Actor: Anna Kharton, Olivia Capozzalo
Original translation: Zen, PANews
Whether you’re one of the most dedicated players of Hamster Kombat, the Telegram-based click-to-earn game, or you’ve completely brushed it off, the buzz surrounding the game since its release this spring is real.
With Notcoin as a precedent, since Hamster Kombat’s registered accounts reached tens of millions, most of the news about the game has focused on the release and price prediction of its native token HMSTR. Now, as the first season of the game has come to an end since its launch in March, players have begun to accuse the team of unfair treatment and false promises.
As of last weekend, as part of the game's promised reward system, the resources accumulated by players have been converted into HMSTR tokens, which are expected to be sent in the form of airdropped tokens at the TGE. The game team also revealed more information about the token supply and distribution in a post on the X platform. The team said that of the planned supply of 100 billion HMSTR tokens to be minted, 75% will be reserved for the community and 60% of the tokens will be distributed to the game's users at the end of the first season.
According to the team’s post on the X platform, this “hamster math” continues: of the 60% HMSTR token supply allocated to users, 88.75% will be distributed during this week’s token airdrop and listing, and the remainder will be locked and unlocked only 10 months after the token is listed on the exchange. The team also promised to airdrop an additional 15% of the 100 billion tokens during the upcoming second season of Hamster Kombat.
Since March, the Hamster Kombat team says the game has as many as 300 million users. Of those users, only a small half, or 131 million players, are eligible to receive tokens in the much-anticipated airdrop, currently scheduled for September 26. In addition, 2.3 million players were identified as cheating users and were banned from participating in the token distribution altogether.
Disappointing Token Distribution
Since the Hamster Kombat team’s announcement on Sunday, many users have taken to the X platform to voice their dissatisfaction with the token distribution process and criteria, arguing that the number of tokens they received was far less than the time and effort they put in.
HMSTR tokens will be listed and traded on exchanges later this week after the airdrop, but several major exchanges have already conducted pre-market trading of spot and futures contracts for HMSTR tokens. Its price ranges from 0.01 USDT to 0.1 USDT on different platforms, and players are confused about the actual value of their allocated tokens.
Judging from comments in the community, based on the highest USDT prices on various exchanges, the average user would earn less than $50 for hundreds of hours of gaming time.
A player nicknamed Timbo in the Telegram community said that he played the game almost from the beginning, playing the game for about 4-5 hours a day for two months, earning about 500 tokens. As time went on, the heat around the game and the upcoming token continued to increase, which meant that more and more players were promised token distributions at the release. "My interest gradually faded over time. The game itself is not that interesting. As for potential earnings, I didn't expect too much - the number of players has become very large and everyone needs to be rewarded." Timbo said.
"Cheater" judgment raises questions
Another bigger wave of negative sentiment is that Hamster Kombat announced that 2.3 million players would be excluded from token distribution. According to the project, the ban is to deal with users who allegedly tried to obtain game revenue through improper means, such as clicking with multiple devices, playing games from different accounts, or cheating through recommendations. The project also gave an example: "One person connected more than 400 accounts to the same Binance address, and another person invited nearly 2,000 "friends", all of whom were marked by our anti-cheating system."
However, some of the criteria for determining cheating seem controversial, and one of the most shocking penalties is buying keys. Keys are important game props introduced later, and they also have a high weight in airdrops. In the rules of the game, users need to complete a mini-game to obtain keys, but some players choose to buy them directly with krypton gold and skip the mini-game. The "Hamster Kombat" game system allows users to buy keys without any warnings or explanations that this is a violation. However, this behavior was apparently identified as "cheating" in the airdrop and allegedly resulted in players being banned from obtaining tokens.
Several members of the Hamster Kombat Telegram chat group posted a message that included this line:
“Some of my friends have been wrongly included on the cheater list without doing anything wrong. This injustice has severely damaged the trust of the community and created an atmosphere of distrust.”
