Playing Snook is not a Protected Right

TL;DR

We’ve identified playing behavior that give an unfair advantage. The right to Special Skin Rewards has been temporarily revoked from those specific Special Skins. Special Skins that will try to secure eligibility to Special Skin Rewards by gaining unfair advantages will be sanctioned similarly. We will make logs demonstrating this behavior public for review. In the future this process of enforcing sanctions will be controlled by the community.

The facts

During the night of November 18–19 we identified a group of concurrent players “feeding” a single Special Skin. Over several hours these players killed each other, resulting in nearly 250 dead snooks. Most kills did not yield any Traits. Every time a Trait dropped the Special Skin picked it up. Once the Special Skin collected 8 traits, which would make it eligible for Season 3 Special Skin Rewards, the coordinated attack was stopped.

We’re not cool with this because it comes from other players’ pockets!

Yes, we wrote “attack”. We see this type of activity as a criminal attack much the same way coordination of financial activities on stock markets are crimes. Activities that provide an unfair advantage over the general public result in skewed distribution of funds (in this case Special Skin Rewards). Their eligibility means that other players will get a smaller portion og the Special Skin Rewards. In simple English, what they did is the same as stealing money directly from other players’ wallets.

We will not stand for this.

Playing Snook is not a Protected Right

Therefore, effective retroactively from Nov 1st, we reserve the right to blacklist specific Special Skins and temporarily revoke their eligibility for Special Skin Rewards (i.e., the eligibility will be revoked only for the season in which we identified an unfair advantage). We will keep a close eye on those Special Skins in the following seasons.

Special Skin owners that are unable to claim their Special Skin Rewards are requested to contact us and we will notify them if their eligibility has been revoked.

It’s a centralized act and we’re not thrilled about it.

Yes, it is a centralized act and we really tried to avoid it. However, we could not sit idle when it came to hurting other players. In order to make sure these sanctions are above reproach we will publish the evidence (logs) for the community’s review.

In addition we are working on designing governance mechanisms that will allow this protective process to be decentralized in the future and controlled by the community.

Playing Snook is not a protected right — if you can’t play fair, try a different game.

We will be happy to answer any questions about this in our next Happy Hour.

Peace out.

The Snook Core Team