Today I bring you a true story. A story of deceit, downvotes, denial, and other disgusting behavior on this very blockchain. This is...

The CryptoBrewMaster Debacle!

So... I'm guessing most of you at this point have heard about this new game on Hive called CryptoBrewMaster?? It's essentially a card game where you can buy (with Hive), or earn through doing daily in game tasks, these ingredients cards. Water, barley, hops... things like that. Then when you get all the ingredients to make a beer you can play those cards and you'll brew a beer card (either over time or immediately if you are willing to pay). The beer cards have a monetary value and you can sell them in game for "CBM" which is a second layer token tradable on Hive Engine. That's the basics of it anyway. Technically all you need is a Hive account and you can play for free, but unless you buy in you will quickly get bored with how long it will take to get enough ingredients using only the free beer energy accumulation and especially with the lack of availability of certain ingredients in the daily quests... but now I'm getting ahead of myself... let me back up.

One morning I was scrolling through my feed on Torum and I saw a post about a new game on Hive. I'm always trying to keep up with what's new on Hive so I decided to check it out. I really liked the concept and the graphics were cool. And I love beer, so I was all ready to jump onboard and start playing! The game was simple to play, but I kinda liked that. And there were promises for lots of game expansion in the future.

I was playing everyday. I even started setting alarms so I could get my daily tasks going as soon as possible. I invested quite a bit of time, but I was having fun and I was earning crypto. And as I kinda mentioned earlier... I invested some money to buy cards because you just can't do really well without buying some ingredients to keep the brewery running. I was brewing beers, selling them and building up a nice little stack of CBM! But eventually I saw that with the high costs of the daily tasks and beer energy and the low costs of the beer cards... I was making very little CBM in profit from each beer. And with the low price of CBM it would be totally impossible to ever earn back even just a portion of what I had put in... so I was a little put off when I realized this and I questioned the CryptoBrewmasterStaff about the high costs of tasks and low costs of Beer Cards and I was told not to worry because the prices of those beer cards would go up as the game got increased adoption.

So I kept playing. And even continued to promote the game on places like Discord, Facebook, and Torum. But now instead of selling all my beer cards for CBM right away, I decided to HODL them. I figured why sell now if the price is supposed to be going up... right?? I continued brewing like crazy. Saving up a nice stockpile of beers. And I even achieved the rank of #1 Master Brewer for a couple weeks!!

And then it happened...

I woke up one morning and logged in to get my daily tasks going and claim my beer cards and I see something very alarming. All of my beer cards had severely dropped from a price range of 29-40 CBM to some now being worth less than 5!! 😧

This was drastically opposite of what I had been lead to expect. So I immediately went to their Discord server to see what exactly was going on and why my cards had lost over 80% of their value!

The admins response...

It's a game in Alpha mode...
we do not ask for any investments here...
just play as it is or just leave.

Really?? So... I just said Bye.

Being in Alpha mode is not an excuse for screwing over your users. That's just bad business. Wether or not they "ask for investments" (which in my opinion they do by asking you to purchase the ingredients cards) is irrelevant to the fact that users do invest both time and money. And in my opinion that response was quite far from anything resembling good customer service. But it gets even better.

Another admin jumps in and blocks me and starts talking trash and making jokes. They're really mature as you can tell. Also as you can see another user chiming in asking about the low beer prices.

I told them they shouldn't treat me like this after I had been so dedicated to playing and promoting their game. They of course made stupid jokes that I wasn't dedicated, and that I was really just an addict. Their jokes seemed pointless to me and I tried to move the conversation along to actually address the problem.

Unfortunately I got no satisfactory responses beyond "that's just how the game works"... and "it's not an investment" ... which to me is admitting your game is severely flawed and likely just a scam. I was getting quite frustrated at this point and started warning the other users that had arrived with questions as well as tagging the advisor/partner role in an attempt to get someone with a little more professionalism (which I'm guessing upset the admins who were still busy trash talking me).

I got to leave a few more frustrated comments... but then they banned me from commenting unless I verify my phone number... ya... that's not happening.

I wasn't really personally concerned about the small amount of money that I invested... I'm definitely not going broke because of it. But to me it's all about the principle. And I was highly disappointed with the unprincipled behavior I saw from the BrewMaster team.

And worst of all I felt quite guilty for promoting such a horrible product. So I made sure to go around to all the places where I had promoted it and made posts to let them know about my experience with CryptoBrewMaster and how I felt about it now. It was the least I could do. And I honestly thought that would be the end of it... until the attack started.

I had left a comment on my friend @jaynie's post. All completely unrelated to CryptoBrewMaster. And I suddenly received a barrage of downvotes from some "cleaners". I"ve criticized some of the cleaners before so at first I thought that's probably all it was about. But then upon further conversation with them I realized it was because they had seen my comments in the CryptoBrewMaster Discord server and were all upset that I had dared to speak the truth.

Although I disagreed with him, @enforcer48 made his argument and I can respect it. He was even willing to admit that their downvotes were far less damaging to me than people hearing my opinions was damaging to CryptoBrewMaster. Thank you for that inspiration to continue speaking out about it! lol. But then @nathanpieters showed up. With a giant ego, no manners, and not a tiny speck of any understanding of argumentation.

I'll spare you all the details, but I gotta tell you... @nathanpieters is probably one of the sickest dirtbags I've ever talked to. Just full of hate. He hurled baseless insult after baseless insult at me while I tried to make logical arguments. Racism, misogyny, victim shaming, slander... some truly disgusting stuff. Luckily for me I did't let any of that mind numbingly stupid crap he said bother me for one bit. He couldn't find an actual argument if it was an elephant sitting on his nose. It was extra funny to see him going back to the CryptoBrewMaster Discord server later to brag about telling me off. 😂 I really think it's hilarious that he thinks he's such a tough guy!

So to wrap this all up... despite probably continuing to receive malicious downvotes (from people that claim to protect Hive from scams while simultaneously defending them), I will no longer be recommending anyone play this game and will continue to tell anyone I talk with about it that I think it's a waste of time at best and a scam at worst.

I was quite happy to see that my complaints did get them to add a new "terms of use" that you must accept in order to play now. But as you probably could guess at this point... I won't be clicking accept.

And honestly I'm afraid that scam games like CryptoBrewMaster are not good at all for the future reputation of Hive as a blockchain. If the future of the Hive blockchain is crappy CBM type scam tokens... I'm terrified.