Etherbots: Pokemon on the blockchain?

I just recently heard of Etherbots from Hacker Noon. They say it’s a ‘decentralised robot wars’, sure, but for me, it’s Pokemon all over again. I’ve been a fan of Pokemon since Red/Blue (although I had stopped at Emerald). I didn’t own any consoles after that so I was stuck in time. Still, the main gameplay has stayed in each game — catch them, make them strong and battle with them.

This is essentially what Etherbots is although much simpler. In Pokemon, you had a story (somewhat) that takes you around the world you’re in, battling all the gym leaders and your childhood rival. All this time, you also get to meet a faction (or factions!) that have some plan of their own to take over the world. You then use your Pokemon to defeat everyone’s monsters and eventually become the greatest. Wow! Well, Etherbots does not have any of those stories, but they do have the aspect of collecting robots. You can collect them, interchange their parts and then battle with them — to win even more parts!

Wait, but what about decentralised?

Ah yes. The magic word. Coming off the success of Cryptokitties and Cryptocelebrities, Etherbots improves the aspect of collecting pixels on the blockchain to actually having some sort of use and PLAYING with them. Cryptokitties and Cryptocelebrities set a precedent and those two have actually proved that ownership of data is here to stay. Etherbots even wrote an article about it!

What I also like about it is the developers’ straight up honesty. In this cryptomarket where almost everybody and their mother shills coins, I value honest developers / teams a LOT more. I recently popped into their discord to see what was going on and to ask a question. The presale (which is now over) was selling 3900 robot crates at increasing ETH prices. By the time I was ready to jump in, the price of a crate was at 0.4~ETH, which when you actually convert is about $350~ at the time of writing.

$350.
I’ll let that sink in for a bit. Okay. A normal AAA game usually costs $50-$60 if I remember correctly. I personally think it is too much, especially since the game hasn’t launched yet. Still, we know there will be buyers but not me. Anyway, I digress.

I popped in the chat and asked if the chance of rare parts increases as the prices goes up. Basically, if i DO buy a crate at 0.4ETH, does it have the same chances for gold / shadow parts as the ones who bought the first 10 crates?

A team member answered (sorry I forgot who!) that yes, it does have the same chance. This may seem nothing to you, but for me it was a spot of honesty which makes me lean towards playing it when it launches. They could have easily said the later crates had more chances — no one would actually know because of the randomness, but they still said it was the same and saved me from buying. Sure they lost me as a buyer already for that crate, but in within an hour, all the crates were gone anyway.

This is a project I will be keeping tabs on — it captures two of my interests at once: Pokemon and the blockchain. Etherbots launches on Friday, 16 February 2018 11:00:00 (probably PST).

P.S. This has also been posted (by me!) in Medium