Getting ahead of those trying to game a fair distribution for a quick buck and slandering CityStates.
Today we had some unpleasant conversations in the Discord and via DM from users that bought a lot of VIP passes thinking that our sale will be easy to get rigged the same way a lot of others do.
This article is written to get ahead of them because they might try to slander the project because they can’t accept that it was them making a mistake by being too greedy and reading too little.
While I don’t have proof that they were intending to use bots to rig the sale and buy as many packs as they can to then flip/resell to actual players later on, the amount of VIP Passes they bought speaks for itself.
I can absolutely understand the frustration when you are spending money trying to game the system in your favor. What I don’t understand, or rather can’t accept is when people can’t take their fault and live with it as a lesson. Instead they turned on us, started to lie (easily refutable), edited quotes from our announcements as if we don’t know what we wrote and one even called CityStates a scam because he can’t cheat in our sale since we ensure a fair distribution.
Let’s get the bigger picture first:
If you’ve ever participated in a sale on AH you may have experienced instant sell outs with everything getting listed at highly inflated prices shortly after. This is possible with the use of bots and multi-accounts in case a whitelist-system is even in place.
First come first serve is not fair because you may be at work or sleeping or have any other reason not to be there right at the minute the sale starts. To prevent this, we developed an asynchronous distribution model were all packs are distributed fair between all that are trying to buy within a 24 hour window, not just a few or who came first.
Now these users were demanding from us that the Sale has to happen on AtomicHub and only there. The reason? They bought 10 or more Bronze Passes. Why? I guess in other projects that would enable them to buy everything up. In the CityStates sale however you only need one pass and the Bronze Tier has no limit restrictions.
To clarify what we have to deal with here, I post the screenshots but redacted their usernames since I don’t want to go down on the same level. The following conversation took place via DM:
I mean, I had my guess why he bought that many packs but I was still curious what he would answer. Instead of a straight one, I got ‘schooled’ on what he thinks these markets are for:
I was hoping that this would end the conversation on mediocre terms but alas:
When there is one thing that I can’t stand is when people that are trying to cheat their way on the cost of others that are actually interested to play blockchain games call us the bad guys.
If you are reading this and are unfamiliar with how we handle things:
We post almost daily development updates since months!
We involve the community as much as we can and time permits.
We even post financial statements so everyone knows where we stand.
All sales we did on AtomicHub so far have been auctions starting at 1 WAX so anybody can bid what they think is a fair price without pressure.
Shortly after that over 20 Bronze and a bunch of other Passes went on sale on AH and then another user started to complain in the public channel. There was a lot of going back and forth, him ignoring our arguments and questions, repeated lies and edited quotes that were of course easily refutable.
He then threatened to report our collection on AH as being deceptive because he claimed it was not announced that the sale would be on the Dashboard.
Which he was quickly corrected for by violetninja. Even in the very first post we made for the Sale it was already announced that it will be on the Dashboard (several times even):
Looks like a realization that it’s not our fault? Well, after probably searching for any announcement where the Sale was to be on AH he came back with this:
Which is sadly just a quote he butchered to fit his narrative:
You can read the original article here: https://medium.com/citystates/getting-ready-for-the-upcoming-citystates-packsale-68add9e8f96
There was a lot more written and if you want you can still read this in the #general channel on Discord but I seriously have spent way too much time on this already and will end the post with something more positive, the video of FruitGuru play-testing our PvP pre-beta build:
