Ban Policy Implementation

Draft Proposals
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I will start with my gratitude and appreciate for the team. I continue to be impressed by what the team has shipped, the complexity of the economy and the persistence to continue making moves while many other teams gave up during these market conditions.

That said, it’s really sad for me as an active player and supporter of this project for the last 18 months to see what is being discussed here with this proposal. Again, I want to make clear, I am all for security measures to prevent people from exploiting the game and the economy. That’s critically important, and at the same time, the approach that is being discussed here is terrifying.

This is going to be a long post so I’ll summarize the main points here first:

  • Moving away from decentralizing: the teams actions have continued to move away from decentralization and not towards it against their stated intentions
  • Lack of understanding from the team: Is there a single person on the team who is playing a 16 land account and planting 3x a day? Has anyone on the team ranked high on the leaderboards?
  • Why now: Is now really the time to upset some of your biggest and long time supporters? Is this really the biggest priority for the team at the moment?
  • What’s a bigger threat to the economy: extractors or automation?
  • Again: where’s the clarity?!

Moving away from decentralization:

First we heard that whales were the problem because they were selling their staking rewards, so the team reduced the RBW rewards. Whether this achieved it’s intended impact or not, I am not certain as I haven’t done the math, but what I do know is that this reduced the RBW going towards players and away from the team. This means that the rate of progression decentralization has slowed.

We have also seen multiple times now that the team will use their RBW voting bag when they see fit and basically push through anything they want. If the team can override any vote they want AND they control the rate of RBW that goes away from the team and towards players, the decentralization argument feels bogus.

Now we have the team proposing to ban assets based on unclear rules. Banning assets via a centralized entity is not decentralization any way you try to spin it.

If you go back to the whitepaper, it clearly says that LG “is committed to decentralizing Crypto Unicorns via the RBW governance token.” These actions appear to the contrary.

Why now:

This one is truly baffling. Why is there a sudden rush to ban assets? Is there math or calculations somewhere that the team is not sharing that shows that this is negatively impacting the community?

Right now, the balance of the game economy is fragile. It’s being held together by QE which is not a long-term solution, but a great temporary solution. So instead of working on solving some of the real issues facing the game, economy and player growth, the team has decided to go all in that bots are the problem, just like we heard with whale stakers. At least with the staking changes, they presented some math.

What is clear is that many long time players are not happy with this proposal and some have stated that they will be dumping all of their assets rather than stick around to see how this plays out. And I believe them. I’m not sure what I’m going to do myself.

So I ask: can the game really withstand a fire sale from some of the biggest wallets and long term players? I highly doubt it given how fragile everything is right now and how difficult it is to attract new players as is.

Lack of understanding from the team:

Is anyone on the team playing the game every day? Has anyone on the team ranked in the top 100 on any leaderboard ever? You don’t have to publicly answer this but it seems clear what the answer is.

From the language I see regarding these proposals and discussions from the team, I’m not sure they fully get it. It doesn’t appear they are playing their own game. And they are definitely not playing it from a competitive, high level perspective. Many people have been planting 3x a day on 100s of farms. It’s mindless. It’s not fun. And it wastes SO MUCH TIME.

If we have a ban on automation tools before we have a legit scholar solution, I firmly believe that the team is disconnected from what’s actually happening in the game and they are more interesting in literally wasting our time than taking our perspective into consideration.

What’s a bigger threat to the economy: extractors or bots?

We have people who are raising investments to set up accounts to generate ROI for their investors. We have other people spinning up many accounts to maximize leaderboard and jousting rewards. Is that better or worse for the game than someone who is using some level of automation to save time? And FWIW, some of these investors and extractors are good people who realize that there is a nice return to be had here. That’s a compliment to the team and community, but it is optimizing for maximum profit and extraction very similar to the argument I hear against automation.

I also know players who have used some form of automation who are some of the biggest supporters and contributors to this project. They have repeated purchased assets since day one, buy tokens regularly and rank on leaderboards consistently. Are they any better or worse than people who are raising funds and buying assets below the floor purely for extraction? I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s black and white.

Where’s the clarity?!

I hate that I have to beat this drum again and again. I have continually called for clear communications from the team since the game launched. It’s been an issue that the team has acknowledged many times and says they are committed to improving. And yet here we are again.

Right now, as this proposal stands, it’s incredibly vague. An autoclicker for collecting poop is fine, according to what is written. What does that actually mean for the rest of the game. Is an autoclicker for collecting gathering carts fine? In theory, there’s no difference as it’s pure collection. What about farms? And now what about planting? There’s no strategy to planting seeds? What about selling to the RMP? Is there skill or strategy involved in selling berries automatically?

