Hi Julia! thanks for sharing this! I have a few questions on the proposal:

• could you give us a bit of background for the tip behind it?
• will the 300 KSM be used entirely for those playing? if so, which percentage will be used for airdropping and which one, if any, will be sold by you? or are there any other plans to use these?
• what are your plans with Kusama after this first integration has been completed?
• what are the technical specs for an integration like the one you plan to do?

Thanks!

Thanks for your interest! I'm happy to answer your questions.

• We don't have KSM, so trying to get the funds for the initial proposal. Also this way, we can already find out in advance if the kusama community likes our proposal :-)
• 150 KSM will be distributed among the players during the game event following the Kusama integration and 150 KSM will be kept by us to cover our expenses for development and tournament execution. The plan can be found in the linked document.
• We've got a concept for a multi-blockchain statechannel solution and are currently trying to grasp the state Kusama is at, what's already built, what needs to be built and how we could prove to be of value.
• The integration proposed here is very simple. We would enable players to purchase lives with KSM and withdraw profit in KSM. If an ETH player is killing a KSM player, he'll receive the life's value in KSM. We're not a proper dapp (yet) at this stage, as we first wanted to see if we manage to attract users with this concept before spending a lot of time and resources on complicated technical implementation.

Looking into the feasibility of state channel tech on Kusama is worth this proposal alone, I would definitely be in support if you planned on sharing that solution with the community after you've created the integration 👍

Thanks Julia, on the first question there is a typo: i meant "Team", not "tip" :)

here's some points I edited out of my original response, before seeing Julia's,that I still feel are valid: I am not particularly in favor of this game specifically integrating with Kusama, it's targeted at the crypto community and I don't see it attracting real users or people who play games for fun, only people wanting to earn crypto.

(my initial objection was - this isn't a project doing anything novel, isn't bringing value to the Kusama community, only sapping it, and I don't particularly understand why we should subsidize a centralized game without a strong integration with Kusama other than as a payment integration.)

Julia, you are not planning to use NFTs for the game?

This is really a lot of feedback in a short time. Thanks to all of you for looking at our proposal!

could you give us a bit of background for the team behind it?

Sure. We're 4 people at the moment. Stefan Hoeller and I (Julia Altenried) are the founders. We've built blockchain applications since early 2016, such as truly decentralized games, a casino statechannel and bankroll staking solution (Edgeless) or community insurance (Ooniq) to just name a few. Ha Nguyen is helping with development and Robert Brooks is doing the design.

I am not particularly in favor of this game specifically integrating with Kusama, it's targeted at the crypto community and I don't see it attracting real users or people who play games for fun, only people wanting to earn crypto.

I understand your concern, but only agree partly. Our most loyal players are in it for the fun and competition. They were playing the game before we added the possibility to earn free lives in the game, so we didn't have the "bounty hunters", yet. Still, having the bounty hunters on the game helps the "honest" players (those who are actually interested in playing rather than just earning crypto), because for them, the game is more fun the more people are playing. Of course, those players are also happy if at the end of the day, their wallet is heavier than before, rather than lighter ;-) And some of the bounty hunters became loyal players as well.

Also, I don't think that playing a game for fun and playing a game to earn crypto exclude each other. People are used to pay for entertainment, but having the chance to not just be entertained, but earning something at the same time, should have the potential to attract real users as well. Actually, I'm quite convinced that the play2earn idea will gain momentum in the near future.

Julia, you are not planning to use NFTs for the game?

Yes, we do. We'd like to integrate individual character skins and are thinking about adding artifacts which can be equipped for temporary boost of bomb strength/speed/bomb capacity/etc However, since we're a self-funded project till now, we need to take one step at a time.

Not in council, but my feeling is that this is net-good for Kusama if it results in at least some open source work that other projects could use. Julia, would you consider open sourcing some interesting part(s) of your KSM integration after implementation? We on the Kusama side would then love to promote it as well, resulting in some more advertising for both your game and tools to use with Kusama.

Sure, I do not see a problem here :-)

Yes, we do. We'd like to integrate individual character skins and are thinking about adding artifacts which can be equipped for temporary boost of bomb strength/speed/bomb capacity/etc However, since we're a self-funded project till now, we need to take one step at a time.

Let me know when you do decide to do it, we've got the tools for it and its easy to do on KSM/Polkadot

Great, thanks, will let you know, then!

I spent about an hour on Sunday evening playing this game, and also went into it two times today (to make sure of my conclusions from Sunday). So, my opinion on this.

All this proposal is a lie, a deceit, a fake and a bullshit.

running with 80-200 players per day

It's a lie! Only one player plays the game on an ongoing basis, Dirty Lumberjack, although it is constantly shown that 8 (along with me) players are online. One more lie/fake inside the game This player either a bot (most likely not), or a salary player, or one of the developers. For all the time spent in the game, I saw only one more lost soul, which lasted about 3 minutes in a game.

The game is not addictive, you do not want to go into it and play again, there are no pluses from various currencies in it, it's just an account from which you can buy life. At the same time, the game is perfectly played without buying life, when you plaing as a ghost. Thus, the only thing why money is needed there is to get them out of the game.

The game contains bugs. For example, if during the game you go out to read the rules, then you can return to the game only by log out and login again. Another bug: you can see old corpses if the page is in the background for some time.

If a tournament is held, then live people will play it. As you can see on the YouTube channel, it’s missing, even at such moments in the online game there are 17 people (do not forget about 7 wound users from the creators). But no one is playing this game just like that. Immediately after receiving the prize, this money will simply be withdrawn and exchanged most likely for dollars. Thus, the only benefit to the network is that someone finds out on which exchange KSM is being traded, and learns to place orders on a centralized exchange. I'm afraid in a couple of months none of the players will remember what currency his prize was in.

At the last tournament, which was sponsored by the gaming blockchain Ebakus and took place over the course of 3 weeks, we had over 1200 participants and distributed EBK prizes among more than 50 players.

Think that is lie too. We have videos of the tournament games on their youtube:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXlvx4b83_A

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko3N0M924L0

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EixJUCza5Og

You can see 15, 17 and 19 online players on these beautiful videos on YouTube in the best recorded games, and at the same time there are 9, 8 and 11 players on the field, respectively.

I can hardly believe that 1,200 people came into the game during these 3 weeks, hoping to get free money for participating, but I’m sure that 1,200 real people did not register and played on the tournament.

These prizes were further distributed on the battlefield and now, 4 weeks later, we still have a good percentage of people playing with EBK. Lie! No one playing the game with EBK or without.

Thus, it is simply an attempt to deceive the council and steal money from the treasury.. If I’m not mistaken, I saw suggestion to the tip for the creation of proposal (now i understand why they didn't want to pay from their own pockets), but I still don’t see it. I suggest you to do that proposal asap, or burn this KSM and send here txid of that, so that we are sure that you simply do not run away with this small amount of KSM.

If there is such an opportunity (as far as i know we haven't unfortunatelly), I would like to fine the the creators of such a proposal for deliberately misleading and wasting people’s time to consider a fake proposal.

One big lesson for me from this case is never to approve a tip for submitting a proposal, so that the submitter always has something to lose.

Shame on you from me, Julia Altenried and Stefan Hoeller.

Dear CP287,

I’m sad to read such a mean post.

I'm sorry, you were visiting the game at a time where almost no players were online. The player numbers are from the month of May and it’s true that our user numbers have been dropping recently with no events going on, but we still do have 25 new signups on a regular day and a similar number of old players. Divide 80 by 24 and you get a more realistic feeling of how many users there are at the same time. With news of a new event coming up, the numbers would rise again quickly. You can join the telegram group to get notifications when players log into the game. I hope, you get the chance to play with more people on the battlefield, then you might realize that it’s actually fun to play.

DirtyLumberjack is a bot, by the way. This is not a secret, we were transparent on this from the beginning (check the discord). I’m pleased, however, that you couldn’t tell after fighting him for one hour.

Our ghost mode is for those players who want to try the game without risk. However, as a ghost you cannot make profit and coming alive takes time, especially if there are many ghosts on the field fighting over the soul shards. This addition did not only lead to many more players, but also to more deposits.

Regarding your criticism of our last tournament: What you see on youtube are our final knockout rounds, with 2x 9 and 1x 12 players participating (although I think on the last day one of the qualifying players was missing). This is, because only the top players from the preceding week qualify for the final round. In the three weeks of the tournament, > 1200 players were playing the game and there were also prizes distributed during qualification, so the prize was not only distributed among the finalists (which you would know if you would have read the proposal). Regarding the ongoing usage of EBK: Since you obviously didn’t have the chance to play with many others (you said yourself only 1 new player, probably playing with DAI), you couldn’t have the chance to judge on how many players continue using the token.

I certainly do not feel ashamed for actually continue building blockchain applications after so many projects in the scene ceased their efforts. We built a good number of truly decentralized applications, including games, but since blockchain still isn’t accepted by the majority of people in the world, it’s hard to make money from it. Show me a single blockchain game where the developers actually managed to create profit. I can only see money being spent on development, but very few users and I investigated most of them. There are not enough blockchain gamers (yet) to run a profitable game, but we are convinced that the play2earn concept has the potential to attract new users for the blockchain scene in general.

We focused on a simple casual game with low entrance barrier, so anybody can start playing right away without the need to understand crypto, install wallets or working through a number of tutorials to understand how the game works. People new to crypto can start playing immediately and without risk and if they manage to make some profit, then they might be motivated to install wallets and look into how to actually use these weird coins.

