5 ms·

Of course they are better. Better mechanics, graphics, economies that work.

Alex3917 6y ago
Have any MMOs actually put their economies on the blockchain yet though? I know people have been talking about this for years, but I haven't heard anyone talking about it actually happening yet.
- greiskul 6y ago
  Why would anyone do that? I don't see neither a gameplay advantage for doing that, nor a technological one. Is there any applications that could take advantage of that which I am missing?
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    Without items being registered on the blockchain, there is no way to know how rare or common something actually is, so there is no way to accurately price it. So everything from weapons and armor to gold, ore, reagents, crafting supplies, furniture, housing, etc. Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items.
    - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
      > Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items. It's at this point I'm assuming you're being bitter and trolling.
      - Alex3917 6y ago
        How is a pension fund investing in WoW diamonds any different than a pension fund investing in a diamond mine in real life? The only difference is that in real life there is a predetermined (albeit not entirely knowable) difficulty function, whereas in WoW the company that makes the game can just decide to mint however many they want overnight. But if you can use technology to preclude the latter from happening, the suddenly there is zero difference. Sure a better game could come out and the value of items could come down, but that isn't really any different than if people in real life decided they just liked garnets instead of diamonds or whatever. And presumably as Moore's Law slows down, winning games will stay in the front runner position for longer. From a pension fund's perspective, you're basically just finding something that a small number of people love passionately and then hoping that as more people learn about that thing, the value of everything connected to the ecosystem increases. That doesn't really seem any different than investing in a social network like Facebook or whatever, which clearly pension funds already do (usually by allocating a small portion of their funds into VC, although sometimes directly).
        SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
        The workforce for WoW is entirely optional, and applying real world economic forces to it would be a great way to kill it. How would these items be generated in game? If it's CPU power, you're describing bitcoin, it's not player interaction, there's no in game mining required, and if there is, now you're wasting someone's time and CPU for something that's going to quickly stop being fun.
        dmurray 6y ago
        You could still tie it to player interaction, so some loose combination of player skill and time spent in game. Don't these games already try really hard to prevent botting?
        SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
        They do, though it's a constant arms race. Is the idea that the company is just doling out items? An artificial scarcity? Doesn't that make the market super untrustworthy if they could flood it at any time? You can't do traditional coin mining as that would remove the effort from the gameplay.
    - kingkawn 6y ago
      who in the whole world wants their state pension funds to be stored in WoW items?
    - tossmeout 6y ago
      This is very classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem thinking. Its prevalence in the cryptocurrency and blockchain communities is why I'm extremely bearish on both.
      - Alex3917 6y ago
        I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem?
        virtue3 6y ago
        You can easily go invest in Eve. Godspeed.
        SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
        Is it easy to convert the money back into cash? I remember PLEX (and WoW now has a similar token among many others), but I swear it was a one way conversion, though there was monetary value in playing for free.
        tossmeout 6y ago
        > Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items. Why is it a problem that university endowments and state pension funds aren't allocating some of their investments into virtual items? It's not. > I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem? You can already invest money into games and/or get paid to play games via a variety of methods. It seems like you're shoehorning the blockchain into the equation unnecessarily. Besides, solution-in-search-of-a-problem doesn't mean you're failing to target real problems. It means you came up with your solution first before analyzing the specific problems you're now trying to apply it to. That's almost always inferior to starting with the problem and then working backwards to craft the perfect bespoke solution. Almost all of the problems that blockchain obsessives point out are either (a) trivial problems that few people care about, or (b) are better solved without needing a blockchain.
    - twalla 6y ago
      Imagine how many people would want to play an MMO where the loot tables are determined by what return they give to a bunch of boomers who have probably never even heard of the game. Currently the incentive structure is to make a gaming offering compelling (addicting?) enough to justify a monthly subscription. If you create a two way value transfer for money/virtual items with legitimate institutions you're going to completely fuck the incentive structure. Imagine what happened with the Diablo real money auction house except now the scalpers are pension and hedge fund managers.
      - Alex3917 6y ago
        > Imagine how many people would want to play an MMO where the loot tables are determined by what return they give to a bunch of boomers who have probably never even heard of the game. How is that any different than, say, these people looking for diamonds in Crater of Diamonds State Park? I'm linking to this specific guy because he describes it well: "It's a lottery ticket with exercise." https://youtu.be/YX93NHWfyQw?t=650 https://youtu.be/YX93NHWfyQw?t=650 Similarly, Facebook decides what content to show you based on what's profitable for investors. But for whatever problems Facebook has, it's still much more widely used than any competitors run by non-profits or whatever.
    - outworlder 6y ago
      > Without items being registered on the blockchain, there is no way to know how rare or common something actually is, so there is no way to accurately price it. What? You price them the same way you price them in the real world: domain knowledge and data. EVE in particular has charts that tell you historical transaction amounts and volume.
setr 6y ago
I haven't really noticed any game with working economies beyond EVE -- at least in the sense that they actually integrate with the rest of the game universe, and aren't simply an ad-hoc bartering system driven by drop-rates conducted purely between players, because the intentional economy (eg driven by gold/currency) has entirely fallen apart as a result of developers never quite understanding that infinite gold generation infinitely inflates to the point that $currency is entirely worthless. EVE is the only current MMO I can think of which realizes that destroying value is also important having a functional economy, and creating those interesting economically-based dynamics
- NathanKP 6y ago
  Elder Scrolls Online has also done one of the best jobs at keeping the economy running well out of any MMORPG I've played. They have a pretty ingenious way of destroying gold to keep the economy from inflating. Basically the only viable way to sell things in the game is to get a guild trader. There are a limited number of them in the game, and not all are equal. Guild traders in main cities for example get 100x the player traffic as traders in the middle of nowhere. So there is a lot of competition to get a good guild trader, and guilds all bid large sums of gold to try to get a good trader. The winning bid for a trader gets the trader for 1 week, and the gold spent on the winning bid is destroyed. So it turns into a self balancing system, because if there is too much gold in the economy then the guild trader bids go up really high and take lots of gold out of the economy every week. If there is not enough gold in the economy then it isn't viable to make such a large bid on the guild trader, as you won't have any chance of making enough money back to justify the large bid, so bids go down and more money stays in the economy.
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    My only gripe about the ESO method is it locks all non-guild players out of placing things on the auction house, but otherwise you're dead on.
imtringued 6y ago
There are some MMOs that only allow players to trade with premium currency. It's a pretty neat idea because it means everyone can get access to cash shop items. It also avoids currency inflation problems because the currency isn't created out of thin air by killing monsters, selling items to NPCs or completing quests.