I can go on and on here, but I think the point is clear. We are talking about the most severe punishment possible in all of web3 gaming (which is completely anti-decentralization), and the team seems fine with being completely vague. Timetraveler, Alriad, Vyona, Kora, Krumpy, Daalex, Keizer, Bigmc, Vonneumann, Genji and others have been asking for clarity since the first draft was published without clear answers coming from the team. Where is the clarity?

With all of that said, here’s what I suggest…

If you really think this is such a big deal you either:

a) provide the math to support your claims that bots are ruining the economy

b) abstain from voting with team RBW bag and let the community decide

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The goal is to present the DAO with a possible solution to safeguard the economy in the long run. As the product was specifically produced with the goal of making it a game players enjoy, the participation of bots in the ecosystem was not initially accounted for. This is contrary to product direction.

a) provide the math to support your claims that bots are ruining the economy

As for this, I have no qualms asking the person who made this claim to provide the data. As this claim is not made by me, can you tag the person who said this? Apologies if any of my messages have caused this misunderstanding. Let me clarify our position:

Bots, in general, are extractive as they do not participate in the community. The proposal seeks to safeguard from this possibility. We can always be preventive and this is more of a preventive approach. We hoped that DAO would chose to be preventive.

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I would also provide an update:

I’m still in the process of ensuring we find a solution to the possible loopholes presented previously. Thank you for the additional feedback. There will be another revision again some time soon.

In the meantime, please continue to provide feedback on how we can polish the proposal to ensure we safeguard our economy in the long-term. Thank you!

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the participation of bots in the ecosystem was not initially accounted for

Did you really just say this?

You claim to be presenting the DAO with a solution to safeguard the economy. Contrary to how noble this sounds on paper, LG is proposing to enact this solution by threatening user asset ownership with bans and blacklists. This goes against the very fabric of web3.

In your responses so far, you haven’t once indicated that you understand this. Instead, you’ve picked an arbitrary minor point from jbp3’s post and tried to distract from the major ones - a classic political response that really means ‘I have no idea’. Address the concerns around decentalisation properly and clearly in your updated revision, because if you don’t you’ll just drive this community further apart.

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I’m sorry I skipped on explaining the decentralization part as it was discussed in the medium article we posted when we first launched the DAO. We are building under the tenets of decentralization. CU’s path to decentralization is determined by the token distribution. The token distribution is dictated by the tokenomics and the respective unlock schedule.

As it is, we are in the early stages of decentralization. Full decentralization will happen in the years to come once all the tokens unlocked and have been disbursed to all participants of the ecosystem. This means that at the early stage, LG and the investors will have majority of the share of the share as members of the DAO. This narrative was openly repeated when we first launched the DAO.

As for going against the spirit of web3, this is something the DAO will need to decide upon themselves. Many other web3 games enacted bans and didn’t consult their community about it. In CU, we are deciding this as a DAO. Regardless of my personal opinion, this is something that DAO will need to decide upon.

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I don’t want to dwell on whether bots are good or bad. Instead, I want to focus on how I can make this proposal better such that we’re still able to keep bots out, safeguard our community and keep ourselves from any possible exploitation. This is while keeping in mind that we do not take away from the experience from normal players. I’d like it if people can provide feedback on how we can revise the proposal such that we make it agreeable to players while still meeting the same goal.

I’ve accepted that some people are against the banning of bots to begin with so there’s no reconciliation to be made there as it contradicts the motivation of this proposal. There are two different camps with contradicting opinions. So, assuming the goals are unchanged, I’d like to know what parts need revision. Happy to hear suggestions.

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Since you asked for suggestions, here are my recommendations in order:

  1. Redesign the grinding game elements that are not fun

It feels like the team has decided that proof of clicking was the way to ensure a fair and balanced economy. Perhaps this made sense in the very beginning with the discussion of native delegation weeks after launch, but we are now over a year into this time drain. The collective time lost by the community on needless activity is bonkers.

My 16 land main account has 103 farms. If I want to farm them 3x a day as designed and each one takes me 5 seconds to collect and plant (sometimes with babies), that’s 25 minutes / day just to plant my farms for one account. There is no fun, no strategy, no enjoyment. Only pain.

That’s just the farming loop. Now add in gathering, crafting, breeding, questing, jousting, selling, etc. It truly appears that LG has designed a game to waste the community’s time instead of allowing us to enjoy the strategic elements.

If this was fixed first and foremost, players wouldn’t need automation just to preserve their own sanity.

