8 ms·

Gaming with being able to earn money is something I normally call gambling or work. It's depressing to think about it. And yes people who made gold in wow wer

Gaming with being able to earn money is something I normally call gambling or work. It's depressing to think about it. And yes people who made gold in wow were also not gaming but working. It wasn't cool, fun or whatever 10 years ago

coding123 4y ago
I also had fun making gold in Skyrim, which was offline. I don't recall it being work, but whatever.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It can be a puzzle with a built in score and fun, but rarely are these direct-to-cash games fun. D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.
  - supernewton 4y ago
    I mean, the real improvement to D3 was they massively upped the drop rate of rare items, which "coincidentally" happened when they stopped taking a cut off people selling their rare items for real money.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah. The money always causes a conflict with the fun. Only the pure cosmetic games seem to avoid that when the money flows.
  - csa 4y ago
    Very much agreed, but… My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece that I sold for $25. That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay at the start of the game. I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I knew they didn’t stay on AH long. That said, I didn’t want to compete with all of the lower price point folks, so i set the price to something absurd just to see what happened. I have no idea why they bought it. I had much better late game stuff for sale for much cheaper that never sold. It was a strange market — I’m glad it is gone.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      People would search by “best I can equip” and you caught a whale.
  - px43 4y ago
    In my opinion, nothing has ever come close to the rich economic system that emerged naturally in Diablo 2. Maybe it just hit me at a good time in my life, towards the end of high school. I spent probably half my time playing that game just doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily buy an SOJ from a barbarian or amazon for 3-4 Perfect Skulls. Through nothing but these trades I was able to go from a couple SOJ (the most valuable 1x1 item in the game) to about 40 or 50 over the course of a few months.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      There was a stable economy time where there weren’t continual “buff patches” dumping more and more items, and it was a good time.
    - jholman 4y ago
      You sound like you've never played Eve Online
  - charlieyu1 4y ago
    I would disagree with that. D3 RMAH was bad because D3 was bad. At that time there was basically no itemisation, everything gear was basically dps/main stat/trifecta. D3 was so bad that the fix was to remove trading completely and never been brought back. People traded D2 items for gear, runes and/or real money for decades, there is no problem and the game is alive for well.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Offline is key here
- Melchori 4y ago
  That's not the point I was making. Playing a little bit with game economics is fun to a certain point.
UberFly 4y ago
You are obviously not a gamer or understand the appeal.
- Melchori 4y ago
  Very interesting to find this type of sentiment on hn. But let me clarify: I lived the wow time. It destroyed 3 relationships from friends I know, it broke carrier chances for 2. Yes there is a difference between grinding a little bit of gold vs playing it all day, not doing anything else anymore for your life and bragging about being able to buy a month abo with in-game gold I totally get the appeal of challenges in well running raids but there was always the one person who made the game the only life content. And yes there are still people being hardcore addicted to games like shooter. Depressed friends risking everything worthwhile for it. Understithe appeal doesn't invalidate my comment.
reidjs 4y ago
Gambling and gaming are quite interconnected, maybe you can describe it as a spectrum between games and gambling. Free single player games are the 'purest' games, you're only betting that it's worth your time. Cheap single player games, you're still gambling in that you're 'betting' the game is worth your time and $5. Closer to the gambling side are things like Poker, CS Skins, the Diablo Auction House, Eve Online mining, etc. Probably the purest form of gambling is slot machines, since they are purely random chance.
- glitchc 4y ago
  This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is akin to gambling: You don’t know how good it is until you start reading. Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    People with absurd notions very often conflate the colloquial definition and the precise definition of words and then try to draw conclusions out of the confusion. Like anti-science people who talk about theories and theories.
  - firebaze 4y ago
    I suppose I'm overlooking something, since I cannot follow this line of reasoning. When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean, or it is a classic I just never bought yet). Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in either of these cases, there is a less than 50% chance I perceive the book as good. Which, to me, is a gamble. So I suppose there is an edge I don't get?
    - admax88qqq 4y ago
      Not all "risks" are "gambling"
    - 4y ago
px43 4y ago
The status quo in gaming today is that people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc, and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the lives we live in virtual spaces. Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW. You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a market game, gambling on the outcome of a game, or crypto-tokenized items/stats. These have their own problems as well, mostly being that their development structure is usually not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. Surely you could have a smart contract that implements that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button inputs you used or something - of course there's no way to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons at the right time, but that applies to real WoW too).
    - cowtools 4y ago
      I have considered this already. That does not solve anything here, for the reasons you have mentioned yourself. To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof". Eventually, so many people will cheat that the actual game is considered to be a minor nusance. It's like TF2 idle servers. You incentivise players to not play the game.
Seanambers 4y ago
Thing is in WOW you had a large population of actual gamers who were willing to pay real hard currency for ingame currency. Because the game in itself was attractive as a game. Cryptokittens have none of that value.