Have any MMOs actually put their economies on the blockchain yet though? I know people have been talking about this for years, but I haven't heard anyone talking about it actually happening yet.

greiskul 6y ago
Why would anyone do that? I don't see neither a gameplay advantage for doing that, nor a technological one. Is there any applications that could take advantage of that which I am missing?
- Alex3917 6y ago
  Without items being registered on the blockchain, there is no way to know how rare or common something actually is, so there is no way to accurately price it. So everything from weapons and armor to gold, ore, reagents, crafting supplies, furniture, housing, etc. Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items.
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    > Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items. It's at this point I'm assuming you're being bitter and trolling.
    - Alex3917 6y ago
      How is a pension fund investing in WoW diamonds any different than a pension fund investing in a diamond mine in real life? The only difference is that in real life there is a predetermined (albeit not entirely knowable) difficulty function, whereas in WoW the company that makes the game can just decide to mint however many they want overnight. But if you can use technology to preclude the latter from happening, the suddenly there is zero difference. Sure a better game could come out and the value of items could come down, but that isn't really any different than if people in real life decided they just liked garnets instead of diamonds or whatever. And presumably as Moore's Law slows down, winning games will stay in the front runner position for longer. From a pension fund's perspective, you're basically just finding something that a small number of people love passionately and then hoping that as more people learn about that thing, the value of everything connected to the ecosystem increases. That doesn't really seem any different than investing in a social network like Facebook or whatever, which clearly pension funds already do (usually by allocating a small portion of their funds into VC, although sometimes directly).
      - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
        The workforce for WoW is entirely optional, and applying real world economic forces to it would be a great way to kill it. How would these items be generated in game? If it's CPU power, you're describing bitcoin, it's not player interaction, there's no in game mining required, and if there is, now you're wasting someone's time and CPU for something that's going to quickly stop being fun.
        dmurray 6y ago
        You could still tie it to player interaction, so some loose combination of player skill and time spent in game. Don't these games already try really hard to prevent botting?
        SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
        They do, though it's a constant arms race. Is the idea that the company is just doling out items? An artificial scarcity? Doesn't that make the market super untrustworthy if they could flood it at any time? You can't do traditional coin mining as that would remove the effort from the gameplay.
  - kingkawn 6y ago
    who in the whole world wants their state pension funds to be stored in WoW items?
  - tossmeout 6y ago
    This is very classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem thinking. Its prevalence in the cryptocurrency and blockchain communities is why I'm extremely bearish on both.
    - Alex3917 6y ago
      I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem?
      - virtue3 6y ago
        You can easily go invest in Eve. Godspeed.
        SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
        Is it easy to convert the money back into cash? I remember PLEX (and WoW now has a similar token among many others), but I swear it was a one way conversion, though there was monetary value in playing for free.
      - tossmeout 6y ago
        > Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items. Why is it a problem that university endowments and state pension funds aren't allocating some of their investments into virtual items? It's not. > I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem? You can already invest money into games and/or get paid to play games via a variety of methods. It seems like you're shoehorning the blockchain into the equation unnecessarily. Besides, solution-in-search-of-a-problem doesn't mean you're failing to target real problems. It means you came up with your solution first before analyzing the specific problems you're now trying to apply it to. That's almost always inferior to starting with the problem and then working backwards to craft the perfect bespoke solution. Almost all of the problems that blockchain obsessives point out are either (a) trivial problems that few people care about, or (b) are better solved without needing a blockchain.
  - twalla 6y ago
    Imagine how many people would want to play an MMO where the loot tables are determined by what return they give to a bunch of boomers who have probably never even heard of the game. Currently the incentive structure is to make a gaming offering compelling (addicting?) enough to justify a monthly subscription. If you create a two way value transfer for money/virtual items with legitimate institutions you're going to completely fuck the incentive structure. Imagine what happened with the Diablo real money auction house except now the scalpers are pension and hedge fund managers.
    - Alex3917 6y ago
      > Imagine how many people would want to play an MMO where the loot tables are determined by what return they give to a bunch of boomers who have probably never even heard of the game. How is that any different than, say, these people looking for diamonds in Crater of Diamonds State Park? I'm linking to this specific guy because he describes it well: "It's a lottery ticket with exercise." https://youtu.be/YX93NHWfyQw?t=650 https://youtu.be/YX93NHWfyQw?t=650 Similarly, Facebook decides what content to show you based on what's profitable for investors. But for whatever problems Facebook has, it's still much more widely used than any competitors run by non-profits or whatever.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > Without items being registered on the blockchain, there is no way to know how rare or common something actually is, so there is no way to accurately price it. What? You price them the same way you price them in the real world: domain knowledge and data. EVE in particular has charts that tell you historical transaction amounts and volume.

setr 6y ago

I haven't really noticed any game with working economies beyond EVE -- at least in the sense that they actually integrate with the rest of the game universe, and aren't simply an ad-hoc bartering system driven by drop-rates conducted purely between players, because the intentional economy (eg driven by gold/currency) has entirely fallen apart as a result of developers never quite understanding that infinite gold generation infinitely inflates to the point that $currency is entirely worthless. EVE is the only current MMO I can think of which realizes that destroying value is also important having a functional economy, and creating those interesting economically-based dynamics

NathanKP 6y ago
Elder Scrolls Online has also done one of the best jobs at keeping the economy running well out of any MMORPG I've played. They have a pretty ingenious way of destroying gold to keep the economy from inflating. Basically the only viable way to sell things in the game is to get a guild trader. There are a limited number of them in the game, and not all are equal. Guild traders in main cities for example get 100x the player traffic as traders in the middle of nowhere. So there is a lot of competition to get a good guild trader, and guilds all bid large sums of gold to try to get a good trader. The winning bid for a trader gets the trader for 1 week, and the gold spent on the winning bid is destroyed. So it turns into a self balancing system, because if there is too much gold in the economy then the guild trader bids go up really high and take lots of gold out of the economy every week. If there is not enough gold in the economy then it isn't viable to make such a large bid on the guild trader, as you won't have any chance of making enough money back to justify the large bid, so bids go down and more money stays in the economy.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  My only gripe about the ESO method is it locks all non-guild players out of placing things on the auction house, but otherwise you're dead on.

imtringued 6y ago

There are some MMOs that only allow players to trade with premium currency. It's a pretty neat idea because it means everyone can get access to cash shop items. It also avoids currency inflation problems because the currency isn't created out of thin air by killing monsters, selling items to NPCs or completing quests.