Introduction to Showdown - A Skill-based Wagering and eSports Platform powered by Relative Finance

Watch the Showdown introduction video here:

Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Clan Battles

• Win2Earn

• Platform Flow

• Back-end Architecture

• Closed Beta Sign-up Form

Introduction:

Showdown Gaming aims to revolutionise the eSports and competitive wagering landscape by bringing the benefits of the Web3 ecosystem to Web2 gaming. This involves creating a bridge between the two ecosystems and allowing gamers to use decentralised financial tools within the traditional gaming environment. The goal is to provide a platform where gamers can seamlessly wager, transact, and compete using a secure and transparent blockchain-based system.

The gaming industry is a significant contributor to the global economy with its revenues surpassing that of the global movie industry, and its continued growth presents a unique opportunity for DeFi integration. However, the slow adoption of Web3 payment solutions in Web2 gaming platforms has prevented gamers from experiencing decentralised finance's many benefits such as reduced fees, increased security, and financial autonomy when participating in Web2 gaming platforms. The initially slow adoption of Web3 payment solutions represents a significant gap in the market that needs to be addressed to ensure a seamless transition between the two ecosystems.

Key pain points

1. As of now, tournaments and wagering in Web2 gaming are primarily offered by centralised platforms that are trust-based, opaque, and custodial.

2. All game wagering and eSports platforms that currently exist either focus on speculative betting on professional matches or if focused on skill-based wagering for recreational gamers, are not scalable, as they require users to manually report the result of games played.

3. Lack of win 2 earn solutions integrated with existing web2 games, leading to reduced web2 user acquisition for the web3 gaming ecosystem.

Relative’s unique smart contract architecture will be used to power the first game-agnostic application that will facilitate automated and instantaneous settlement of wagers and tournaments by querying the game server directly for match results and posting them onto the blockchain. The platform's smart contracts automatically manage the distribution of winnings based on predetermined rules, providing a fair, transparent and trustless environment for players to operate in.

Until now, the ability to earn a monetary reward for hours of hard-work and dedication has only been available to eSports teams or top-ranked players and professionals. Showdown will democratise the gaming industry by giving players the opportunity to bet on their own skills and unlock a new paradigm for gaming. Showdown will launch with wagering and win 2 earn for CSGO while also focusing on other popular multiplayer games which have an open source server architecture that is compatible with Showdown.

Web3 games had over 1.15 million daily active wallets in 2022, but this constitutes only 0.03% of the total gamers worldwide (3 billion). The potential market is massive - with the majority of projects in the GameFi sector failing to attract the web2 gaming community. With recent advancements in fiat on-ramps, account abstractions, and gasless transactions, Showdown can benefit from the removal of significant barriers that previously existed to onboarding web2 users onto the blockchain.

Clan Battles

Players can either wager in a 1v1 mode or in a clan v clan mode, and can determine game type, mode and rulesets of their choice. Game parameters include variables such as; the map, number of rounds, restricted weapons, wager per player, and the scheduled time of wager.

Once the game is over, the smart contract queries the game result directly from Relative’s web2 gaming oracle which is directly integrated with the CSGO servers and the platform initiates a payout to the winning team.

Win-to-Earn

The Showdown platform introduces the first ever win-to-earn game modes for Web 2 gaming titles. Win to Earn ensures a fair and logical distribution of rewards as a player must win against others in order to receive a reward as opposed to the conventional play to earn model which incentivizes participation over merit. These rewards can be accumulated and utilised to wager on Showdown allowing for a skillful gamer to first generate capital that can then be compounded through successful showdown victories.

Platform Flow

The user interaction flow on Showdown is designed to be as intuitive and user-friendly as possible:

• Players log-in to the Showdown platform using their Steam IDs after which a Web3 wallet is instantly generated and linked to their Steam ID.

• Showdown will integrate with payment gateways to provide players with a convenient way of converting their fiat money to crypto and vice versa.

• After logging in through Steam, players can browse through various games, create or join clans, challenge other players, compete for rewards in our public servers, and place their wagers using cryptocurrencies.

Clan Management:

After logging into Showdown with their SteamIDs players have the option of either creating or joining a clan. The creator of a Clan is assigned the Clan leader role and will have admin control on adding players, assigning players role and permissions, and initiating challenges/ wagers. Each Clan will have its own unique id with the platform tracking match stats and wagering history record. A clan can have an unlimited number of players.