  1. Work with 3rd party automation providers

As I’m sure redesigning the mind-numbing elements of the game will take time, effort and resources and likely isn’t a priority, I’d highly recommend working with 3rd party automation providers. I can imagine this feels completely against everything you are proposing here, but allow me a brief moment and then I’ll move on to other recommendations.

Every game where an incentive for automation exists fights a never ending game of cat and mouse. Right now, I could probably spin up an auto-gpt bot to play the game for me exactly as a human would without anyone ever being able to detect it. This will certainly be the case in the next 6 months or so as AI advancements are outpacing even the most aggressive expectations and whatever countermeasures you implement will be in vain.

I’d suggest taking the app store approach and partner with these automation solutions. You can dictate the terms of what is acceptable, you can open them to all players to make a fair and level playing field and you can collect a tax on them that benefits the community. Make it a win-win for the community, the automation providers and the team.

Think of it like the war on drugs. It was incredibly ineffective and a waste of resources and eventually the government realized it was better to legalize it so they could tax it and control it rather than to allow it to exist in the shadows.

  1. Delay this proposal until we have native delegation

Accepting that both 1 & 2 might not be your top choice, I would shelf this proposal until there is a viable alternative. Putting aside the bots vs. scholars debate, if you are going to take a hard stance on bots, don’t force players to use a scholar system that puts their assets at risk.

LG designed a game that requires significant time investment to play and then continues to incentivize players to increase their land, unicorn and wallet count. I’m certain that a majority of the “growth” we’ve seen recently has come from existing players increasing their wallets. Give them a viable and safe native delegation option and then revisit this proposal.

As you have said, this proposal is preventative and as a safeguard for the long run. If there is no significant threat to the economy at the moment (which unless someone can show otherwise I have been led to believe is the case), let’s revisit this proposal at a more appropriate time.

  1. If you are going to force this upon us now, here’s my suggestions
  • Become hyper specific about what is allowed in terms of automation and what is not. Saying that “simple clickers that automate a simple task (ex. poop collection)” is allowed is not sufficient. Lay out every single scenario. Or, conversely ban it all. Absolutely remove any vagueness.
  • Remove the section around unreported security bugs. That’s your job. You have a paid QA team (I hope) who’s responsible for this. You also have a bug bounty system. It shouldn’t be left up to the players to decide if something is alpha or an advantage or if it’s a bug that they are exploiting at risk of being banned.
  • On the topic of being banned, don’t. Just don’t. Yes, by all means you can block players from participating in your games if you deem them to be violating your terms, but don’t prevent them from being able to sell their assets. It’s the most anti-web3 position you could possibly take, and I’d highly recommend you don’t go down that route. Do everything in your power to penalize them and stop them from exploiting or gaining further, but don’t go down the road of threatening ownership.
  • In terms of decentralization, please get off your high horse. Respectfully. In the same 3 paragraph post above you say, and I quote, “We are in the early stages of decentralization… at the early stage, LG and the investors will have a majority of the share as members of the DAO… Many other web3 games enacted bans and didn’t consult their community about it. In CU, we are deciding this as a DAO.” You are trying to position yourself as better than these other companies because you are consulting your community, but ultimately deciding as a DAO that you control what the outcome will be. If you are going to take this approach, that’s entire your choice but stop pretending that you are better than other companies.
  • Present a complete proposal which includes clarity around the loopholes provided by vyona and others along with what exactly that means for the affected assets.

I’ll end this on a bit of a lighter note. You all are doing great work. Bumpercorns seems to have a great initial reaction from the community. I can’t wait for Tribes, shadowcorns and all the other fun stuff we don’t know about. You have weathered this market better than almost any web3 game. Please focus on what matters most right now.

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Hello, @jbp3! Thank you for the suggestions. These are very specific and actionable. I appreciate you taking the time to write them!

On a relevant note to your suggestion of delaying this until delegation is out, I actually do agree that that might be a good idea. It’ll buy time to fully integrate revisions and prepare all the systems to be put in place prior.

Also, it seems like TheGenji is writing a counter-proposal to this. Depending on how that goes, I feel like this proposal might be retracted and revisited at another time. TheGenji’s proposal might provide a temporary middle ground - a ban policy we can implement while we wait for delegation and after we’ve analyze the effects of TheGenji’s proposal should it pass.

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from what im seeing here… we really need to build the “government” where which laws and actions are acceptable and not and that it has to start somewhere. this proposal is very drastic and vague, i really believe that we as a community should have a system to fight people who are taking advantage on the system. but to have something subjective is not really going to pass to anyone.

this ban proposal is a lot of work . we have to specifically add laws and remove them which ever is . very precise, and i think this is a matter that requires more focus. we can’t just half ass it.

