Thread by @TheCryptoGemini

A 🧵about the current @PlayCrabada meta, the shaky $CRA & $TUS market and looting

I believe there is absolutely no reason to panic if you trust the team (which I do, they have delivered consistently from day 1) 🦀

Strap in for a LONG one: my views on the meta and its history 👇

Looting and bots have been a highly debated topic on the Crabada discord the past few days

Looting has always been more profitable than mining or renting by design. It requires more effort, but since we're all in this to make money, many of us would like to loot

This has generally resulted in there being more looters (or potential looters) than miners at any given time. If at any time there would be open mines, people would start looting to earn a better ROI

A short timeline on looting, bots & how they created 'the meta':

Before miner's revenge, pure bulks reigned supreme

Pure bulk teams were the only teams that were able to mine without being looted, and were themselves also the best looters (there were no pure surges in the game at the time)

This was the start of pure bulk mass breeding

As always, people wanted the best ROI so preferred looting over mining. This of course resulted in there being no available mines at any given time

The only way to successfully loot was to be very fast and snipe new mines

As some will know, the best way to be very fast when using a blockchain application is to interact directly with the smartcontract rather than go through the front-end user interface

This is where 'botting' is born. Some clever people figured out how to snipe mines & loot

The situation at this point didn't feel very fun for most people. It was difficult to loot, pure bulks were immune to looting and other classes all insta-lost mines

The Crabada team agreed and introduced miner's revenge: awesome! Other classes stood a chance now

MR blew life into the tavern, and breeding of all classes picked up a bit

Fairly quickly though, people realised that while winning mines some times was better than never, it hadn't solved all the problems. It was still hard to loot, and bulks were still somewhat immune

Since pure bulks have remained so dominant throughout this whole time, it's no surpise that their population stats dwarf those of all the other pures at this point

From an ROI perspective it simply made sense to mine with bulks, thus the price was high and thus many bred them

Creeping closer towards Battle Game launch, it's clear that the team realised that a more balanced crab population would be more ideal for the game's long term health

While the Miner's Revenge update did something to help there, more was required. Bring in Factions!

Factions evened the playing field by making every class weak to others. As a result no single class was now unlootable. Bulks would be lootable by primes/gems

This gave many the hope that they would now finally be able to participate as a looter since there were so many bulks

This hype for finally being able to loot lead to high prices of gems & primes in anticipation (and in turn high prices for craboids since they are able to loot lux etc)

Everyone starting breeding all the underbred classes, since each of them would be able to loot someone soon

Unfortunately what people seemed to forget is that for every new aspiring looter, there would also have to be a miner that was now losing to him most of the time

The hope was that since there were so many bulks, it would be a while until all their mines were looted at any time

Unfortunately what actually happened is that some bulks stopped mining, and the mines quickly dried up for looting

Some bulk miners sold and prices dropped. While you may expect that at some point they would be bought up and end up mining again, that didn't necessarily happen

There are many other places where pure bulks can be put to use:

Since looters only care about BP, every single looting team now should have 1 pure bulk in it

And every single looter should also reinforce with 2 bulks

Who knows what the main cause was, but there didn't end up being enough bulk mines for everyone to go around

People were very quick to rush in and blame bots for everything, they were hoping for a looting feast and ended up a situation where it was very hard again

Estimating the percentage of loots which are performed by botters at any given time is very difficult to determine. I don't really think it matters

What it comes down to is that everyone would like a chance at the great looting rewards, and we get upset when we don't get that

The @PlayCrabada team have announced that they're working on a fix against bots that will give everyone a more fair shot at looting. Expected to be released within 3 weeks

The team is gigabrain and probably has a much better solution than me, but here's my thoughts:

I imagine that it is probably VERY difficult to stop bots entirely, and that even if you did most would still not be able to loot

Someone with high ping will lose to someone with a better connection

The real problem imo is not bots, it's that more ppl want to loot than to mine

The REAL solution in my eyes to distribute things more fairly would be to put a cap on how many times a team can loot in a day

If a team can only loot say 2-3 times in a day, it will have to mine the rest, and there will be enough mines to go around for everyone

How this ties in to the $CRA and $TUS price? Aside from general market downturn, I believe there was some dumping by upset breeders

Bulk breeders/miners are upset at no longer being OP, and other class breeders have come to realise they aren't the new OP either

Was it justified to be upset? Not really in my opinion.

Battle Game is coming in march, none of this idle game meta will matter at that point anymore, the real game is yet to begin

I also expect that the Crabada team to keep doing a great job at balancing the crab ecosystem

This shaky market has also brought new opportunities with it though!

Several strategies have better ROI's than before:

- Renting bulks has improved
- Mining 2 bulks and a prime is pretty good
- Mining high MP & prime is pretty good
- Mining 'floor' crabs & prime is good

There are also a ton of speculative investments:

- Bet on team making looting fair: gems, craboid, sunken seem like nice bets
- Bet on more people mining: primes
- Bet on battle game: low populations. So surge, ruined, sunken or organics if you can get your hands on them

- If you believe the team will deliver on the promise of making CRAM useful and that mining zones will be cool: stack CRAM!

A sneaky work-around the max cap is to buy and add to the LP. That way you can hold more than (staked cra)/50*4

Reached max thread size lol 🦀#snibsnib

TLDR: No need to be upset, I am comfy 🦀