last-place elimination system, and the lowest scoring Game Token LP pool will be Rug; the Game Token with the highest Game Score will receive 1% ETH bonus collected from the other nine communities. Since the end of each game round is uncertain, the game Token price may fluctuate dramatically after 30 days of play. There are currently two main ways to increase the score of different Token: increasing the trading volume of that Token and bribes.

Bribe is a feature of The Rug Game, where players can pay a TRG or CULT bribe to the DAO in order to increase the score of their game tokens. The bribe raises the score by 150% of the number of Tokens paid by the player. For example, if Token A has a score of 90 and Token B has a score of 100, and a player pays 20 TRG and chooses Token A, the final score will be 120 for A and 100 for B. 50% of the bribes paid by the player will be allocated to the TRG or CULT staker, while the other 50% will be burned.

Problem

The Rug Game is still in its early stages while there are some problems with it as a gaming game.

(1) Token is not only a Token, but also represents a community behind it. 10 Tokens means 10 communities, choose or too many. So far, The Rug Game has not caused as much FOMO as last year’s Cult. DAO, but has only spread within a small circle, as can be seen from the number of followers and engagement on the official Twitter feed. In addition, the overall crypto market is still in a bear market and the market liquidity is limited, which may result in the scattering of funds among different Tokens and the phenomenon that some Tokens are left untouched and unpurchased. According to the official 24-hour trading volume data provided by The Rug Game, Token T is far ahead of other Tokens, and Token A, which has the lowest trading volume, is only about 3.3% of Token T.

From the perspective of communication, when users are first exposed to these letters they are actually indifferent and either choose them by feel or choose the first one that is recommended or has a high exposure on social media. In the Twitter thread, generally the more forward tweets are viewed, followed by the more backward ones, while those in the middle are collapsed. This gives Token T, which is at the top, the most exposure and naturally becomes the leader of the bunch.

In addition, it is not easy to create a community culture for a one-letter Token, especially in the early days when the community is mostly scattered without influencers, and the bribe play is difficult to implement. subsequent players promote their Token in the community to bring in other players to join the camp, not only to improve their score, but also possibly to dump, and the outcome of the end game may not matter.

(2) This is not only a gaming war, but also a protracted war, and the lack of real-time incentives can easily lead to a lack of competitiveness. The unified goal of players is to “stay clear of relegation” first and “win” later, and they may stop further investment as long as they are not eliminated. Under the condition that only the last ranked Token will be eliminated, players will fall into the loop of not putting in much effort to get the first place, and not wanting to work hard when they fall behind and become the “vice captain”. In a pessimistic atmosphere where the strongest are always strong and the weakest can’t turn around, if the subsequent official launch is a rule that the score is not cleared at the end of the round, this Matthew effect may lead to a vicious circle where the last place pool keeps getting Rug. Even if the score is cleared, the community will not be cleared, the reason why the first is the first, but also because it is stronger than the consensus formed by other communities.

At present, the scoreboard has formed a situation where Token T is the only superpower, so new players will choose to allocate a certain amount of Token T to hedge the game results as much as possible before considering other Tokens. The other game Tokens have lost the suspense of competing for the first place, and if this pattern continues, the only thing that remains may be the question of who will be eliminated. The game can be more competitive if officials follow up with incentives for lagging communities to make reversals seem possible, and “anti-monopoly” resource containment for the leaders.

(3) The bribe play is not existential enough. First, in the absence of community cohesion, retail investors make bribes without substantial impact; while whales are caught in a self-game, judging whether contributing a bribe is enough to win enough reward in return (currently it is to get first), and if they cannot eventually get what they want, their bribe money will become APR divided among stakers. Second, under the no-reward rule within the Token community, the only incentive for the community to pay bribes is to change the community Token’s score ranking, but the Token community with the higher score does not always have the incentive to pay bribes after ensuring that the Token it bets on is “ranked”, especially at the moment where one side is far ahead. Finally, if the TRG or CULT price is not in a reasonable range, it may affect the willingness of players to pay bribes.

There is still a lot of room for adjustment in the rules of The Rug Game. If we can add rewards for the middle ranking (similar to the Champions League/Championship 4 in the English Premier League) and rewards for individual bribe data, or differentiate airdrops according to Token ranking, on the premise of retaining the rewards for the top ranking and penalizing the bottom ranking, we may be able to attract more new players to participate in the game.

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