If i have the time to really sit on this matter we can solve this with a proper discussions. I will create an idea soon. but this proposal sadly will be a No for me for now…

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@lgManicUnicorn Here’s a good suggestion from @Venticello

“Regarding the NFT, we can not block, but freeze, let’s say for 2 weeks, hardly anyone wants to continue to do bad things if his assets stop working for a long time. A person can dispose of assets, but until NFT’s are unfrozen, NFT’s will not be able to be used in the metaverse.”

I am in favor of fighting automation (in any form)
I’m for Lightman’s suggestion to change farming time (upwards of 1-2 times a day)
I - am against taking the issue of unlocking to the DAO
I am ready to consider the availability of automation for ALL players (I have an example of Ultima Online and UO Assist (this program was blocked because it provided a wide range of features, subsequently the ban was lifted and allowed a limited range of actions in it)))
I.e. create yourself or/and engaged third parties allowed to automate (with limited functionality (this issue is discussed)), and all other automation, which will be detected outside of this program - to be blocked
@jbp3 I understand correctly that you are not willing to take responsibility for your actions and/or the actions of third parties (hired workers)?
You write that you spent money buying assets, i.e. it turns out that if I have money, no laws are written to me, right?

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Thank you, @WINTER_AND_SUMMER! These are appreciated. These will help when I write the revision.

I was initially hoping to find a middle ground with TheGenji, but, there seems to be a conflict in terms of the motivation. Again, I’d like to reiterate that this proposal is for the banning of the bots and safeguarding our ecosystem. I continue to look for specific feedback on how we can polish the proposal.

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lol. what bro? please point me to whatever it is you think I said in my post that helped you determine that I’m not willing to take responsibility for my actions or the actions of third parties.

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In light of the Town Hall on 2023 June 15, I recommend that the language against bots in this proposal specifically target “spoofing the client” meaning “[anyone avoiding loading the game interface and] using API calls directly” as Aaron made clear that he was not against automation, citing [a Selenium browser that loads the interface and does automated actions via the interface] as an example of what is allowed.

I also recommend that if the community wants to add automation in any form not implicitly provided within the game client as a ban-able offense that it be a separate proposal and DAO vote.

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I agree, initially the wording was not correct, this is no longer botting, but cheating or hacking.

And there is a big difference between a person who recorded their actions in a clicker and a person who essentially bought an ASIC that mines game tokens without interaction.

In such a situation, an ordinary player cannot get a random ban, unlike a person using hacker software.

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Yes. So, we’ve been actually discussing the revisions to make here. This is also the reason why this wasn’t queued for council review this 15th. It wasn’t ready for review. Please look forward to the revision!

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Hello, @everyone!

I appreciate your continued participation in our discussions about the bot policy implementation proposal. I’ve made several changes in response to the feedback and concerns expressed.

Different views of what constitutes “abusive,” “exploitative,” or “allowable” bot usage have emerged from our discussions. As a result, for clarity and simplicity, I have amended the proposal to encompass all forms of “automation”.

A new section has also been introduced to recognize extreme situations that require immediate action as discussed during the Town Hall. This section lists specific conditions that would demand an immediate ban, bypassing the warning period, to protect our DAO from significant losses.

Furthermore, I fixed a potential loophole noted by certain community members: people who have been warned may avoid bans by transferring their assets to another wallet. To address this, the amended proposal calls for thorough investigations of both in-game and blockchain transactions. As a result, both the source and recipient wallets will be checked, decreasing the possibility of ban evasion.

I invite you to review the revisions and provide comments. Your continual support is critical to making this work for our community.

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@lgManicUnicorn some clarification regarding client spoofing is needed.

The current revision says that it’s a ban without warning but it sounds like one of the ways people bot is by using client spoofing without actually “abusing the game’s resources, such as computational power or storage, to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, or engage in other malicious activities.”

So if its just automation via client spoofing which category does it fall into? Is that a ban without warning regardless?

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Hello! Thanks for reading. In this case, it’ll be a ban with warning as indicated in “Cheating and Bots” as it doesn’t meet the other qualifications!

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Hi @lgManicUnicorn

Could you elaborate this further?

Since players has many accounts does this includes playing jousting with multiple accounts?
or playing as a group to gain advantage on winning?

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Definitely not. That’s not a game server/smart contract thing. We’ve already removed the Sybil Attack section. An example of this is the Shadowcorn sniping issue in the past.