StateOfDrugwars

Yo dear community,

A few players who shared their thoughts about DrugWars have inspired me to make a simple post and give some information even if I consider working is more important than talking.

As you may have noticed, we moved the share feature to our tokenbb based forum (which is also on Steem) to prevent steemians from having half of their feeds filled only by drugwars posts. Even though I never considered it to be spam (or certainly less than many things that I see regularly), I completely understand the difficulty people face when wanting to discover new content if Steemit.com or other UI does not permit to hide the gaming shares (like facebook did with all their games). I had no time to work on the condenser to offer this possibility so we made this change as the only possible solution. This also provides more activity on our forum and permit our users to discover it.

To be honest, removing the custom_json is probably one of the best things we did since the start and I'm thankful to people who pushed me to do it, because I was myself really skeptical about this change. Only coders and code enthusiasts will understand what I mean, but if we want to develop the game perfectly it was 3 times more complicated to keep the system as it was earlier. For non-coders let me explain it a bit.

With custom_json:

1. You do an action, broadcast the transaction to steem.
2. We read this transaction (it takes minimum 3 sec), the transaction at this moment is unstable and we use validators (like steem itself does) to check if this action was possible.
3. The action is valid, we update the database and put everything in pending. Why? Because this block was unstable, remember? Nothing can guarantee the order of unstable blocks (not to forget the fact to not miss any of them).
4. You receive a notification to see the change in the game, you feel that you did one action in 3 sec. In fact, you have just triggered the pending mode of this action (which represent different code since it is put only in pending). You received a "fake" notification.
5. Some 45-50 sec later this block is confirmed and becomes irreversible on the blockchain. We again read the blockchain, we check again if that action is valid (because you could have made other actions). If it's valid we update the database and finally your valid action is taken into count!
6. You receive a notification to see the change in the game. Remember, fights were taking 45 sec to start because we couldn't be sure of the order until the irreversible block.

That was the perfect way to use Steem for confirming actions and thanks to fabien's help we did it great until now.

Posting for players with custom_json:

I have made the whole system to post with the fundition account just to know if this would be possible and how it would be comfortable, (so nobody would have rc problem even with new account) but the fact is that:

1. The player does an action, broadcasts the transaction to DrugWars (that one is fast).
2. We broadcast the transaction to Steem.
3. The user receives a notification after 6 sec (even if we post it fast).
4. Copy paste here the system that we had before.

You will notice easily that a facebook or google user would need like 1 minute to really make an action. This does not provide the best user experience for the players.

Now (no more custom_json):

1. You do an action, broadcast the transaction to DrugWars.
2. We confirm your identity and check if your action is valid.
3. If the action is valid we update the database and trigger the action.
4. You receive a notification to see the change.
5. All those steps took less than 1 sec against 45-50 sec before and represent like 3 times less code, we don't put anything more in pending ;)

Ok, things are more easier for me to continue to code the game now, but isn't it more pleasant for players to have near 0 latency? Remember, DrugWars uses validators as blockchain does, and it uses the chain for payments. Even if we can't guarantee to be secure as the blockchain itself we are working day per day to approach this possibility.

The auditable data for everyone will certainly come back but in a different way ;)

The question of the Steemapp and if DrugWars is one of them

Our rewards are based on the balance of the durgwars Steem account, we convert 80% of all sells to Steem currency (including fiat payment), we use steem accounts, we offer and sell steem accounts, we accept steem and permit to instantly exchange FUTURE to Steem in the game and soon the price of payments with Steem will be dropped to the equal of FUTURE. Still, all the transactions are confirmed by the Steem blockchain blocks and a lot of stuff is tied to Steem.

We could say that DrugWars is not truly a dApp but a hybrid one and I agree completely to using both technologies to make a better product, but nobody can say that DrugWars isn't a SteemApp. We have many other features for Steem to show its advantages compared to other social platforms, but they are not released yet.
If someone considers it a "normal" game, how much normal games give you the possibility to log in with Steem? I would like to obtain some examples.

Finally, even if I love decentralization I see a lot of players in the world who could discover crypto for the first time with Drugwars simply because the game is accessible and not any more boring with 50 second confirmation time for 1 attack.

I would like to thank players who noticed that we are using Facebook & Google at the same level of this blockchain to promote it. Not many people understand that, but if we want people to adopt the Steem ecosystem, it will never happen by staying closed as we have been for the last couple of years. The crypto adoption will happen with apps and games, and FutureShock with 4 other product based on Steem besides Fundition & Drugwars will always do it's best for Steem by grabbing users directly from other platforms!

How many people are discovering Steem right now with DrugWars compared with only Steem login based apps? We are gathering the data and hopefully I will be able to show you guys that we are definitely going to be all the way up.

To be continued...