So, who are both of you and why did you start playing LiteBringer?

Shyrus: Hello, I’m Shyrus and I play Litebringer with two of my brothers. I got to know about LiteBringer because we were longtime Tibia players. We used to play Tibia back in 2003 with the dial-up internet. We started playing LiteBringer because we liked the idea, that every resource you have in the game is actually valuable and you can legally turn it into real money.

Jrlmjr: For pleasure. I am Jrlmjr, I am 27 years old, a lawyer in Brazil and a lover of poetry, philosophy, psychoanalysis, economics, logic, hermeneutics and constitutionalism. I got to know about Litebringer from friends in Tibia, which I have played since 2001, practically my whole childhood. When I heard about LiteBringer, I confess that I first took a backseat. But when analyzing the game’s market, I realized that this could be very profitable.

How did you both get in touch with each other?

Shyrus: Hmm, I believe jrlmjr was looking for a Tier 6 equipment set on the Discord trade channel. I used to be a big supplier back then. I used to sell some equipment to him, but pretty soon he became a supplier as well. We started brainstorming about strategies, game future, improvements and other stuff.

Jrlmjr: Correct. I bought my initial sets from Shyrus and started to farm my resources, both to grow in the game and to trade in order to recover the initial investment I had made as well as make a little profit.

How is this possible? Aren’t you competitors on the market?

Shyrus: I think we used to be competitors when we both were trying to sell Tier 6 equipment, but this market crashed a long time ago because there were too many sellers.

Nowadays we mainly sell Tier 6 Legendaries and Green Shards. I think the demand for these 2 items is way higher than the amount we can produce. We usually discuss prices, but we don’t have any kind of agreement. I can sell the items for how much I want to and so can he.

Jrlmjr: I’m not sure if we even were competitors selling these sets because I didn’t have as much in stock at the time and didn’t sell as much as Shyrus did. Since my investment was rather conservative, I didn’t start with 20 characters right away. I started with 8 and I split them between making sets, shards and stones. Over time I had enough characters to farm everything I needed, so I started to profit from sales. We did not have any agreement at the time and today we are friends discussing the future of the market, prices, etc.

What is your goal?

Shyrus: LiteBringer used to be just another game to me, so my main goal was to have some fun and be on the relevant leaderboards. Now I also see an opportunity to make a living out of it, as a part time job.

Jrlmjr: Initially my goal was to invest. I joined Litebringer because I saw an excellent investment opportunity and good market growth. Currently, I enjoy the competitiveness and the competition for leadership on the leaderboard.

Do you still have fun while gaming or is it just about doing business?

Shyrus: I still have some fun, mainly when I get a rare Tier 6 Legendary, haha. To be honest, I used to have much more fun when I wasn’t able to do all quests in the game, when I was still figuring out an efficient game strategy. Right now it’s kind of a mid-term, I’m doing business, but I also have some fun while I’m doing it. I believe with the release of new content (next update), there will be a need to figure out the best or most efficient strategy again and that’s something I really enjoy.

Jrlmjr: As I said, initially it was just an opportunity for investment and profit. At the moment I confess that I enjoy the competitiveness of the game and I imagine that it will be even better in future. So, right now, I really enjoy the game.

How much have you invested and what did you get in return?

Shyrus: I did not invest anything. I started on September 20th, 2020 and my only funding came from the emergency faucet on Discord. So far I’ve earned a little over 35 LTCs. One of my brothers started in December 2020, with an initial investment of 0.2 LTCs. Up to now, he has gathered 4.5 LTCs and his knight is worth about 4 LTCs.

Jrlmjr: I started in November 2020 and invested 0.5 LTC. At that time, one Litecoin cost about 60-70 dollars. Up to now, I have managed to earn a little bit more than 22 LTCs, that is within 2 months and excluding what I have reinvested, the number of items I have still up for sale or the production that is still ongoing. It is just insane!
Despite all this, there is still a LOT of space for new players and new investors. The game has just begun and the market has still got many opportunities.