We are idealists at heart as well and always preferred 100% decentralized applications, but turned more pragmatic over the time. Now, we find that it’s more important to first test a new concept (see if it’s interesting for users) even if the technical implementation is suboptimal, before investing more time and resources. After all, we do not have the luxury of external funding. Still, we work every day to drive crypto adoption forward. You might consider this before pointing with the finger on somebody and calling „shame on you!“.

Oh, and you don’t have to worry about us running away with the tip …

Nonetheless, I appreciate that you spent your precious time with trying out our game and your honest feedback. If you’d like to get insight in our statictsics/logs or know more about our general visions for the game, feel free to DM us on the riot.

DirtyLumberjack is a bot, by the way. This is not a secret, we were transparent on this from the beginning (check the discord).

I don't think this is a good way to be transparent. A good way to be transparent is to write about it in a help/tutorial in capital letters.

but we still do have 25 new signups on a regular day and a similar number of old players.

I still think these are numbers in your best days, but it seems you finally started telling the truth, and admitted that the original phrase was an absolute lie and manipulation ("running with 80-200 players per day").

so the prize was not only distributed among the finalists (which you would know if you would have read the proposal).

I read your proposal several times (as you can see from my quotes of your offer), and I never said that the prizes were distributed only among the finalists. I just showed the level of interest and hype around the game among spectators and participants that even the most nervous and exciting games, where good money is played for such a game, collect a maximum of 19 people online to watch inside the game.

In the three weeks of the tournament, > 1200 players were playing the game

As I wrote, I can believe it. It seems like there really is starting to be more truth in your posts. But in your sentence you write a little differently: "At the last tournament,... we had over 1200 participants". I think that is a lie and manipulation. If the participants played and did not even know that they were participants in the tournament, then I would not represent this as the number of participants in the tournament.

We focused on a simple casual game with low entrance barrier, so anybody can start playing right away without the need to understand crypto, install wallets or working through a number of tutorials to understand how the game works.

The problem is that the game does not allow to understand crypto, and you don’t even need to install a crypto-wallet (although this is the smallest that can be achieved from the user of the game).

You might consider this before pointing with the finger on somebody and calling „shame on you!“.

When someone comes, deceives, manipulates, and with the help of this, tries to take money from our network/treasury, hoping that people do not have enough time to check your proposal for the truth, I personally condemn such an action.

In my opinion, in your message you indirectly agreed with everything that I wrote. I remind you that I wrote only my personal feeling and experience about your game and proposal, and each member of the network/council makes a choice himself.

I still think these are numbers in your best days, but it seems you finally started telling the truth, and admitted that the original phrase was an absolute lie and manipulation ("running with 80-200 players per day").

Using numbers from April and May as a reference for a proposal made on the 3. of June, does not qualify as dishonest for me.

I just showed the level of interest and hype around the game among spectators and participants that even the most nervous and exciting games, where good money is played for such a game, collect a maximum of 19 people online to watch inside the game. ... If the participants played and did not even know that they were participants in the tournament, then I would not represent this as the number of participants in the tournament.

The start page of cryptoman held a huge tournament banner which was not to miss and we marketed it accordingly. The tournament was held over the course of 3 weeks with engoing events. I guess people who did not manage to qualify were not very interested about watching the finals, although some might have followed the livestream (I do not know the numbers, would need to ask the streamer).

When someone comes, deceives, manipulates, and with the help of this, tries to take money from our network/treasury, hoping that people do not have enough time to check your proposal for the truth, I personally condemn such an action.

These sound like very condemnable actions, however I do not feel guilty of any of these. In contrary, we're working hard to build a product with the potential to benefit all of us.

In my opinion, in your message you indirectly agreed with everything that I wrote.

In my opinion, you're reading what you want out of my words, anyway.

I remind you that I wrote only my personal feeling and experience about your game and proposal, and each member of the network/council makes a choice himself.

I know. It was a member of the web3 foundation, who contacted us because he liked the game and saw its potential (had more luck than you and started playing with a number of players online). I'll just hope, there'll be more of his kind than of yours ;-)

Btw: We did not think of a simple KSM integration first, but rather about a proposal for implementing a statechannel solution on Kusama or Substrate, but it seemed a good and easy way to get a feeling for the community and how things work here - and to find out if the community is generally interested in having us contributing to the network.

I think for the scope of this proposal, I recommend councillors just... ignore the game? Look at the idea and existing work completed - contracts on multiple chains, a willingness to jump into an unfamiliar community and technical environment, and an extremely responsive and easy-to-reach team, evidently from this thread.

