Thanks for your extensive response!

> The majority of the game currently is waiting for resources to build up to upgrade buildings.

When starting the game today, one need to be careful indeed since the more powerful players will take your resources as quickly as this is possible. But, with a few weeks building, one can have a pretty ok save zone build. Joining a gang is another way to quicker building, gang members can support finding the targets to steal resources from.

> The user must additionally spend a ton of time clicking through potential targets to find a good one. The game being more open previously meant that people could build tools to take away some of this time wastage built into the game.

I disagree with you completely: those games being engineers / developers did had a HUGE advantage over all the others, turning the game into a game for engineers and developers only. I cannot imagine this is the idea behind the game. How I see this game developing is that it requires strategy thinking and tactics to play it. Also, when it would be super easy with only little time involved to find target to steal from, or to win the fight, the fun would be out of the game, since only the high power users will take all the resources available in no time leaving nothing for the 1.000s (and in the future hopefully 10s of thousands of) active users.

> Was it a bad plan to move away from Steem as a rewarding currency?

> They kind of had to due to their position, but that was largely due to poor choices. They couldn't maintain the demand of users to buy things in game, so it just collapsed.

To a certain extend I agree with you. The game was started as the Steem blockchain and Steemit was started. Whatever Steem was available that day, was distributed with an aggressive formula giving a lot of benefits to the early players, while not taking into account the longer term. A mistake, for sure...

> They could have used the Steem Engine tokens. Instead they chose a system that you trade with a IM bot. Very odd choice.

Yes, steem engine is available, but I personally don't mind they didn't go for that solution. The ball is here at STINC. They promised SMT already for so long, but seems not being able to deliver(and will we ever get it?) It would be super cool indeed when dApps launching in the Steemit community also keep Steem part of their dApp in one way or the other. I certainly hope the drugwars team will introduce something that makes sense wrt integration of Steem.

> While the developers should be allowed to update and improve their "game", the most vocal critics are often people that care the most, and you should care about their opinions as a developer. 

I certainly will not disagree on this point. I must say I didn't follow most of the conversations, and am not at all active in the Drugwars Discord to know what has happened. The communication on the Steem blockchain increased dramatically when this spokes person was 'hired', but since then it slowed down a lot again. A bit of a shame imho, since I do agree many beta testers around and they deserve to be informed.

> If they want more people to view it as a game, they need to make it more fun, rather than just a very slow upgrade system with the ability to monotonously go through every possible user to find a potential target.

I agree with you, the fun factor is not that great yet, but I do have hopes the team will come up with additional gaming features to make it more fun. Every few days we see additions which shows me the team is not sitting still. In time we will know if the game will be a stayer, or most users will leave for something else.

> The "If you don't like it, leave!" mentality is often used in politics as well. It doesn't work, and it's rude. It's a way to shut down opposition.

It was never my intention to shut up people; Not to allow others to give their own opinion. I should've been more considerate. Not to excuse myself, I wrote the post after reading a set of very rude comments to the recent  Drugwars posts on Steemit. It's not an excuse, but an explanation why I formulated this a bit hard.

I certainly hope Drugwars will become a game many people will like to play. it is one of the dApps that has the potential and we need dApps that can make a success of crypto in general and the only way to do that is to get many many people using the dApp and keep them using the dApp. Although it seems a bit centralised at the moment, I personally think strategy / tactic games cannot record all transaction on the blockchain since it'll not provided a levelled playground for a wide variety of gamers.

Thanks again for your comment BTW.

Excellent feedback @geekpowered, and thank you.

@drugwars is currently asking for a delegation from Steemit Inc.

Your feedback would be welcome:

- https://steemit.com/delegation/@drugwars/drugwars-delegation-application