Sunflower Farmers Saga: Why Hive is Better than Polygon
I recently read the post on reddit on how one game developer made blunder on Polygon chain causing it to rise in gas fees. If you read my posts on noise.cash, then you already know how much I hate Ethereum's transaction fees.
I was praising Polygon last year for it's low fees and quick transactions and this year, the game called "Sunflower Farmers" kind of jinxed that progress of the chain.
At the same time thought came into my head in context of Splinterlands. The game is one of the most popular game in the dAppRadar. It has been getting a lot of signups and a lot of people are playing it.
Yet it does not cost much to play the game, nor does it crashes the blockchain. In short, Hive and Splinterlands both are great.
So what are some of the lessons we can learn from Sunflower Farmers & Polygon's crash? Let's discuss them.
Lesson 1: Hosting Game Data off Chain
A lot of game developers think of hosting everything on the chain. Which increases load on the blockchain and makes it slow. You don't have to host every little setting in the game and broadcast it to the chain.
Leaderboard, scores, in-game values at the end of battles or end of the game exit type can be thrown to the chain. This way there would be less load and chain and game both won't crash.
Lesson 2: Less Microtransactions the Better
A lot of games have greedy developers, they want to literally monetize every pixel off the game. They charge for every movement in the game so much so that microtransaction hell makes it hard to work for users.
Take example of axie, which are expensive, battles which cost money. All of this load on the blockchain. Besides microtransaction also takes the fun out of the game. I understand developers need to make the money but there needs to be line drawn on the greed part.
Lesson 3: Anti-Bot & Anti-Cheat Methods
There are games which eventually get gamed and bots kind of ruin the flow of the game. You may notice that having an anti-bot and anti-cheat method by employing some time gaps, randomness within the game can help.
But I am not a developer nor I am aware of any strong methods yet I feel there is a way to fix this if people who know how to get involved. It may take time but having it in place can be a good option to put up for long term.
Lesson 4: Ethereum is Good for Development, Bad for Scale
I know this would trigger a lot of ethereum fans but let's face it. There is not even one dApp or the game or metaverse that is NOT suffering out there. Like almost every project is suffering with Ethereum gas fees.
The chain has got so expensive that very few or limited sector of the society can use it anymore. Even layer 2 solutions are getting costly these days with incident like the sunfarmers saga.
In short, game dev & dApp dev's bad design practice can bring up the gas prices on polygon which shows it's not really a good design underneath.
Why Hive is Better than Polygon
Let's put the facts on table. Hive doesn't crash like the Polygon did. Hive has better developers on both dApp side and game dev side. There are good people working on splinterlands and not letting it crash. Which tells you how hive managed to remain fast and low fee/zero fee chain in comparison to polygon.
Polygon despite being layer 2 solution and promised to be cheaper on transactions ended up costing a lot in last 2 weeks, which proves it can't scale, and recover unless developers pause their ecosystem from overloading the chain.
Over to you, what do you think about Polygon in near future? Do you think Hive community should invite more game developers to it's chain?
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta