Vapourware Blockchain ruins/revolutionizes online games (and takes your money)

[grimace]

I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007–2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell.

I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.

— Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum

Proposed Problem

For example, Asheron’s Call, a long running online RPG closed its doors after 12 years — leaving its most loyal players
stranded.

If Asheron’s Call was on the Blockchain, the community could have forked the data, and STILL keep playing.

Proposed Solution

With Blockchain games, all of the hours and effort you have invested into your characters and digital assets are YOURS FOREVER and no one can take them away from you — including the very creators of the game.

...

It doesn’t matter if you get banned or if the game forked into a different branch — your karma, points, and anything else you have earned will always be yours in perpetuity.

...

Since all of your hard-work is permanently preserved on the Blockchain and you actually own it, it is possible for you to even sell your digital assets at a profit to a buyer — OR you could even start game-play with a different game using your existing character(s) on a completely different Blockchain.

Above quotes from From the cliickbait hype article (advertisement):

Blockchain Games: The BIGGEST TROJAN HORSE ‘experts’ won’t see coming — (and the startling implications you’d never guess)

Dilanka McLovin
Growth @ Loom Network, where we are building scalable blockchains for large-scale online games and social apps. Also: Creators of CryptoZombies.io.
Apr 24

Blockchain Games: The BIGGEST TROJAN HORSE ‘experts’ won’t see coming — (and the startling implications you’d never guess)

https://medium.com/loom-network/blo...n-t-see-coming-and-the-startling-1846eb412aba​

Here’s a couple of sneak-peek teasers of some of the DAppChain Games we are developing right this moment:

CryptoZombies Battleground Gameplay (ALPHA VERSION)






- - -

What if I told you that in the future — Blockchain Games can not only solve ALL of those problems — but (from an infrastructure standpoint) are actually SUPERIOR to any game that has ever existed up until now?

Would you believe me or would you look at me with skepticism?

I remain skeptical of this.

All of this blockchain, initial coin offering (speculation and gambling!), hype for technology that does not exist (but it will in the future! just read our whitepaper and look at our development road map), buzzwords, and . . . gaming?

 

[SerratedBiz]

GM_JamesPro You're welcome mate.

 

[grimace]

Exhibit B

“My Wish was simple, I loved playing Computer games and I wished the Gold that I earned could be real.”

http://voteneverdie.com/the-story/

Spoiler

In 1994 I was a starving filmmaker writing a screenplay. At night unable to afford to go out, I began playing Tele-Arena a multiplayer role-playing game on a BBS, but I was running up a long distance phone bill to NY in the process. I wished the virtual gold I was accumulating in the game was real. I knew the internet was around the corner and I saw a glimpse of the future, millions upon millions of people connected and Roleplaying in online worlds. I reflected how every time I lost a life playing an arcade game I would happily pay another quarter to start over, it was easy to imagine that with millions of people playing online around the world it would soon amount to a gigantic pile of quarters, but what if each quarter didn’t all go to the maker of the game, but half of it was turned into virtual gold, that players could earn and cash out if they chose?
It was clear to me that a vast treasury would be built if every time someone paid for another life in a game, half of the money was put aside to underwrite the real cash virtual economy.
That was the day NEVERDIE was born in my mind. The vision haunted me and I kept searching for a way to make it a reality.

In 1995 I partnered with Sean Ferrell the developer of Tele-arena to turn his game into a Real Cash MMO, we did manage to sell the game, but we were too far ahead of our time to convince investors that a real cash economy was the future.

Over the next decade I looked for other ways to make it a reality and in 2000 I even wrote a fictional Screenplay called Role-Player about NEVERDIE a World Champion Online Gamer. As I was trying to get the movie financed, I heard about MindArk a company in Sweden that was developing a Real Cash economy based MMO called Project Entropia. I quickly signed up for Beta and named my avatar Jon NEVERDIE Jacobs, over the next decade with a lot of blood, sweat and tears, all my Virtual Dreams came true!

I feel I have lived the American Dream in Virtual Reality and I want everyone else to have the same opportunity.

Want to know More? check out the NEVERDIE Timeline

Some virtual world you can "live in" . . .
rocktropia.com

You can spend fiat currency (real world money) to buy "tokens" . . .
https://neverdie.com/wallet.html

 

[Allyriadil]

How fucking retarded this blockchain meme is. The problem is not centralization it's proprietary software.
Just open source the fucking games and then you can play them again and host your own server.

Still salty about Asheron's call, at least there's an emulator in development now.

 

[grimace]

So if a privately held company releases a game client open source and any player can run a server . . . will this create multiple low population servers?

A company would want to charge a monthly fee to host your character in the subscription model. In the games as a service model you buy the game once and play "free" "forever" with a DLC cash shop.

Are there other business models for online games?

(Not including: first person shooters, fighter, racing games, or other games that are multiplayer but not massively multiplayer/persistent).

Playstation Plus and X-Box live charges a monthly fee to give players access to online multiplayer.

Allyriadil do you want to play Asheron's Call online and the number of players playing on your server does not matter? You want the PVE and party raid component? Or PVP?

 

[Allyriadil]

So if a privately held company releases a game client open source and any player can run a server . . . will this create multiple low population servers?

A company would want to charge a monthly fee to host your character in the subscription model. In the games as a service model you buy the game once and play "free" "forever" with a DLC cash shop.

Are there other business models for online games?

(Not including: first person shooters, fighter, racing games, or other games that are multiplayer but not massively multiplayer/persistent).

Playstation Plus and X-Box live charges a monthly fee to give players access to online multiplayer.

Allyriadil do you want to play Asheron's Call online and the number of players playing on your server does not matter? You want the PVE and party raid component? Or PVP?

Just look at the many Ragnarok Online private servers for instance, that has never been a problem. I also didn't refer that for currently running MMORPG's just for the ones that have shutdown.

But suppose a company decides to open source their running game and they still want to monetize it. It will still be possible.
There are plenty of private servers for existing MMORPGs, not all people flocked to the private servers and many prefer to play and support the original.
Honestly, it's the same thing with piracy, when people want to support the game they will buy it, otherwise they can just get it for free anyway.

 

[Deathsquid]

 

[grimace]

Exhibit B - more video evidence



https://youtu be/H5L3fjrf2FE


Inside Entropia Universe he created the iconic avatar NEVERDIE and he became the first gamer to make a million dollars inside a Virtual World. Jon’s Club NEVERDIE made the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records as the most valuable virtual item. Jon founded NEVERDIE Studios and has worked with Michael Jackson, Lemmy and Universal Studios bringing KING KONG, ZOMBIE KONG and The THING to Virtual Reality. NEVERDIE Studios developed and operates the ROCKtropia Virtual World, the first and only MMORPG to fully disrupt all existing gaming business models by providing real gamified jobs that pay any user $10 per month to play. In 2016 Jon was elected the first President of Virtual Reality with a mission to create a billion jobs in VR. In 2017 Jon launched the NEVERDIE Coin and the Teleporter Token on the Ethereum Blockchain to facilitate virtual world democracy and finance development of cross platform blockchain games and DApps including AmeVRica and Payatar to drive the growth of a decentralized trillion dollar virtual goods economy.

 

[Deathsquid]

It disrupted the industry so hard that no-one ever heard about it.

Btw, are you getting paid ten dollars already or are you just being theoretical, grimace?

 

[grimace]

It disrupted the industry so hard that no-one ever heard about it.

Btw, are you getting paid ten dollars already or are you just being theoretical, grimace?

This is all a nightmare to me. I do not hold Ethereum tokens. I do not get paid for Chinese MMO Gold Farming are anything similar.

"Virtual Jobs" for people will not give people dignity. These keyboard jobs will make people more stressed, overweight, and carpel tunneled.

Ethereum will not hold. Ethereum must be resisted.

 

[Deathsquid]

It disrupted the industry so hard that no-one ever heard about it.

Btw, are you getting paid ten dollars already or are you just being theoretical, grimace?

This is all a nightmare to me. I do not hold Ethereum tokens. I do not get paid for Chinese MMO Gold Farming are anything similar.

"Virtual Jobs" for people will not give people dignity. These keyboard jobs will make people more stressed, overweight, and carpel tunneled.

Ethereum will not hold. Ethereum must be resisted.

Oh okay.

I dunno, this might be a thing somewhere in APAC and/or Africa? I don't see a point of being paid 10 dollars a month to play amazingly shitty MMOs. And yeah, good luck having characters be FOREVER YOURS because fine, great, they're yours but how about maybe the company running the MMO having deprecated the older builds altogether, like, oh, I don't know, every single one of them? NO, Asheron's Call players couldn't "continue to play forever" after "forking the data", who the fuck even wrote that garbage.

Fuck.

 

[grimace]

Deathsquid


With blockchain technology (essentially a database) user data remains persistent in the blockchain. Your character data and inventory could now be
interoperable



Some games already play this way. Terraria allows you to take your character to another server/world. Removing the "centralized privatized corporate capitalist server" from the equation and allowing users to host their own nodes to enable decentralized blockchains to store player/character stats/records and inventories could allow you to play your Avatar in different worlds.

The problem I see with this:

Different games run in different engines and the graphics appear differently.

So unless your game is a spreadsheet simulator without graphics the cooperation among game studios to share assets ... blah blah blah.

This all requires teamwork and cooperation to make this blockchain dreamwork. And technology like this is prone to factions and forks and selfish self centered motivation.

 

[Deathsquid]

Deathsquid


With blockchain technology (essentially a database) user data remains persistent in the blockchain. Your character data and inventory could now be
interoperable



Some games already play this way. Terraria allows you to take your character to another server/world. Removing the "centralized privatized corporate capitalist server" from the equation and allowing users to host their own nodes to enable decentralized blockchains to store player/character stats/records and inventories could allow you to play your Avatar in different worlds.

The problem I see with this:

Different games run in different engines and the graphics appear differently.

So unless your game is a spreadsheet simulator without graphics the cooperation among game studios to share assets ... blah blah blah.

This all requires teamwork and cooperation to make this blockchain dreamwork. And technology like this is prone to factions and forks and selfish self centered motivation.

Well this is pretty much it, yeah. It has to all be within a single corporation/alliance, and that data is then essentially your xp/currency that can be cashed in on in another game within the network, which, to me, is a meaningless gesture. I play games for fun, not because I treat them as some kind of an investment, so when I stop playing an MMO for this or another reason, it's not like I want to take the "value" from that MMO and move it on to the next.

In fact, this is a horrible idea. Imagine the following scenario - Activision-Blizzard decides to pick up this model for their BNet games. Okay, cool, I'm a long-time player of their games, this is great! Let's even assume the conversion rates from their currencies/played time will not shaft me as a player and I'll get a decent bang for my buck (good luck Blizz, you are gonna be broke in no time with all the no-lifers), what's the problem here? Well, the problem is I can dump all that currency on a new game and completely fuck over its progression curve and economy.

Therefore this kind of a model actually only works on games where these stats are already microscopical in importance - meantime you're (generic "you") letting your computer run someone else's crypto mining for 10 dollars which you'll probably never cash in on since one day the company will mysteriously disappear after selling off to 10cent or something.

Also, fuck blockchain and (unrelated) fuck Ken Levine.

 

[grimace]

What did Ken Levine do to you Deathsquid ?

---

Another way to implement blockcahin/tokens/cryptocurrency --

The in game gold/currency/credits/whatever store of value you use in game can be purchased in the real world for fiat. You then use your "tokens" to spend money on vanity items and DLC across the supported network.

X-Box Live points does this?

Blizzard could do this, in theory. The Blizzgoldcoin could be tied to WoW gold, Diabolo Auction House, etc. The benefit (if any) to gamers (consumers) would be to "cash out". Exchange your Blizzgoldcoin for United States Dollar.

The problem here is regulation and every player needs to be age 18 or over and registered with a real ID and Social Security Number for tax purposes.