coding123 4y ago

I also had fun making gold in Skyrim, which was offline. I don't recall it being work, but whatever.

bombcar 4y ago
It can be a puzzle with a built in score and fun, but rarely are these direct-to-cash games fun. D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.
- supernewton 4y ago
  I mean, the real improvement to D3 was they massively upped the drop rate of rare items, which "coincidentally" happened when they stopped taking a cut off people selling their rare items for real money.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah. The money always causes a conflict with the fun. Only the pure cosmetic games seem to avoid that when the money flows.
- csa 4y ago
  Very much agreed, but… My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece that I sold for $25. That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay at the start of the game. I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I knew they didn’t stay on AH long. That said, I didn’t want to compete with all of the lower price point folks, so i set the price to something absurd just to see what happened. I have no idea why they bought it. I had much better late game stuff for sale for much cheaper that never sold. It was a strange market — I’m glad it is gone.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    People would search by “best I can equip” and you caught a whale.
- px43 4y ago
  In my opinion, nothing has ever come close to the rich economic system that emerged naturally in Diablo 2. Maybe it just hit me at a good time in my life, towards the end of high school. I spent probably half my time playing that game just doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily buy an SOJ from a barbarian or amazon for 3-4 Perfect Skulls. Through nothing but these trades I was able to go from a couple SOJ (the most valuable 1x1 item in the game) to about 40 or 50 over the course of a few months.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    There was a stable economy time where there weren’t continual “buff patches” dumping more and more items, and it was a good time.
  - jholman 4y ago
    You sound like you've never played Eve Online
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  I would disagree with that. D3 RMAH was bad because D3 was bad. At that time there was basically no itemisation, everything gear was basically dps/main stat/trifecta. D3 was so bad that the fix was to remove trading completely and never been brought back. People traded D2 items for gear, runes and/or real money for decades, there is no problem and the game is alive for well.
jbverschoor 4y ago
Offline is key here
Melchori 4y ago
That's not the point I was making. Playing a little bit with game economics is fun to a certain point.

UberFly 4y ago

You are obviously not a gamer or understand the appeal.

Melchori 4y ago
Very interesting to find this type of sentiment on hn. But let me clarify: I lived the wow time. It destroyed 3 relationships from friends I know, it broke carrier chances for 2. Yes there is a difference between grinding a little bit of gold vs playing it all day, not doing anything else anymore for your life and bragging about being able to buy a month abo with in-game gold I totally get the appeal of challenges in well running raids but there was always the one person who made the game the only life content. And yes there are still people being hardcore addicted to games like shooter. Depressed friends risking everything worthwhile for it. Understithe appeal doesn't invalidate my comment.

reidjs 4y ago

Gambling and gaming are quite interconnected, maybe you can describe it as a spectrum between games and gambling. Free single player games are the 'purest' games, you're only betting that it's worth your time. Cheap single player games, you're still gambling in that you're 'betting' the game is worth your time and $5. Closer to the gambling side are things like Poker, CS Skins, the Diablo Auction House, Eve Online mining, etc. Probably the purest form of gambling is slot machines, since they are purely random chance.

glitchc 4y ago
This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is akin to gambling: You don’t know how good it is until you start reading. Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.
- hinkley 4y ago
  People with absurd notions very often conflate the colloquial definition and the precise definition of words and then try to draw conclusions out of the confusion. Like anti-science people who talk about theories and theories.
- firebaze 4y ago
  I suppose I'm overlooking something, since I cannot follow this line of reasoning. When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean, or it is a classic I just never bought yet). Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in either of these cases, there is a less than 50% chance I perceive the book as good. Which, to me, is a gamble. So I suppose there is an edge I don't get?
  - admax88qqq 4y ago
    Not all "risks" are "gambling"
  - 4y ago

px43 4y ago

The status quo in gaming today is that people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc, and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the lives we live in virtual spaces. Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.

cowtools 4y ago
Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW. You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a market game, gambling on the outcome of a game, or crypto-tokenized items/stats. These have their own problems as well, mostly being that their development structure is usually not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency.
- lmm 4y ago
  > You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. Surely you could have a smart contract that implements that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button inputs you used or something - of course there's no way to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons at the right time, but that applies to real WoW too).
  - cowtools 4y ago
    I have considered this already. That does not solve anything here, for the reasons you have mentioned yourself. To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof". Eventually, so many people will cheat that the actual game is considered to be a minor nusance. It's like TF2 idle servers. You incentivise players to not play the game.

Seanambers 4y ago

Thing is in WOW you had a large population of actual gamers who were willing to pay real hard currency for ingame currency. Because the game in itself was attractive as a game. Cryptokittens have none of that value.