These players, who were identified by the project as violating the so-called "rules of the game", were given a simple status at the end of the first season: "Cheating is bad." The Telegram group chat of the Hamster Kombat community was immediately flooded with complaints, and everyone believed that the distribution criteria were unfair and asked the administrators to reconsider and distribute tokens. Users in Telegram expressed dissatisfaction with being suddenly labeled as cheaters at the end of the season, pointing out that they had spent a lot of time on the game.
"At the beginning of the project, no one knew what violations there would be, and at the end of the project, there was a ban, and the tokens were distributed to fewer people under ridiculous excuses." A person who claimed to be a player complained on the X platform that he had played for four months, collected more than 200 keys, and earned 8.36 million HMSTR every hour, setting alarms and tracking the "uptime" of cards. "Now you tell me I don't deserve it. Hamster Kombat is a liar."
Meanwhile, the hashtag#boycotthamsterkombat(boycott Hamster Kombat) is trending on Platform X – with over 22, 000 tweets at the time of writing.
How is token allocation determined?
According to community reports, the number of tokens players receive is determined based on the following criteria:
The number of coins collected by the user during the entire period
The number of friends invited by the user to join the game
The number of coins a user earns through passive income
The number of keys the user has won in the mini-game
The number of daily tasks completed by the user
Tokens in Hamster Kombat are divided into several categories: Total HMSTR, Claimed, Next Unlock, and Unclaimed. However, the game does not provide an explanation for these different categories.
It turns out that the most important task that determines the number of tokens each player gets is not the passive income HMSTR tokens earned by playing the game, but the number of friends invited through the referral link. Judging from the comments on social media, ordinary users are the most dissatisfied with the token distribution logic because they spend a lot of time actually playing the game, trying to get into the top 100 players, completing tasks, etc. These players are the core of the community and may not have a wide social network like YouTube influencers, who can invite "friends" by sharing referral links and thus earn more tokens.
Did Hamster Kombat fool everyone? With a massive token distribution plan and reported user statistics, the game is still expected to achieve one of the largest airdrops in the crypto space. Players who have linked their wallets to their Hamster Kombat accounts can expect to receive their allocation of tokens during this week's airdrop, which can then be traded on major exchanges such as Binance and OKX.
Given the reportedly large number of users playing Hamster Kombat, it’s perhaps unsurprising that players received fewer tokens than expected. Given that the total token supply is capped at 100 billion and a reported user base of hundreds of millions of users, the math becomes at least somewhat clear, even if it’s disappointing for most players.
Regardless, the value of users’ earnings in fiat terms won’t be clear until HMSTR tokens go live for spot trading on September 26 and players actually receive their long-awaited tokens.
Russian experts say their tokens will face selling pressure
According to RTVI, Viktor Pershikov, an independent expert in combating financial crime in the crypto space, said that those who "wanted to get rich by playing Hamster Kombat" "found their expectations dashed." The media noted that many people were disappointed to learn that "after playing the game for several months," their efforts "only paid off with $5 to $15." Pershikov also said that the game and its team "never promised to make anyone rich," and that when players eventually begin trading their HMSTR tokens for fiat currency, the token price "will come under pressure."
Telegram is the chat app of choice for most Russian citizens, and the popular Hamster Kombat is naturally very popular in Russia. Some players in the country even buy fascia guns to enhance their knocking ability. Many e-commerce sellers also took the opportunity to promote the "hamster knocking" function of their fascia guns, thereby driving the sales growth of these fascia guns on Russian e-commerce platforms.
Russian information and socio-political electronic newspaper Fontanka.ru reported on Hamster Kombat on September 22, saying that the "eight-year-old son" of one of its employees "mined" Bitcoin for a total of 120 days. In the end, the boy's "income was about 4.3 rubles ($0.046)."
Some commentators expressed their displeasure in the comments section of Fontantka Ru’s article, with one Russian social media user lamenting: “How did we go from being the most well-read and educated country in the world to being like this?”
