How the esports scene has suffered from scam and what problems need to be solved! herocoin.io Follow Jun 26, 2018 · 4 min read

With Valve’s implementation of skins into their esport titles and consequently introducing a marketplace for in-game cosmetics third parties saw “opportunities”. Those “opportunities” are far from reasonable business opportunities. Especially in CS:GO, skin betting sites gained huge popularity.

What’s the problem?

Skins are in-game wearables which can be equipped and only have a visual impact, thus they provide no advantage in the game. Since they are tradeable they have an underlying value, making the rarest and most popular ones worth thousands of dollars. Betting sites did not only influence the subjective perception of many passionate esports fans, where a large proportion of them are still young kids, but they also cheekily lied about the integrity of their platforms. On board with big personalities from the scene, like twitch.tv streamers and professional players, CS:GO skin betting sites basically ripped off their customers. Also the legal situation at that time did not give them a hard time, since many countries have been slow to organize suitable regulations for esports in general, let alone betting on esports or using in-game wearables as an item of value.

Scam Alert

Suddenly there were betting sites everywhere, popping out of nothing on mass. They may have different models, but in the end they are all determined by the same aspects: shady, untrustworthy, too good to be true and intransparent. Game modes differ from offering loot boxes which include different items of different value and users have a perceptual chance to open a rare item, to pure coinflips where you either double up or lose your stake.

Case CSGOshuffle

YouTube was flooded with videos showing people gambling on those sites and winning absurd amounts of money within no time. Well, they were sponsored, paid to do promotions for those sites. A peak was reached when the biggest CS:GO streamers started to substitute in-game content by just showing themselves gambling with skins. They were no regular players though. Reporter Richard Lewis leaked chatlogs which prove that the owner of CSGOshuffle provided inside information to one of the most popular streamers on twitch.tv and, back in the days, the biggest CS:GO streamer — “PhantomL0rd”, with 10.000 average live viewers. PhantomL0rd used his skins to participate in contests on CSGOshuffle, and in order to manipulate and monetize his audience, the owner of CSGOshuffle gave him live information about the winning chances. This meant he exactly knew how likely it is to win and when to stake high amounts of money and when not to. Of course, his audience wanted to experience the same success, too bad that at the end they ended up filling the pockets of both PhantomL0rd and CSGOshuffle. This is not an isolated case, next to others mOE is another prominent example with almost the same case, altogether they caused a big swing and a lot of drama in the esports scene. The industry has started to implement — forced or not — tools in order to provide a certain standard of security like “KYC” (Know your customer) but this is the minimum standard and not a technological improvement. It needs a real game changer, disrupting current systems to its core, building it up again with the true intention of creating a fairer, more transparent, manipulation free and trustless system.

It’s $PLAY time —

Revolutionizing online betting through the Blockchain

With every big event you have those “fly by night” organizations popping up and then disappearing a few weeks later leaving customers scratching their heads. Often it is suggested to use well-known betting sites with positive reputations and experience but what if there was a technological revolution that allows us to move and play without trusting anyone? We feel the same pain when it comes to online betting and have done a lot of pioneer work in that field. We are innovating online betting by enriching the industry with a smart contract, which can be implemented by literally every provider who wants to benefit from the advantages of operating on the blockchain. Thanks to the cryptocurrency $PLAY a fully automatized smart contract is triggered, which handles contests automatically and is a game changer when it comes to security. herosphere.gg is the first use case of HEROcoin, and one of the first real blockchain products worldwide. It is a peer-to-peer esports prediction and fantasy gaming platform. You experience great joy by gathering a free-to-play currency called “spheres”, which can be traded for various esports related items, goodies, peripherals, vouchers and many more. At the moment the implementation of HEROcoin on herosphere.gg is live, since a closed BETA phase has started on the 21st of June, consisting of three waves and will turn into an open BETA afterwards. This means the site fully runs on the blockchain offering a trustless environment for users.

*https://www.sportsbookreview.com/betting-sites/blacklist/