To the Cryptoman team: I know it's difficult not to be proud of something you create but as I've mentioned here and elsewhere, I really doubt you will get very far if you're presenting the game integration as anywhere near the goal of your proposal - mentally I'm filtering out the game entirely, and I see this as "a micro-grant to a small team to fund exploratory work into the Kusama (and Polkadot) ecosystem," - I hope you don't take offence at this, positioning it that way makes it a fairly clear decision in my mind:

• I see you've built things in the past.
• We need more teams considering building in our ecosystem.
• This is not a large ask.
• You have some model for sustainability and usecases on your own (albeit, I think this will probably need to evolve).
• You've shown initiative and have a long-term plan for where this can go in the future.

To cp287: I don't believe we're anywhere near the stage where being protectionist over tips and very small proposals from treasury will do any good for our community. I really would be disappointed if people coming to our forums to judge if they want to engage with the community were discouraged by having to deal with hostile politics and being accused of being liars. There is no reason for scammers to come to council, engage in discussions, take feedback, and respond over the course of two weeks - there are much easier scams that earn much more than this.

I hope that in the future with Bounties and curators, less teams need to get consensus directly from council and we can fund more projects like this. What is the point of Kusama if not to do exactly this?

If something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then for me it's a duck.

I have a normal attitude towards people's delusions, but I am absolutely intolerant of conscious manipulation (I believe that this is a lie) to achieve their goals.

I am sure that creating this proposal Julia knew very well that they do not have 200 players a day at the moment of submission proposal (and she can easily edit decription of proposal, when she saw declining statistics. But she did not do it, since it is not give to her any benefits. She is not profitable to be trasparent and keep people informed of what is happening now in their closed infrastructure).

I’m sure that the numbers of the previous tournament are not correct, considering the players who actually took part in the tournament to win (one more manipulation/abuse/lie).

This proposal does not want to engage in the community, they just want to get money for marketing their game (and this is normal), but without bringing any benefit to the second side, Kusama network. I call it abuse. Yes, maybe I'm rude enough, but that’s how I think it’s necessary to relate to people/organizations who are trying only to use you, and not offer mutually beneficial cooperation. If you don’t treat them like that, then it will still be +EV actions for them, since they should successfully cheat at least once in 20. That, given the inertia and lack of time of people, is very easy to achieve. And in this case, abusers will win in this world, taking the benefit from those who really deserve it.

And yes, trying to cheat/abuse/lie and scammers will come to the council and submit proposals ALWAYS(!) since:

1. this is the only way to get money from the treasury;

2. they may already have a place on the council, or people on the council who are ready to vote "aye", regardless of the benefits of the networks.

I already had experience working in the financial committee of one of the networks, where during our audit it was discovered that it was through the semblance of council that people received> $10M for clean scam and dust in the eyes (this happens every day in our life, just look at most governments). I will do my best to oppose these kinds of abuses and try to protect Kusama network from such things as hard as I can.

I am always happy to see offers that will be mutually beneficial, as I did before.

I believe that in order not to be in a similar situation, the people who submit the proposal should not try to manipulate statistics, but try to be transparent and not only show numbers wrapped up or fabricated by certain circumstances or not relevant, forgetting about others.

This is the second time we have encountered this, and we will meet again and again such situations, since such a method works quite well in the "real world". Due to my free time, I will try to find such cases and talk about what kind of manipulation I discovered and vote against.

Ex-casual and free-to-play gamer here on platforms such as Kongregate, Armor games and yes, even FB. (Tales of a misspent youth...)

In general love the idea of building games on blockchain, so my initial leaning will always be to the "aye" side. Having said that it is a tough market to break into - we all know our decentralized tech is still evolving and giving the fickle nature of casual gamers (and getting them to spend money), it is always going to be an uphill battle. Like others I also signed up over the last short while and actually got involved with the game, I guess the real-live engagement numbers that I am seeing here (much less that the posted numbers) also just proves how difficult this is to make it sustainable.

I don't believe the initial ask is high, however always need to judge it completely on merit and the value it will bring to the overall participants in the Kusama network. In this specific case, as it stands atm I don't believe it will increase participation - as a pure promotion there are better ways to spend this amount. Love the idea of multi-crypto, however don't see this as more than an in-and-out at this moment with everything to be sold on exchanges. (It is like an airdrop in Ethereum, nobody really cares much.)

In general, I am a bit disappointed that the team itself had to get funding to get to the proposal stage itself - it is not a large ask for the deposits but indicates that the involvement from the team in the network itself is not quite there. It is understandable, the ecosystem is very large and you can't be everywhere. It is tough saying "nay", especially here as well where the team actually has something already that they intent on growing. However I just don't see the value-add here, it is a bit of a one-way street with no to limited benefit for Kusama and more benefit for the team in actually receiving additional crypto.

With all that, I appreciate the interactions here, but just don't see the fit for right at this point in time. I sincerely wish the team the best of luck, they are certainly fighting an uphill battle bringing F2P and crypto together.