The Rug Game Thesis

A lesson from Teh GameMaster in the dopamine seeking reward loop, human debauchery & the missing link in blockchain gaming

A short look amongst the top crypto games and what do you see? Mostly “fluff”. Whether that be fluffy cute animals, fluffy words about promises of future games, or cartoon metaverses where you can walk around and…. Just walk around.

A lack of pleasurable activities within crypto gaming has led to a replacement for this pleasure in the form of monetary rewards. These monetary rewards are given with the understanding that they offer an incentive and elicit the same response in the gamer, pleasure from partaking and participating in activities.

Unfortunately, this presumption comes from a lack of understanding of the role of dopamine itself. See dopamine is misunderstood by general society and is portrayed and presumed as the main source of the chemical reaction inducing happiness and pleasure. The replacement of actual enjoyment with monetary rewards is hoped to induce the same responses. It doesn’t.

But why?

Dopamine is produced in response to pleasure of course, both normal and monetary. It is also produced however, in response to violence, aggression or fear. In fact, rather than a chemical for pleasure, Dopamine is commonly understood to promote Motivational salience.

“Motivational Salience is a cognitive process and a form of attention that motivates or propels an individual’s behaviour towards or away from a particular object, perceived event or outcome.”

And there we have it. The missing link in the adoption of, and in achieving widespread crypto gaming participation is a lack of aggression, frustration and fear. Monetary rewards are no replacement for the dopamine rush which is released when you genuinely have something to lose, risk on the table, and an enemy to fight.

This is why “fluff is not enough”. Give me degeneracy. Give me fear. Give me genuine risk and something to lose. We are not pleasure seeking beings, we are dopamine seeking beings and we want it ALL. Happiness is not enough, consistent happiness is boring, we seek an element of chaos in our lives, and to think we would be happy with gaming experiences that lack this is stupidity.

We have presented the problem and now we must present the solution.

The Rug Game

The exact thrill seeking behaviour above, crossed with the pleasure dopamine response of monetary rewards is already present within crypto. In fact the predominant amount of gas fees spent in this crypto winter is on the trading, launching and speculation on shitcoins. This crypto underworld goes on beneath the noses of DeFi maxis and techies everywhere and is fueled by rampant addiction to degeneracy and thrill seeking. On telegram in particular you have hoards of shitcoin group chats, Alpha groups, Private Groups all for the purpose of buying shitcoins at a few thousand dollars market cap and selling them at a few hundred thousand market cap.

We see it frequently in the CULT community. Sales of CULT to buy the latest “meta” or the new “hype”. It is frustrating and the FOMO to not partake is immeasurable. As is mentioned in the video on the front page of https://theruggame.io

“You vote with your ETH .. and every good protocol you sell to buy a shitcoin, is a vote against innovation… & a vote for greed.”

And this is why I designed The Rug Game. Kek. Yes it is mine by design, but built by some additional trusted developers who worked on RVLT, but aren’t working currently on our blockchain.

I created it so the community can have an outlet for their FOMO and an outlet for their aggression. It is ever so boring to all be on the same team all of the time, let us fight, let us attack and let us speculate! Separately, yet, still all together.

The Rug Game is an antidote and a cure for our degeneracy. We are weaning ourselves away from supporting scam developers that may or may not rug pull you. And instead we are playing the game on our own terms. We know the risks, we know the rewards, and we are free to play, free to win and free to lose.

And I have made ever so many different ways you can win or lose…

The Rules, how to win and The many different strategies

“TRG is the core standard ERC 20 token.

On top of this, there are 10 game tokens which spell out — The Rug Game

$T $H $E $R $U $G $G* $A $M $E*

“All of the 10 gaming tokens have a 4% tax. 1% buys and burns CULT, 1% which buys & burns TRG, 1% game token sent to burn wallet & 1% which is collected by a contract & held in ETH. All of these tokens will launch at once, and after 30 days the game begins.”

The first of, and all ten tokens consecutively, were launched Jan-06–2023 06:55:35 PM (https://etherscan.io/tx/0x6db0254d47b58137090f27a2cd9d6be5aec462ca62190fd4e5e86847cf11fc38)

100% of the individual letter tokens 666,666,666,666 were paired with 1 WETH for a starting marketcap of circa $2,500 at the time.

We have redesigned the standard buy and sell taxation model to make buys far cheaper on gas as compared to sells. If you look at your buy transaction, you can see that 4% is sent to the token contract itself, this means you can in fact buy all gaming tokens with 0.1% or lower slippage.

On the sale of the token by the same buyer, you can see that the full 8% worth of tokens are sent to their respective homes or burn wallets, whilst clearing on only 4.5% slippage. This makes the sell transaction more expensive than a buy, but who cares about that?

Another note is that the buy and sell amounts of CULT also send the normal 0.4% to the treasury. So effectively every gaming token buy and sell sends 0.008% to the treasury.

Big Brein.

The Rugs and the Rewards

“Between every 30–60 days the token which has burnt the least amount numerically of the gaming token, CULT , and TRG is eliminated, and the liquidity is rugged automatically.

Any ETH left from the LP at the time of the rug will auto buyback TRG and send it to the TRG DAO & stakers.

At the time the token with the least burns rugs, the 1% ETH collected of every other community token is sent as ETH rewards to the winning community tokens holders.”

Incentive is everything in this game and so both letter and core $TRG holders benefit. If you view the original token factory contract you can see that this is where the 1% WETH collection is being stored. This will build and build until the first or next rug where it will become claimable on https://theruggame.io by the winning tokens holders. At present you can see this pool has built to over $31,000.

The current highest marketcap letter is $450,000 this means that annualised WETH APR for this tokens holders if they were sent just this amount every 60 days would be 41.46%… and that is just 8–9 days of WETH collection at the longest periods of 60 days.

If you gross that up in line with rug periods of 30 or 60 days by dividing $31,096 by 9 and then multiplying by 30 that comes to $103,656.66 paid out per month to winning token holders. Per month. This is why I believe letters are currently extremely undervalued.

The Annualised WETH rewards for token holders, grossed up based on historic data and rewarded against the current highest marketcap letter comes to an APR of 376.42%.

This is the reward given for the rug risk taken. No inflation. No ever expanding supply. Deflation, real yield and ethereum rewards.

TRG Tokenomics

The results of todays poll are in and rather than have large(er), amounts of tokens unlocking, the community have chosen for 20% of the ethereum raised to be paid to the dev team, with a small 2.5% token allocation as well. The max supply for points purposes of TRG is the same as CULT 6,666,666,666,666. The amount of tokens sold via for liquidity bootstrapping pool is not yet known exactly so I can only give rough estimates, but I have created a pie chart below which should be somewhat reflective.

Bribes

Bribes will likely come into the game as scores begin to reach closer parity to one another. We have added 50% bribe boosts to incentivise users to burn, however as you can see by the current trillions of difference. This won’t be enough in order to close that gap just yet as the volumes of trading at $2500 market cap caused the volume burned of the letters to far outweigh the burns from CULT which was a multi million dollar token.

This points disparity has been taken into account as letter burns are worth 100 times more than TRG or CULT burns due to the letters smaller supply. As these letters mature the gaps will close as the ability to bribe to boost will come into play later in the game.

50% of all CULT bribes will automatically be paid to CULT stakers & 50% burned. As well as this, 50% of TRG bribes will be automatically paid to TRG stakers & 50% burned.

Strategy, Points and Winning

The lowest scoring token will populate the top row of the table where you can see “GAMEOVER: X”. This is dynamic and is there to let you know which token is currently in line to be rugged, should they not increase their score.

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that although $T has been leader of the pack by some distance it has not been adding points as quickly as some others such as $M which stormed from last place, to now in its current second place…

Why is this?

Well, it is the exact same reason as to why CULT is more efficient at low prices than at high prices. This is due to funds bring sent in CULT but measured in ETH and thus meaning, more CULT is burned the lower the CULT price gets vs ethereum.

The same is said for our letters.

For example let’s say:

Token One is $ 1M marketcap = $1 per token

Token Two is $ 50K marketcap = $0.05 per token

1% of all USD buys is burned of the token

If I buy $100 of Token One, that gets me 100 tokens: 1% is burned and so that burns: 1 token of Token One

If I buy $100 of Token Two, that gets me 2000 tokens: 1% is burned and so that burns: 20 tokens of Token Two

So what does this mean?

Well this is how it gets so fun and so multilayered. You see if your token is losing on day 29 and your whole team dumps it in order to not get rugged, the actual process of dumping it to such a low marketcap would massively increase the burns. This means that by the time the token has been dumped, it would probably have overtaken its next lowest scoring counterpart and thus would no longer be the token getting rugged!

This is where the gamification comes in of marketcap, popularity, fear and team work. For example, in normal tokens, if a group of whales was to manipulate the market and dump the price, this would or could cause uproar. However, in The Rug Game. That tactic, as long as the same whales bought back eventually, would mean the token could spend time at a lower marketcap in order to score points, before eventually being bought back up by the same sellers.

This also means that towards day 30 people may begin to wash trade their tokens by using volume bots to continuously buy and sell in order to generate points.

This game completely turns the tables on up only mentality by giving users of these tokens other more efficient ways to score points and earn hundreds of percentage points of wrapped ethereum returns for doing so.

Conclusion

I don’t want to giveaway every strategic move but hopefully I have spurned some ideas for you and your team. As you can see by the above, the rewards for the winners of each round of this game are huge and plenty to offset the potential rug risk. I am extremely excited to see which strategies you choose and who is looking for efficiency and competitiveness vs “up only”. The big breins have the chance to show their big breins here.

The TRG sale closes on Monday at 14:00 UTC. Let the games begin!

https://fjordfoundry.com/pools/mainnet/0x48d63961B25AF0A280B5Cf33bE8ce7d86C221Dbc

• Mr O