Welcome back to the Tribe! In this post we are going to dive straight into some of the largest burdening issues on the Zed Run platform. In this post we take a look at the Zed Run status in terms of racing.
Nothing should be considered investment or financial advice. Enjoy the ride!
Zed Run Status
While it’s easy to point out failures or problems, we always want to take a multiple step approach to any review or status update.
Most importantly, we need to always acknowledge the successes of any project before digging into some of the shadows behind the scenes.
First of all, lets go over some of the huge accomplishments that the Zed team has recently undertaken:
- Hosted the first ever successful Zed Run official Tournament – We would consider this a huge success for the platform.
- The platform has successfully tried to implement several features that the community asked for showing that they are receptive to their investors and users.
- There have been additional partnerships and special events going on showing the increasing interest form outside third parties looking to get in on the action.
- The VHS team behind the platform has continued to grow and are currently looking for a bunch of new people to join the team which is always exciting. We are sure once these shoes are filled, there will be more improvements and changes happening faster.
- Finally, we have personally had great experiences with the Zed Run support team showing again that their users are a prime focus.
Those are probably our biggest PROs right now for the platform. Each of these bullet points deserve a round of applause so please keep up the great work!
Looking to the Cracks
Unfortunately, this post has more to it than just shiny accolades.
Therefore, lets kick things off with the blaring issue at hand that has made us stop using the platform as much – the racing elo system.
Zed Run Racing
We want to stress that everything we say should be taken as constructive rather than critically.
Although, we have recently seen a number of stables completely stop racing with our stable being one in particular.
Why would stables just stop racing their horses?
Well, simply due to the amount of egregious competition on the track.
For instance, we have a class 3 horse called Different Gravey that flames around 80% of the time in the 1000m and has a racing strength of around 84%-85% thanks to the Zed tools. This horse is a winner and monster at the sprint.
EVEN with him we can not enter most class 3 races regardless of the prize pool. Why? Because of the amount of over competition currently on the track.
There are horses racing all day that have 100% flames over hundreds of races, and have won thousands and thousands of Ethereum in profit.
It seems unfeasible that out of all our horses, it is not advantageous for us to race any of them. Mind everyone, that we did not skimp on investing in the platform or our stable. In total, our stable cost easily over $100 thousand with a majority of our horses being genesis proven racers with over 10% win rates.
We can’t imagine the stress that smaller stables are currently experiencing and those that looked to cash-flow positive with their investment in Zed Run.
Zed Run Market
A majority of this stress is also stemming from the open market.
The prices of horses have fallen through the floor with almost all horses value dropping substantially in the past 2 months. While Ethereum is surging, it does not quite compensate because the breeding fees, and mating fees have scaled similarly causing issues there as well.
Worse than that, the availably of people looking to breed has fallen off due to the decreased utility of horses currently and overall worsening cash flow valuation.
Lets look at the full picture:
- Probably around 90%-95% of horses can no longer racer profitably in any class
- It is no longer profitable to breed and sell offspring at reasonable levels for most bloodlines
- In addition, certain bloodlines like Szabos can barely sell out in Stud even at the minimum with decent positive win-rates.
- Last of all, the platform is still riddled with bugs and issues decreasing user interaction and sentiment
These facts do not paint a pretty picture.
What Can Be Done?
This is the million dollar question right?
Sadly, we do not have the experience to fully advise on solutions, but we will still try. Here is our take on the elo system.
Elo System
Zed needs to seriously refer to other popular games and gambling systems about how they manage their elo systems better.
Being a semi-professional gamer at one point, we’ve seen many games struggle with this, but it is even more important with money is involved.
One thing is for sure, new stables should NEVER be faced with proven horses like POODL to the Moon or LBJ Goat against their $200 horse looking to just test out the platform. It does not make sense on any level of gambling or gaming.
In fact, it is quite unacceptable to have a platform that pairs up these kinds of horses and stables. It should not even be possible.
Reflecting on our gaming days, there was no way to basically end up playing against a pro in a lower elo game accept for possibly on NORMAL or UNRANKED matches.
In this scenario the normal and unranked games would correlate to the free races.
Clearly, this needs to be address or eventually stables like ourselves will just stop racing. We will breed and stud, but never touch the track. It doesn’t make sense to race our horses when we know they will more than likely lose or just continually come in fourth or third at best.
Proposed changes
The best system we can think of is a mix of these things below:
- There needs to be a clear segregation of stronger and proven stables from the newer stables in general. Not fully, but there should be races that only stables with a number of wins or total winnings can enter.
- There also needs to be a better individual horse ranking system that involves winnings and not just win rate. Clearly, the win rate system can be abused, so a mixed elo system that limits available races based on winnings and win rate will server to section off horses that should never be paired up with weaker or cheap horses.
- Finally, there needs to be a segmented track. No more of these races from “different cities” or colored tracks. There needs to be completely different areas where stables can go to race horses that you can not be mixed with other tracks or competition. For instance, there might be a section of the site that only allows genesis horses, or a section that only stables with over 500 wins can enter. This will serve to remove competition as well from the general mass and alleviate some of this pressure.
Zed Run Status Post
This post is getting a bit heavy, so we are going to end it here. We will continue to revisit this and obviously keep the community updated on our opinions and status of racing. Overall, the Zed Run ecosystem still has all the potential it had months ago and more. These are just growing pains that will hopefully be solved sooner than later.
The team has already acknowledged these problems and are working on fixes. We are just taking the time to cover and discuss them!
Cheers
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