The Telegram-based game Hamster Kombat that emerged this year and quickly gained immense popularity among users has now faced big backlash from its community of players.
This is happening due to unclear issues that began arising around its highly awaited airdrop of HMSTR tokens.
After launching in March this year, Hamster Kombat has attracted an immense amount of 300 million players on Telegram. However, users are now deeply frustrated due to last-minute changes to the structure of the airdrop. And this frustration is growing bigger and bigger.
How Hamster Kombat Attracted 300 Million Users
Hamster Kombat is a play-to-earn (P2E) game created on the mini app platform provided by Telegram. The game combines simple to grasp clicker mechanics with the addition of more strategic elements. The team of the Hamster Kombat creators did not disclose the names or nicknames of all its members. However, it is known to be linked to Web3 integration and some other cryptocurrency projects.
The game gives players a chance to earn in-game coins thanks to clicking and solving various tasks, puzzles, and completing mini-games, such as challenges called the “Daily Combo” and “Daily Cipher”. The main in-game currency here is the HMSTR token. The team announced that on September 26 this year, it would conduct an airdrop to allow users claim those tokens in exchange for in-game ones they earned for clicking and performing tasks, solving puzzles.
While playing Hamster Kombat, players complete challenges every day – they match specific combinations of cards, solve puzzles which allows them to unlock various in-game rewards, like tokens, power-ups, cool and exclusive character skins. This game requires daily participation. Besides, extra bonuses can be earned by referring friends. This game also has a feature called a “cheating prevention”, which marks users that got suspected of leveraging bots. This, however, brought backlash from the community at the game and concerns about lack of fairness in it.
Overall, Hamster Kombat is a mixture of fun mini-games and crypto rewards. It is this blend that has been attracting a large amount of casual gamers and crypto enthusiasts. Besides, as the date of the promised airdrop drew closer, players expected to see a substantial increase of new users.
Issues With the Airdrop Get Tense
On Thursday, September 29, Hamster Kombat is preparing to launch its tradable HMSTR token via the airdrop. Over the weekend, the developers announced how many tokens players would be allowed to claim. Here comes a catch that made many Hamster Kombat players deeply frustrated and disappointed.
The tweet published by the team on September 22, summarized the results of the Season 1, stating that out of more than 300 million players that took part in the game since March 131 million of them qualified for the airdrop with 2.3 million banned for cheating. The post also said that 30.6 million players were unable to choose the withdrawal method before the deadline, however, they can still claim their HMSTR tokens.
From 100 billion tokens, the team said, 75% have been reserved for the community to grab. 60% of those will be distributed after Season 1, the tweet promised. From this amount, users will be able to claim 88.75% during the airdrop right away and 11.25% of HMSTR will be vested and unlocked ten months after the token gets listed on crypto exchanges – that’s approximately July next year. Another 15% will be dropped to users during Season 2 of the game.
These details were not previously told the players, hence the high level of frustration and indignation caused by this announcement. Players began to grumble on social media, slamming Hamster Kombat developers for this unpleasant twist.
Game Developers Need to Clarify the Mess
Some began calling the developers “scammers” for making many players’s six months’ gaming go down the drain for nothing. As for the cheaters announced in the tweet, players claimed that they found cutting off those users from the airdrop unfair since initially the developers said this would not be real disqualification but only a warning. Many of those disqualified players claim that was made wrongfully. Overall, this has made a huge dent on the game’s reputation and increased distrust to it for future players.
The developers are now expected to address those concerns and outright complaints in a formal statement in order not to leave the game’s future in question. Odds are high that without their response, the game is likely to lose its massive community of players and add more damage to its already chipped reputation.
So far, the HMSTR token has been listed on a few big-name exchanges, like OKX, Bybit and BitGet. Rumors have also been spreading about an approaching listing on Binance.
Many Hamster Kombat players feel like cheated shareholders and some are even willing to complain to the US securities regulator – the SEC, which discouraged Pavel Durov from launching the TON token in 2019 and making him eventually drop the project into the hands of the eager community.