We have already communicated, that we will release new content in the near future. How do you prepare yourselves?

Shyrus: I have just stopped selling resources and I’m starting to stock them up, buying any cheap offer I see. I believe there will be a large number of these needed to be able to clear new contents and if that’s true, the demand will increase and with that, the price will increase as well.

Jrlmjr: Regarding the next update, I imagine that the market will go to the moon. Even now, before the update, the market is still growing, with eventual losses at times when the price reaches a high level (normal volatility). The reason for my prognosis is that the new content will most likely be much more difficult than the current one. The simple reason: It will have to last until the next content update. With that in mind, I think the race for the leadership and the unlocking of the new content will be huge.

Like Shyrus, I think there are not enough resources going around for everyone to be able to have characters at the top of the game, so prices will go up. In my view, there are two possible strategies: Save the resources to sell them after the update or use them to be able to reach the new goals within the game. Who knows what awaits us reaching the new goals. Probably incredible legendary and rare items? We’ll soon find out.

Would you mind telling us your strategy?

Shyrus: I’d say the most important strategy is to have a deep understanding of the game mechanics. It’s very important to know exactly how Power, Elements and Effects will affect the number of rounds of a chosen quest and consequently the reward amount. If you know the game and have the know-how to calculate the sum of an arithmetic progression, you can calculate the reward amount. With that you can create lots of spreadsheets and find out what is the most efficient way to reinvest your resources.

Studying the market, finding out what the demand is and trying to farm that resource, efficiently, is my/a good strategy. Certain classes are best for certain specific tasks. A properly geared and skilled character can farm more than ten times the amount of Green Shards than a poorly geared or poorly skilled character with the same investment.

I believe I was the first player that had a fully skilled Knight back in October. In total, I reinvested more than 2 LTCs to build him – Fighter Scrolls used to cost 15 lites each back then. I used him to farm big amounts of Green Shards which sold quite well. I sold 4k Green Shards for 320 lites. Within a month I had my investment back. From that time on, that character was just generating profit. For instance, the day before this interview I sold 1kk Green Shards for 3 LTCs.

Jrlmjr: I can only agree with Shyrus. Focusing on how to adapt to unknown future content: You can either save your resources for the future and buy up cheap resource offers – and they will be sold cheaper at some point due to the need for some players, who are new to making quick money, to repay their subscriptions and to continue growing their account. You will then be able to sell them after the update when their price rises. This way you will make some easy money. Or you can save your resources for the future and use them when we have the information we need to know where to properly invest those resources to compete for new markets early on.

To me the issue here seems to be more temporal: Those who are not afraid to invest before the update will have more gains than those who are conservative. This does not mean that after the update it is not worth investing in the game. On the contrary, after the update the market will be on fire and you will profit. The point is that before the update your investment will come at a cheaper price and it will probably bring you an earlier return, compared to those who invest later. The game is still in an embryonic phase and just beginning. The update, will be its birth and you will have many years of life ahead, to eternity.

What would you recommend to newcomers?

Shyrus: Learn the GAME MECHANICS!

If you can afford to invest in the game, do it efficiently so you can get your investment back fast and grow to start profiting. Create or buy 20 characters as fast as you can. Buy some cheap T6 equipment sets. Gear your characters with them. Progress all these gears to level 15. In 1 to 2 days, you will be able to evolve your characters into advanced classes. From this moment on, you have enough power to do the weekly scroll quest. Scrolls are the cash cows for beginners because each scroll sells for 0.5 to 2 lites.

If you can’t afford to invest in the game, try selling every scroll you get until you have a better understanding of the game. Try creating more characters with the lites you get from the scrolls. As soon as you made some lites buy a few T6 gears to grow.

After that you’ve got to find out what you want to farm and do it EFFICIENTLY. You don’t waste precious resources on things that aren’t going to be useful.

