Sun Flower Farmers show us Polygon's Limitations, but there are solutions....

I logged into CryptoRaiders to do my weekly grind a few days ago only to fine that the suggested Polygon Gas fees were 10 times what they usually were - they'd risen to 300 from 30.

The reason for this congestion, I later learned was due to a rapid increase in (most probably) bot accounts farming in-game rewards on a relatively new game: Sunflower Farmer - NB the game is currently offline and undergoing redevelopment to make it more bot resistant!

In only 4 days, starting from 1st Jan, the number of users on this game rose from < 100 K to 350K and the number of daily transactions rose to nearly 1 Million, just for this one game. (NB this is compared to around 20K daily users on the popular Quick Swap app, so it's a lot!).

At peak congestion I was having to pay 600 in GAS to ensure that transactions would get through, or around $0.50 cents, when I'm used to paying < $0.1 on Polygon.

I've never played SunFlower Farmer, but I do know that you could harvest/ upgrade every 30 minutes, and as I understand it every building/ crop counted as one TX, so it's no wonder that so many users (bots) congested the network.

In response the Sunflower Devs have pulled the game and are redeveloping it and rebranding (slightly) to Sunflower Land to make it more BOT resistant.

It's an interesting one for blockchain games which highlights the fact that devs need to think VERY carefully about what aspects of the games need to be stored on chain.

Splinterlands is 'ahead of the game' in this respect, having moved the 'battling' elements off-chain and onto their own servers (as I understand it) and keeping 'only' the card contracts (rents/ sells and so on) on chain.

What Splinterlands HASN'T done successfully is deal with bots.

Possibly a solution to this is set up an email account verification system like they do with CryptoRaiders - you have to login with your email address and you are only allowed to associated one blockchain address with that account - you can have more than one account, but only one at a time can play with your log-in.

For an even harder option to this, you could require actual address and/ or personal I/D verification along with the e-mail, although that might be regarded as throwing the baby out with bots as far as most crypto-enthusiasts are concerned!

So there are technical solutions to a chain getting suggested, but all it takes ATM for that to happen on Polygon at least is for someone to develop a game that's profitable in the short term and easily botted.

Sure in this case the Devs seem to have done the 'right thing' by stopping the game for the sake of the network, but it can easily happen again and it doesn't give me confidence in Polygon's future.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta