CryptoFights Review: An Analysis of Blockchain Gaming Flaws on BSV

[00:00:00]hello and welcome back to the series where I play and review every crypto and nft game from the perspective of a gamer before jumping into today's game I wanted to take some time to thank you all for your continued support it's hard to believe that we're already more than halfway to 1 000 subscribers so if you haven't already make sure you subscribe so you never miss out on an upload I've got a very special surprise for the 1000 subscriber Milestone so you won't want to miss it and with that said I'm John and it's time to continue our search for the worst crypto game ever foreign fights proudly presents itself as a brand new way to play and earn battle monsters to get loot craft to create more powerful items then sell or melt them on the nft marketplace play and earn through gameplay better players earn better rewards the game is community owned and influenced by the players don't be surprised if you haven't heard of crypto fights though there is very little discussion online regarding this game plus with the name as stupid as crypto fights my expectations are already low but hey maybe it's a Hidden Gem let's give the game a fair chance heading to crypto fights website I simply click play now to download the game the game is available both for Android mobile devices and for Windows computers I will be playing the windows version of the game so I click download and get the game's installer before installing the game I decided to take a few minutes to read through the game's terms of service while reading through this document I found a few interesting things that I wanted to mention there's no refund policy and all payments are final they reserve the right to deny you winnings from playing the game for any reason they reserve the right to ban you for using profanity including using Asterix to represent profanity all in-game purchases including the tokens are strictly not Investments and you are not allowed to call them that you hereby consent to unauthorized remote access of your device without your knowledge and you don't own any of the assets the developers are simply giving them to you on a license they also seem to have left some sort of proofreading notes in the document here at the end it looks like there's a conversation between two employees oops so far crypto fights is extremely sketchy so we're gonna have to run this one on a virtual machine hopefully that won't negatively affect the performance of the game in general though downloading and installing the game was simple after I accepted the lengthy terms of service I created a username and password and set up a seed phrase one of the main flaws of crypto in my opinion is this need for a seed phrase losing the seed phrase means you're screwed no recovering your account ever this is a major hurdle in the way of mass adoption also because I just showed my seed phrase on screen you can now take complete control of my crypto fights wallet of course that assumes that there would be a reason for you to want this wallet in the first place but be my guest after finalizing the creation of my account I was presented with three species to choose from from my character dwarf Elf or human the three species are labeled as Havoc different difficulties easy medium or hard respectively an odd choice of words here usually you see the word race used in a fantasy setting for these characters not species but anyway I chose the elf species next I get to customize my later customization options are very limited you can change your gender clothing color hairstyle hair color and skin color and that's it after finalizing my Elven Warrior I can then allocate stat points to strength dexterity or intelligence I have no idea what these do but I guess dexterity would be a good choice since I'll probably be using things like bows and daggers since I'm the elf species now that my custom crypto fighter is complete I can continue through the game's guided tutorial this game has a very traditional tutorial with some guy named Bram the brave giving you dialogue based instructions on how to play the game the gameplay of crypto fights is very simple crypto fights uses a turn-based battle system on your turn you have three abilities to choose from Attack hide or blue after you click an ability a dice roll is performed whether the attack hits or not and how much damage it does is determined by this dice roll and that's it crypto fights is pretty much just a Dungeons and Dragons combat simulator except with a fraction of the depth of the tabletop game after defeating the tutorial training dummy I get to pick my weapon of choice of course I chose the bow since I put all my points in dexterity I am then instructed to head to the Caravan to equip my weapon crypto fights uses an overworld-based UI where you navigate a map to do things such as equipping your weapons leveling up and visiting the market it's an interesting stylistic choice for sure but I'm not really a fan of these types of uis that mobile games commonly use since it makes it annoying to navigate quickly you have to wait for the animation to play in the environment to load sometimes just a simple clean looking menu is all that you need once I visited the Caravan and equipped my new weapon I can continue to the second tutorial battle against the Bandit here I learned how to use the hide ability which allows me to roll a dice and then become hidden giving me a bonus on my next attack after winning this battle I leveled up every time you level up in crypto fights you gain access to a skill point which you can spend on this skill tree wow this is almost as complex as path of exiles however I think it's more difficult to navigate the crypto fights skill tree than it is to navigate path of Exiles and that's because in crypto fights there is no visual indication on the tree as far as which skills you've chosen so you kind of have to just keep clicking on random talents on the tree until you find one that it lets you unlock this is stupid and a pretty big oversight visual Clarity is super important especially when it comes to a talent tree it's talent tree 101 that unlearned talents should appear in grayscale and learn talents appear colored have the developers ever played an RPG before after spending my first skill point in crypto fights I finished the games tutorial I'm told that the main aspect of the game is the PVP Arena but in order to unlock that I'll need to battle through the game's single player mode the menacing woodland forest so I guess that's where I'm headed next here I face my first opponent a frog man hybrid named Boga who I easily dispatch in just one shot lucky roll and crypto fights the single player mode is just a linear level progression every time you beat a level you get a chest some experience and then unlock the next level in the path you can replay a level to get the rewards again but only every so often as there's about a five minute cooldown after playing each level before you can play it again while moving forward to level 2 I noticed that the game had me wait in a queue before starting the match that's right I'm waiting in queue to start a single player game of crypto fights now the queue is really quick but why do I need to do this what's going on well as you'll see here at the bottom of the screen crypto fights is waiting for a response from the blockchain before beginning the match this is because all of your crypto fights take place as on-chain transactions this is certainly the most interesting aspect of crypto fights and I'll talk about it in more detail after I'm done playing the game after the blockchain transaction was confirmed and the battle began I realized that the game has an auto battle feature this is great since there's no gameplay anyway you just click a button and watch it ice roll there's no reason to use any of your other abilities when you can just attack every turn so Auto Battle it is at this point me playing crypto fights devolved into just clicking Auto Battle and then browsing the internet in a separate window while the game played itself but no matter how many attempts I had I just couldn't beat this quasi enemy it's just death after death so after about six failed attempts I decided to just start the entire game over but this time as the dwarf species they were labeled easy mode after all after replaying all of the game's content up to closet I was able to easily defeat him unfortunately all of this hard work was for nothing as after a few more battles I reached the doppelganger another completely impossible enemy at this point the only thing that I can do is go back and grind the previous levels every five minutes until I'm strong enough to beat the doppelganger since I couldn't imagine a worse way to spend my afternoon I instead decided to explore the rest that the game has to offer heading back to the main Hub world I checked out the game's Marketplace here you can buy and sell items that you find within the game while most of the games that we've played on the series have created their own proprietary cryptocurrency that you can purchase on an exchange crypto fights does things differently crypto fights is built on top of the bsv blockchain bsv stands for Bitcoin satoshi's vision and it is one of the forks of the original Bitcoin chain instead of needing to buy bsv and convert it to another token you can just transfer bsv into your game wallet and use it to buy items without any need to convert it to another cryptocurrency or at least that's my understanding this is cool but it raises the question if all the rewards are free from playing and you can buy items from other players using bsv how are the developers getting paid here I couldn't imagine that them taking a cut of transactions is enough to run an entire company there must be something I'm missing we'll come back to this later since I want to test the games advertised earn features I decided to sell all of my items to cash out obviously nobody wants to buy my items so there's no cashing out here this is one of the flaws of the play to earn model if everyone is earning the items for free who are you going to be selling items to a game with a system like this is just going to almost always devolve into total bot control the market will be flooded with thousands of items generated from Bots playing each other at maximum efficiency draining all of the value from the game especially when the gameplay is this simple it would be so easy to set up thousands of bots to just grind the game forever and get items instantly flooding the market after looking around a bit more I realized that there really isn't much of anything else to do in crypto fights there are no more single player levels after the woodland forest and the maximum level is only 10 anyway everything else is just labeled as coming soon after all of my time spent grinding in crypto fights I can't say that I had any sort of fun there isn't exactly a whole lot of depth in the gameplay I would have had more fun rolling a 20-sided die with a group of friends and then taking turns slapping whoever rolls under a tent however before deleting this garbage game I noticed that I now have the PVP Arena unlocked the main draw of crypto fights is the PVP Arena after all so I headed directly over and gotten q and to absolutely no one surprise I am the only person playing crypto fights I waited in queue for about 10 minutes and then gave up with my character being too weak to complete the next single player level and the PVP arena being a Dazzle at Wasteland I've beaten crypto fights there is no point in playing this game anymore I've seen it all after destroying the virtual machine that I had installed crypto fights on I went to do some more research why does it exist who is behind it and why is it still online even though nobody is playing it while researching I found that crypto fights is the subject of a great and detailed Reddit post titled crypto fights in search of evasive bsv utility by user it's not lupus on the bsv subreddit now I can't verify the truth of all this information so please take this with a grain of salt these aren't my words I'm just summarizing some points from the Reddit post crypto fights is claimed to be a killer app that demonstrates the scalability of the bsv blockchain crypto fights for a short amount of time was the app with the most on-chain transactions on the bsv blockchain surpassing a bot that did nothing but spam transactions to test volume this is because crypto fights also generates a large amount of transactions with around 10 to 15 transactions for every single battle as every action is logged through a transaction on the bsv blockchain including single-player battles in the 24 hours around the time of this post one year ago the game had seen 200 unique users participate in 1650 PVP battles leading to about 500 000 bsv transactions however these transactions are mostly completely unnecessary and end up creating more problems for the developers because the crypto fights database stores all of the transactions locally in addition to pushing them to the blockchain the inclusion of the blockchain is not useful for the developers at all there's no reason that they would need to go look at the blockchain transactions they're just clones of their internal databases transactions so does this help the players well it does allow for some transparency while crypto fight says on their website that this publicly auditable combat log might prevent cheating that doesn't really make sense when you look deeper into it while it may make it publicly visible when someone is cheating it doesn't actually stop them from cheating nor does it prevent crypto fights from cheating the players while the seed that