Jrlmjr: Learn to be EFFICIENT!

Everything you do, the more efficient you are, the more profit you will make. There is no point in investing 5 LTCs in a character to farm something, if he does not do it well. That is practically like throwing your money out of the window, even if the character will farm relatively well. If that same value had been used for another more efficient character in that specific location, you’d be doing a LOT more. The whole game is based on efficiency.

Learn to observe how the market behaves, what is in short supply. Act when you see that there is a current or future buying trend. Use the leaderboard to check what other players are doing. There is no point in producing 100 tons of meat for a vegetarian market. Your 100 tons of meat will not even be worth 1 kilo of vegetables. Understand that the existence of the value of something is directly linked to the demand and the need it has for a system.

If you have the possibility to start the game with an investment, this will put you well ahead of other players. Start by trying to create a little of each. Create your T6 farmers, your stone farmers and your shard farmers, thereby making yourself self-sufficient. If that is not an option, start slowly. Sell your initial scrolls to get money for subscriptions and never run out of funds. Reinvest your shards and stones in your character to get him to farm more and more.

What exactly has happened when a client desyncs is a heavily discussed topic in our community. Over time some complex theories evolved. Some gamers argue, that it happens when transactions are sent too fast successively. However, none of those theories are correct. In fact, one gamer can’t cause it on their own. It originates from the node network and how forks are handled.

The clients interpret every block and compute the current game state. If a fork appears it depends on the connected nodes which of these blocks are accepted. Consequently, the player base could split and play with different game states. Such a split would repeat at every fork. From this moment, players would not be able to interact with each other anymore.

Security feature

Of course, this is something that should never ever happen, so we implemented a bulletproof method to prevent it. Our clients have an inbuilt fork detection which allows them to revert up to six blocks on their own. This means all the game operations which had taken place in those blocks have to be computed again starting from the block from which the chain has split.

Even exchanges and banking services regard blocks older than 6 blocks as safe and forks of that length as extremely unlikely to happen. However, the testnet proved that this can indeed happen if the mining difficulty becomes extremely easy or the used mining power of a single miner surpasses the current combined computing power excessively. In such cases, we even experienced forks of more than 40 blocks.

So we implemented a service which enables us to handle forks of any dimension. To achieve that, it does nearly the same as what the clients do: detect forks. The trick is that both, the client and the service communicate with each other and compare the hash of the current game state. If the hashes match, there is no need to worry. If they are not the same, this is a clear indication that there is currently an active fork and your client and the service operate with different blocks.

You might be wondering why you can’t proceed to play during the syncing. That is easy to explain and you will agree that it is the right thing to do. We are protecting you against actions you do not want to carry out.

Worst case scenario

Let’s play through the worst case scenario and ignore the integrity service: You have sent a character on a quest during a prior block and you are currently dismantling equipment you do not need. Now a fork appears and your client and the integrity service are connected to nodes which operate with different blocks.

Because the reward of the quests is based on the position of the transaction within the block and the hash of a block, the service and your client will compute different rewards for the character who is on a mission. While the service thinks you received a legendary piece of equipment, your client computes that you received equipment without any relevance. Without the integrity service and a forced resync, you might dismantle the equipment without realizing that you would get a legendary piece if the other chain became the main chain.

Let’s introduce some more chaos. This time it is the other way round. You received a legendary holy ring while the integrity service computes a basic nature ring. You might equip and upgrade it and send your hero on a quest with bosses using physical damage which you can only clear because of the ring.

If now the other chain becomes the mainchain and your client detects that it is in a fork the game operations would do a rollback. Consequently, the legendary holy ring would become a basic nature ring. The elemental bonus for the mission would become a disadvantage and you would fail the quest. However, the upgrading would still have taken place so you would end up with useless equipment in which you invested a lot of resources.

You see, even if a desync is rather annoying it is still better than the situations you might get into if we did not have such strict standards about handling forks.

Most of our community has already played for a month. Some have lost the lites we handed out for free, others made already a small fortune. In this interview, we will have a talk with the gamer Ainz Ooal Gown who plays the market as Paganini played the violin.

When did your journey start?

I started playing LiteBringer on September 17th, around 8:00 PM. Sitting on my throne, answering the holy call of mother nature when I saw an ad about this game that CipSoft had made, and decided to try it out. Since I was already sitting upon a throne, might as well try to act like a king, maybe a tyrant.

What was your main intention for playing LTB?

To be honest, Idle games always made me pretty hooked to them, stuff like Cookie Clicker, Idle Heroes, Tangerine Tycoon, you name it, I’ve probably played it. I just wanted to have some fun, and since CipSoft was a company I was already quite familiar with, it was a plus.

How many lites did you start with?

I started with 10 lites that were given to me to start playing, on the 17th. However, I didn’t play for longer than one hour that day, I’d say I truly started the next day.

How many do you have now?

Right now I sit with around 3000 lites in my wallet, sometimes I got to transfer some to another wallet…I kinda got into day trade with cryptos after starting on LiteBringer.

Were there further investments?

Nah, zero, nada. The 10 lites were all I had.

What’s the secret?

You must play the market. However, most people coming in want to just ‘make some money’ outta it. They are too scared to try anything, holding to every lite they can get. This makes it very easy to play the market. Surely, there are bigger fish than me as when it comes to how many lites they have. But since the game is still fresh, even people with small investments can play a big role there.

Does knowing the mechanics of the gameplay a big role in staying ahead?

Indeed, not knowing the specifics of the game, how it operates on a certain tier, makes it so you have to waste not only a not of time re-equipping characters, but also waste a LOT of stones on the process.

What are the things that you can do in the market?

Since people aren’t sure of the price of certain resources, they tend to hold them or just try to analyze the market not too deeply. Thus, if I flood the market with hundreds of offers of a certain value, it leads the majority of the player base to ACTUALLY believing that is the price of a resource. From there onward, I just need to buy all their stones, and cancel my offers, playing the market.

That is but one of dozens of things that can be done there.

Does knowing how to play the market play a big role in progressing quickly?

A hundred percent! For a very fast progression, you need not only to know how the game works. Besides that, get even more resources than your regulars characters would farm — through the market.

Why are you sharing your secrets?

I just think the game would be way more fun if I had more people trying to do the same, right now it’s been a bit boring to be honest…since I’m catching up to Postpunk, which was my main goal, lol. On Top of that, the thrill of having people trying to compete would make me smile.

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions!

You are welcome!

Most people only heard about LiteBringer since we announced our release in the Litening series of our partner the Litecoin Foundation. However, LiteBringer is a bit older than that. We released officially, on August the 4th but did not announce it broadly. Nevertheless, some gamers found us, tested it and already became masters.

One of these early adopters is Postpunk. When you are active on Discord you surely have seen the pink fluffy unicorn on a rainbow he is using as a profile picture. In our interview tells us how he got here and explains parts of his strategy.

When did you start playing LiteBringer?

I was there from the very first day when it was released on the mainnet. I would have played LiteBringer while it was still in the testing phase, but I was busy at the time.

So why did you start?

I stumbled over it when I was browsing for some blockchain games. After some research and when I realized it is a game which doesn’t use a server, I was hooked. In addition, the true ownership regarding in-game assets was interesting and worth giving it a shot.

Was there anything you liked about the gameplay of LiteBringer in particular?

To be honest, there are tons of games out there stating that they are free to play but it is impossible when you are a non-paying player to compete against paying players. In LiteBringer you know exactly what costs there are and if you are willing to pay for a subscription you have exactly the same chance as everyone else. Besides that, the reward system is a fair one. There is not one unique asset which brings money. LiteBringer is not a slot machine. You get rewarded when you understand the game and its mechanics and are better in adapting your strategy than others.

