🚩10 Red Flags Checklist

Part of our mission is to educate people about all aspects of play-to-earn games. Here is a checklist of 10 red flags we recommend you look out for when doing research and potentially joining a new play-to-earn game. If the answer to a question below is ‘no’ for a game, then that’s a red flag.

1. Is the game launched at the same time as the token?

Some games launch their token first, and the ‘game’ a few weeks later. They do this so they do not need to invest their own money to program the game. Instead, they use the money from the private and public token sale, to program the game, or even sometimes start from scratch developing a game after the token launch. They hire about a dozen developers who need to rush the programming of a new game in a very short amount of time. Can you imagine the amount of miscommunication, time pressure and mess going on inside such a large, brand new team, and the amount of bugs/exploits resulting from it?

Crypto Legions is 100% completed and battle tested before the token launch. The founders have invested their own money to program the game professionally, over the course of several months prior to the launch.

2. Has the game been tested thoroughly before launch?

Because some teams rush programming a game after the token launch, as explained in the first point, they do not have the time to test the game. As a result, many bugs appear while players have invested and are already playing the game. In some cases, it opens an opportunity for hackers to find exploits and run with the investments of the players.

Crypto Legions has been tested for at least two weeks by users, before it launched. We also organised a contest for hackers, who got paid if they found any bugs or exploits. The v2 version of the game was working excellent during its entire lifetime, got many congratulations from many players for having no bugs, and was played by thousands of players.

3. Does the team deliver the promises of the whitepaper and roadmap?

To give you a couple of examples: There was a game that wrote in their whitepaper that they had “simulated and mathematically tested” their game, with “stochastic environment simulation software”. Then a few days after launch, they wrote an announcement that they had to change their whole economic rules, because they forgot to take into account a benefit for people to create large groups of NFTs. Even if they did a stochastic simulation… Shouldn’t the results of their simulation have predicted this? Moreover, it was game-over for everyone a week later. There’s also been countless cases where projects who launched without their game ready have faced constant delays, causing dumps on the market which potentially lost their investors money and severely damaged their projects growth. Too many projects just write anything in their whitepaper to attract buyers, but in reality it’s all bull****. We recommend you check if the actions of the development team are aligned with what has been promised in writing. If not, it's a red flag.

Crypto Legions has created the Omni-Balanced Oracle™, communicating proactively clear boundaries to players of how the economy can be adjusted slightly on the way, to provide longevity for the game. The whitepaper is transparent and aligned with what the team delivers.

4. Are the graphics, website and whitepaper professional?

Many games have many grammar mistakes in the whitepaper and/or a whitepaper that is very hard to understand for new players. Some websites look like their grandmother has written it.

Crypto Legions has written a whitepaper that is easy to understand for new players, and gave it the necessary attention to proactively cover all gaming elements. The game is released in 10 languages from the start. Our economy system has been reviewed by a PhD professor in Gaming and Mathematics at one of the top five universities in the UK. Even our trailer looks like a cinematic Hollywood movie trailer.

5. Has there been any sales of NFTs before the launch of the game?

Many P2E games are hosting large presales of their in-game NFTs before the game is even live. This means players’ money is given to the development team instead of being injected into the economy, which is extremely damaging. It creates huge selling pressure from the beginning (from NFT generated rewards) and takes away the majority of the early buying pressure as people don’t need to buy the token to mint NFTs.

Crypto Legions has no NFT presales. The only way for players to enjoy the game will be for them to buy the token and mint the NFTs after launch, injecting liquidity and rewards into our economy.

6. Is the game on-chain, where the devs cannot block reward withdrawals?

Many P2E games are now being developed off-chain. This means they are hosting projects on private servers where players do not have ownership over their in-game assets. As a result, game functionality can be stopped at any moment, players can be blocked from withdrawing their earned rewards, important data can be destroyed, and there’s zero transparency for players as no transactions are recorded on the blockchain.

Crypto Legions is completely on-chain. Players will have full ownership of their game assets, there is no way to delete any data, and every transaction will be fully transparent and visible for all players on the blockchain.

7. Did the project go through a KYC?

A potential warning sign for new projects is when teams refuse to verify their identities and choose to remain anonymous. As no one knows who they are, it is impossible for them to be held accountable for their actions in cases where they perform scams and potentially run off with investor funds instead of fulfilling their promises.

Crypto Legions has undergone and successfully passed KYC authentication with a professional auditing company. The proof is in the whitepaper.

8. Does the development team communicate well with their community?

In many games the developers are unreachable, hiding behind excuses and not communicating directly with their community through Discord or Telegram. Obviously, that's a red flag, because the players have no insight into what is actually happening with the game, and/or hiding makes it easier for the developers to disappear. Also, research how the team has communicated in the past, especially in stressful situations, because this might give a good prediction of how they will communicate in future.

Crypto Legions has two founders at its core, who include a native English speaker and a communication training expert. On top of this, the team has been expanded to include community managers for the majority of large language groups. Weekly actions show that we care about our players and community, by providing regular progress updates, voice chat AMA's, recording new Youtube videos, etc. We even did a survey with our community, asking what we can improve in our communication and approach.

9. Is the ownership of the reward pool managed responsibly?

The reward pool for P2E games will most likely contain the most amount of tokens. The ownership of this wallet should be managed extremely responsibly, using the protection of a multi-signature wallet that requires authorisation of at-least two or three trustworthy individuals who should have completed a KYC with a professional auditing company.

The Crypto Legions reward pool wallet is protected using multi-signature authorisation checks with 3 individuals who have completed a full KYC with the top auditing company SolidProof. This means that even if one of the project owners wallets is maliciously hacked, the reward pool wallet will still be safe.

10. Are all their contracts audited and free from malicious functions?

Some other play-to-earn games have hidden functions in their smart contracts that allow devs to mint endless amounts of tokens, or change the sell tax to high numbers and effectively create a ‘honeypot’, stopping people from selling their tokens. Also, if the team has not taken any specific precautions against exploits, then it’s obviously a risk to invest.

Crypto Legions successfully passed an audit from CertiK for their token, game and NFT contracts. The game has been battle-tested by hackers and numerous devs who were searching for exploits. It is free from all malicious functions, the game has been tested against exploits in a customised testing environment, and there is an emergency plan to save the game in case of potential hacks.

The result

When you research a game, and you can answer all of the above questions with “yes”, then it’s a good sign. Do the research yourself, and you’ll find that Crypto Legions scores 10/10 on the above checklist.