A clan can whitelist which players it wants to participate in a specific wager, league or tournament.

Alternatively clans can recruit players based on filters such as language, skill level and role to find and attract new players.

Players themselves will be able to search for clans and request invites into their preferred clans.

Anti-Cheat and Dispute Resolution

Showdown will use two mechanisms to prevent and mitigate aimbots and cheating:

• Hotguard Anti-cheat which uses heuristic and signature based detection to identify known and unknown cheats by scanning for anomalous objects in memory and on the file system. Players that are caught using aimbots / cheats will be blacklisted and their wallet addresses and steamIDs banned from Showdown servers.

• Dispute Resolution Governance (coming soon): After the completion of a game, players have the ability to raise a dispute and raise a red flag if they suspect another player of cheating. The dispute resolution period for competitive matches initially will be set for 1 hour, where the first-person view screen capture of all players is available for review. The initial phase of the dispute resolution process is the ‘whistleblower’ phase where players have the ability to report one of their opponents for cheating by staking a predetermined amount of RLTV (Relative’s native token) to initiate the dispute - a dispute only moves to the second phase if voted for by the majority of players on the opposing team. The second phase consists of an independent review by arbitrators, who go through the video footage captured from the disputed game and make a final and binding decision on the dispute. Players found guilty of cheating or hacking are banned with their SteamIDs blacklisted from all Showdown servers. If the player in question is found to be innocent then the ‘whistleblowers’ are penalised by having their staked tokens slashed and transferred to arbitrators.

Showdown NFTs and Steam Airdrop

Players will be able to mint and claim a Showdown Dog Tag at launch. These NFTs will serve as the player’s customizable profile and decentralised identity in the Showdown ecosystem. Players and clans can personalise their profiles, showcase their achievements, statistics, and personal information. Showdown Dog Tags will be free to mint, are soul-bound (i.e. non-transferable) and will be upgradeable based on player progression on the platform. Players are offered greater customization features as they progress through tiers and ranks, and can update their dog tag to reflect records and stats they want to showcase. As the Showdown Dog Tags record all in-game progress made by a player they will serve as an effective tool to prevent smurfing and also curate token gated matches, tournaments and competitions.

Early adopters of the Showdown platform will also be eligible to claim a token airdrop - with eligibility and allocation linked to a player’s history and statistics on Steam and CSGO. Additional information and details on the minting process, NFT rarity and utility will be shared in due course.

Back end structure

The smart contract architecture is extremely simple and is designed to facilitate autonomous scheduling and resolution of wagers for open-source web2 games.

Components:

1. Showdown-contract

2. Showdown-subgraph

3. Showdown-api

4. Showdown-game-server (Example - CS Go servers)

Smart Contract Flow:

1. A user creates a match using the createMatch function on the Showdown-contract. They enter match-parameters like mapName, round time, startTime, prize and the 2 team names.

2. 10 users individually join the specified match on either teamA or teamB (5 users per team) and place the wager using the joinMatch function on the Showdown-contract. Every user has to enter his/her steamId in the joinMatch function.

3. All this information is saved in the Showdown-subgraph as it reads events from the Showdown-contract.

4. Showdown-api has a function getMatches which checks for matches in which all 10 members have joined and the startTime of the match is in 1 minute range of the current time, then it queries all the match related information from the Showdown-subgraph like steamIds, mapName etc.

5. Showdown-api then initialises the match on the CS-go server, sets the match variables and whitelists all the 10 steamIds provided using the queried data from the Showdown-subgraph.

6. Users must have Steam and CSGO installed on their machine. There will be a Launch-Match button on the frontend which will link to "steam://connect/IP:PORT(game-server)" and on clicking it, if the user's SteamId is whitelisted the game will start.

7. Once the game is completed, the CS-go-server will send a POST request to the Showdown-api with the statistics for the match. Showdown-api will determine the winner and call the resolveMatch function on the Showdown-contract with the result.

8. After that users can withdraw their claim using the withdrawClaim function on the Showdown-contract.

Showdown Beta Program

Showdown will be launching in September - sign up here for early access to the closed beta.