What other games are you playing?

I like MMORPGs in general and RTS in particular.

What is the most promising strategy to earn Litecoins?

To mine Litecoins. Just kidding. I think a good way to get Litecoins in LiteBringer is farming resources and to sell them on the marketplace.

What is the most important thing a beginner should remember when starting to play?

Go to the map and get a basic understanding of where you can find resources and equipment to progress to the next tier but also plan ahead! Which path through the tiers do you want to follow? This is a question which can and should be answered while waiting for the characters to complete their first few rounds of farming equipment.

What would you tell someone who wants to make progress fast?

Pick a broad variety of characters to get a matching gear set as fast as possible. In addition, do not lose time evolving your equipment. In comparison to the time, you will need to farm the elemental stones you will only get a minor power boost. Leveling up your equipment is more than enough for the first few tiers and should be your number 1 priority.

How would you describe your strategy in general?

Basically, I stick to the strategy I explained earlier: Stick with a broad variety!

Do you think you found the best strategy?

At this early stage this is difficult to say. The amount of hardcore gamers is still comparatively low. However, I do not believe that there is something like a ‘golden strategy‘. The strategies I’m aware of all have a different focus. Other players follow different plans and they still made good progress.

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions and your tips which will surely help beginners.

You are welcome!

After our Update 7.0 the private trade was temporarily broken while public trades still functioned as intended. So some of our community wondered how this was possible. In this techtalk, we will not only explain the differences but also what caused the error in detail.

Generally speaking private and public trades work in the same way but for private trades, we do not write all required data in the blockchain. To explain the process better, let’s go through it step by step.

What exactly happens

If someone wants to trade an asset privately, the trade out is written in the blockchain as a transaction, exactly like a public trade. That means it also requires a transaction fee. Now the second transaction which is needed when trading publicly, is not required in a private trade because the trade offer is not engraved in the blockchain. Consequently, no one knows its details. This makes it impossible for a stranger to finalize the trade.

The trade offer is only encoded as a Base 64 string and contains hardly any information other than the price and how the price must be combined with the trading token which was signed by the seller. The rest is gibberish.

Base 64 strings are anything but a secure encoding. Every client and even some online services can decode it. However, it is not supposed to be secure, it is there to make the sending and receiving of data more convenient.

When the information is viewed by a potential buyer and is decrypted he knows what the trade-in will look like. Now he is able to combine the signed trading token with the correct amount of coins to create a transaction with a valid signature.

The price information is created and stored locally which is why it is not only possible to set a new price after the trade out is created but gamers are also able to create multiple different offers for the same asset.

This is possible because the signature — which is part of the Base 64 string — describes what a valid transaction must look like, in other words, how the coins and the trading token should be combined. Consequently, there is an infinite number of possible signatures but all signatures for the same price are the same.

So what went wrong in Update 7.0?

When a private trade is created, no miner fee is needed, and hence no fee rate is added. But we had to set a fixed fee in update 6.1 because the automatic fee was insufficient to create public trades. We classified the problem with the public trades as fatal because we wanted to release an update as fast as possible. So, we reduced the testing phase to an absolute minimum. Unfortunately, the edge case was not found before the release.

What a transaction history does is most certainly obvious. Therefore, we will rather share some insight into the process of problem solving when you happen to be the first to deal with such a situation.

Unfortunately, it is not as easy as just collecting and saving the game operations locally. What if a gamer decides to play on a different computer? What happens in case of a resync started by one of our gamers or we have to force a resync to implement a brand new feature?

In that case the collected data would be destroyed instantly because the client would download the preloaded blockchain in which only the final game state is precomputed. Even if we opened the precomputed game state to include the needed data, sooner or later it would end in disaster! Collecting the necessary data of just 500 players would cause the preloaded blockchain service to grow by about 10 MB per month. This would lead to enormous data packets after just a short period of our game running.