the game chooses for each random dice throw is broadcast on the blockchain so the players can see that the random numbers are not being altered mid-game there's nothing stopping crypto fights from just giving you a rigged random number seed from the start making all dice rolls favor the enemy so from a transparency perspective the choice to use the blockchain doesn't add any interesting utility as it neither prevents the player nor the developers from cheating it just lets the public see that they're being cheated not really a useful form of anti-cheat considering the cost of having all these transactions on the blockchain and that brings us to the next point the cost of using the blockchain since each move in a battle is a transaction with around 12 transactions per battle a transaction fee must be paid for each move who's paying this transaction fee well crypto fight says this suggests that crypto fights is acting as a loss leader in crypto gaming to help further adoption however it's a good thing that these transactions are cheap because even when the game only had a player count of 200 it was projected that they were spending 2 434 dollars in transaction fees daily this adds up to almost 1 million dollars a year in operating costs just for the blockchain combat log and 2400 daily in fees is actually with the discounted rate cryptophytes has a special deal with taal which is one of the largest transaction processors on the bsv blockchain this allows them to get reduced fees to make things even more interesting though Calvin ire the owner of coin geek is one of the largest investors in both crypto fights and tal an argument can be made that Calvin who is significantly invested in bsv is using his money to fund these projects to further adoption of bsv however the actual success of this project is Up For Debate speaking of paying people to adopt bsv some suspect that crypto fights buys all of their social media followers as well looking at one of crypto fights tweets shows that almost all replies are about absolute nonsense in Vietnamese which is a common sign of bought followers or replies and considering that I didn't find a single other player online this accusation might be believable based on all of this information the Reddit user comes to the phone following conclusion in his post there's nothing that crypto fights is doing that couldn't be done without bsv crypto fights doesn't actually use nfts all of your items are just stored as in-game items the high bsv transaction rates are not just a misleading and empty talking point they were also expensive and harmful to crypto fights cheating is not only possible but facilitated by their diarrhea of transactions and despite literally trying to buy users their user growth numbers are unimpressive additionally the author states that there is a strong technical case to be made that crypto fights could be doing more if it hadn't used bsv at all looking more into the crypto fights website we can see that they have a roadmap item for a crypto fights 2.0 but information on that seems to be sparse the developers are active on Twitter though so I don't think that this has been abandoned just yet at this point I've seen just about everything that crypto fights has to offer but I did want to mention one thing which is The Game's original terms with Service website preserved on the internet archive you can see here that their old terms of service used to have this tiny font with 30 opacity which is completely impossible to read very sketchy anyway now that I've beaten crypto fights I feel comfortable giving the game a final review and score Point number one use of access while it is easy to download crypto fights I don't recommend you do so as the game's terms of service are very sketchy there is no reason that a program should ever take unauthorized access of your computer zero out of five I don't think you should download this Point number two graphics and audio crypto fights has uh an art style to say the least the game uses a combination of 3D models and pre-rendered backgrounds for the battles however there really isn't much going on here there's no impressive animations or visual effects you just jump at the enemy and swing a sword or fire your bow and with only 10 enemies and 6 player models in the game the doesn't appear that they spend a lot of time on character design either the audio in crypto fights is mostly forgettable the game does not have a lot of music and the sound effects are pretty much all just stock effects for swords bows whips and dice rolls in the end though there is absolutely no soul in this game it's probably the most Bland generic Fantasy game that you could ever create even the name is uninspired crypto fights are you kidding me uninspired and mediocre artwork and audio gets crypto fights a two out of five Point number three gameplay all right I'm gonna be very harsh crypto fights has no gameplay the entirety of the game is Just rolling dice while there are plenty of games that use dice roll combat systems at least there's some sort of strategy in depth crypto fights is so simple that you're best off just turning on Auto Battle and then getting up to do something different absolutely Thoughtless and non-interactive gameplay against crypto fights a 0 out of five the best way to play crypto fights is not at all Point number four the use of cryptocurrency nft or blockchain technology this is a category where crypto fights attempts something interesting it's the first game that we've seen that actually directly uses the blockchain as part of the core gameplay Loop however the blockchain makes the gameplay worse with its inclusion as it slows down the game due to the need to wait for transactions to clear Additionally the ability for the game to be audited via the blockchain is completely useless as the developers can ultimately do whatever they want regardless of the blockchain besides if you have such little trust in the developer that you need to audit them then you've got a bigger problem just play the game and enjoy it if you think the developer is cheating you stop playing auditing them isn't going to get them to change anything because the blockchain brings nothing positive to crypto fights and actually manages to make the gaming experience worse I'm giving crypto fights a negative 5 out of 5 for this category Point number five will this project know my total score for crypto fights is an astounding negative 12 out of 100 unbelievably bad thanks for sticking around to the end of the video as always your likes and subscriptions are appreciated and make sure to comment your thoughts do you also think that crypto fights is sketchy do you think the ability to audit the game's combat log using the blockchain is useful what game should I play next I'm John and I'll see you next time when we continue our search for the worst crypto game ever goodbye