Besides, our balance tracker service which is very useful to reduce the syncing time only transmits transactions which contain unspent outputs. This means that using our service simply on the basis of its data would result in an inconsistent transaction history. Nevertheless, we did not want to give this feature just to people who are willing to sync the wallet of their own accord to include all transactions!

This is why we figured out a solution which fulfills all our needs.

We readjusted our services and searched for a suitable area for transaction tracking. Finding this area was especially tricky and the most difficult part of the creation of the transaction history.

Only specific locations in the flow of data result in a consistent data set. These are situated in the area where the data is extracted directly from the blockchain. Unfortunately, there is one important thing missing in those suitable areas: Information regarding the current version.

This led to a major problem: If the preloaded game state is used when starting the game, you automatically end up with the latest version. At that moment, data related to a prior game version can no longer be interpreted. The solution was a self-computed resync which does not have this problem. The client analyzes the relevant data in chronological order and updates the game version whenever it has to.

The other problem was related to forks which caused some transactions to be displayed twice in the transaction history. It was possible, at least in theory, that a not completed transaction was displayed in case someone would try to spend the same coin twice.

To solve this issue was not as easy as you might expect. The block explorer we use, ElectrumX, has the needed feature to compute the history but has a soft limitation regarding the size of the result. After we got rid of this limitation, we were confronted by the next problem. The output of the explorer only contains transaction IDs and the block height but not the transaction data we needed, which is why every single transaction would have to be checked with the block explorer.

Because every game operation equals a transaction, the number of transactions can get enormous in a short period of time. For instance, one of our team members created 16.000 transactions while the game was still in the testing phase. To compute such an account would take the block explorer about 20 seconds. If more than one complex account should be computed at the same moment the waiting time would reach an unacceptable length.

To solve this, we created a database which tracks every transaction ID and the corresponding transaction data. Whenever data is requested from ElectrumX the transaction IDs are compared with the cache. After that, only the data of transactions which is not already in the cache is downloaded.

In addition, we decided to compress the data by 80 percent. In the end, we were able to reduce the processing time to 300 milliseconds on average.

If you have played LiteBringer you have most certainly noticed that the client is downloading a data package from time to time. We call it preloaded blockchain. That may look time-consuming but in reality, it saves you a lot of time. Here is the reason why.

Developing a game completely on a blockchain has one major problem: Every client has to know everything that is written in the blockchain up to now. But it takes very long to download the whole blockchain with all transactions and to compute the current game state. For instance, the Litecoin blockchain — on which LiteBringer is operating on — is about 34 GB. (2/25/20)

To shorten the waiting time before starting the game, we are offering two different services. We call them balance tracker and preloaded blockchain. The preloaded blockchain is a bundle that contains all relevant data to download. It includes the headers, relevant game transactions, and the precomputed game state.

Every client must have all relevant information about the game. If it wouldn’t be always up to date, it would not be possible to verify a trade offer for instance and therefore, it could happen that an offers sold twice.

Why can’t I start playing right after the download?

While the client is up to date after the download, it does not know your balance yet. So it has to search for every transaction related to your wallet.

Why does the client starts computing on the first block?

A block of the blockchain is connected to the previous block through its header. Theoretically, it is not mandatory to start from the beginning and we could start at a later state to reduce the waiting time even more.

It is only needed to compute the mined blocks since the creation of the used wallet, but we don’t know when that moment was. Theoretically, Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, can join our game with his wallet that exists from the beginning.

In that case, the first few blocks would be relevant, too. Therefore, we decided to use a technically clean solution and are starting on the first block, the genesis block.

Why is the preloaded blockchain not downloaded at every login?

To save bandwidth and time of our users! We decided that we publish a package every 24-hours for now.

It depends on many factors if it is more time-efficient to compute the blocks on your own or to download the preloaded game state. If you use a slow connection to download the data package, it could be less time-consuming for a user to compute the game process on his own.

For now, we guessed that a daily download is the easiest and fastest way, but we will evaluate it later and are able to adjust it anytime.

Some of you who play LiteBringer excessively have already stumbled over error 4013 which states that there are too many chained transactions and no further game actions can be done in this block. So, why does that happen? In just 3 minutes, you will know why and understand that this limitation is reasonable.

First of all, let us do a step backwards and talk about what happens during a transaction. Unfortunately, Litecoin transactions are not as easy as what you are used to when using fiat money. With physical currency you just hand over the money and get your change in return.

Let’s get metaphorical

With Litecoin you don’t have a specific number of Litoshi in your wallet. It is more like a certificate that proves that you own a precious single gold coin which is stored with a person you trust. If you want to pay someone with a fraction of it, you both go to the person who holds the coin. You fill out a contract that grants the person you want to pay a fraction of the coin. Then you receive a new certificate which states the current percentage of the coin you own and your prior certificate granting you the whole coin becomes obsolete. As soon as you leave the office this transaction becomes valid.

If you want to pay multiple people at the same time, you don’t have to go there with every single person, one after the other. If for instance you want to pay 2 people at the same time, all 3 of you can enter the office of the attorney together. You pay the first one and get a new certificate back. Then you pay the second person and receive the final certificate in return.

This works great until you try to get into the office with a thousand people, who you want to pay at the same time. To avoid chaos, the attorney will only let you pass in small groups at any one time.

What the mempool does

The mempool plays the role of the attorney’s office as described in the metaphor above. In the mempool are transactions which are not yet validated and part of a block. If a transaction is finalized, the buyer receives the “change” as an output of the mempool transaction. If the buyer wants to carry out another transaction this “change” can also be used for the new transaction. In return, he will again receive a new mempool transaction output. Since the second transaction depends on the first one, these are called chained transactions.

When a reorg is happening, the mempool will have to be cleaned out to maintain consistency. In that case it cannot be known how many transactions have to be cleared, or which transactions will become invalid, which is why certain precautions ensure the maintenance will not be overly expensive.

Without regulation, there might be 10,000 children who have to be dropped because of one single bad parent. This results in a massive crawl of a gigantic proportion in the mempool. Therefore, it is reasonable to limit the relationships a new transaction can have with those already in the mempool. A default node will not allow a transaction with more than 25 ancestors or descendants in the mempool.

Why we need to follow the rules

Transactions which follow the rules and fulfill this and other certain conditions are called standard transactions. This does not mean, that other types are prohibited. Litecoin allows us to create some very complex transactions. For instance, they can contain several outputs, signatures or junk. Transactions of the last category can stem from bad and malicious software but also from old or broken transactions.

It is not forbidden to create such transactions but they are discouraged by defining rules for standard transactions. These are accepted by all default configured nodes and relayed to others on the network.

Non-standard transactions, in contrast, are not allowed in the mempool of default configured nodes, if they are not yet included in a block. Consequently, they are not broadcasted throughout the network. Nevertheless, a miner can actively decide to accept such a transaction! However, this depends on whether the miner is willing to do that. Most miners use standard nodes, which is why it can take a lot of time before a single miner working with a non-standard transaction can create a block.

How to get rid of the limitation and why we won’t

Of course, we would be able to allow our gamers to create infinite transaction chains. But this would result in delayed validation. In most cases, the game would get stuck for hours or even days. So, this is the reason why we decided to follow the regulations that create standard transactions only.

Another option would be that we split the funds at the moment they are transferred to the LiteBringer wallet. Using the metaphor above, we would melt the goldcoin and make several smaller one. Each of them could be used for a different transaction chain. This would multiply the amount of transactions that are possible per block and it would not be possible to push reach the limit in the average 2.5 minutes until the next block is mined.

But if we split the coins on default, everyone who wants to transfer funds to their LiteBringer wallet would have to pay increased transaction fees. Increased fees would also occur when a player wants to buy items with more than one single part of the splitting. In our opinion, it is not reasonable to increase the financial burden for everyone just to eliminate a limit which will only be reached in very rare conditions and would only need seconds to disappear again.

The continuous flow of operations on the blockchain creates items and resources in LiteBringer. All clients follow the same game logic, resulting in all of them computing the game state and the assets of all the players correctly.

The rewards a player receives for completing a wave of enemies is determined by the hash of the block.

We use it as a seed for our random generator. Of course, it is just a pseudo-randomization like any other random generator. Nevertheless, when using the hash of the latest block as the seed, it is practically impossible to predict the outcome.

The numbers created by the random generator are assigned to the game transactions in chronological order by the clients. Despite that, one output is not equal to one item! The first number decides the type of item you receive, for example, a ring or an amulet. The second number defines the attributes of the item, the third the element, the fourth the main attribute and the fifth the effect of an asset.

To receive assets a player has to go on a quest which is basically a transaction containing all information of that action. Then the client sends such a transaction to miners through the network. As soon as one of them creates a new block the transaction becomes part of the blockchain.

At this point, every client knows exactly, which operation a player performed. The clients compute whether a character is strong enough to beat the enemy of a certain block’s wave and the rewards he is going to get. Such an operation is repeated with every block.

With the help of our service tool the “preloaded blockchain” we have now been able to accelerate the syncing with the game database. Besides that, we were able to speed up the download of the blockchain. Nevertheless, the calculation of a player’s balance is still very time consuming. Unfortunately, there is no way to use the existing service to speed up this process.

Our vision was to speed up the syncing of wallets as much as possible. Until recently it had always been necessary to parse the whole blockchain starting with the genesis block, to find out if there were unspent outputs for transactions. This used to be done by each client for the specific address in use.

What the balance tracker does

In our update 5.0 we introduced our service called “balance tracker”. It utilizes a block explorer to reduce the waiting time as the client does not have to compute the balance on its own.

A block explorer creates a separate database, is able to extend it with data from the full node and keeps itself updated constantly. To do so it is connected with a full node in which all transactions are included.

Please note that we did not just add a block explorer to our game. Firstly, it would not deliver the exact data which would be needed to initialize the tracker in our client. Receiving the balance of an address is not a problem. However, it does not receive the corresponding UTXOs which are needed, so we have to get those separately for every single transaction.

Secondly, the service eliminates potential errors if the explorer changes its output or if we decide that another block explorer suits our needs better. For instance, we can update it anytime without releasing a new game version.
So we have decided to enable our client to communicate with our service. The service is in contact with the block explorer which gets its data from a full node.

How the block explorer works

It was quite hard to find a suitable explorer. The widely used NBXplorer, for instance, is just a minimalistic UTXO tracker whose main use is to track addresses — and only those which were actively registered. We tried to expand the explorer but it turned out that tracking a huge amount of addresses is simply not possible within a reasonable implementation time.
Other explorers were unusable because their technology did not match our needs. After all, we operate on CentOS 7 which only uses stable components. Most modern explorers were not an option because CentOS 7 does not use Python 3.7 and they require a later version. Therefore, we decided to use the ElectrumX server.

To communicate with the explorer the client sends a script hash. With the UTXO the block explorer searches for all corresponding transactions. When the data is collected, it is sent to our game client which computes the available funds.

This information is transferred to the client in a small data package which can be downloaded in a very short time. So your waiting time was reduced from several hours, when doing it by yourself, to just a few seconds!

Nevertheless, this will not replace our preloaded blockchain service. Both fulfill 2 different tasks: While the preloaded blockchain service accelerates collecting game data, the balance tracker is responsible for a speedy calculation of your funds.

Of course, you do not have to use any of our services! As a true blockchain game, we want to give our players maximum freedom. You can turn them off at anytime in the settings. Please note, the waiting time for starting up will be considerably longer if you do not use our services.