4 ms·

Er...trading items between players is a core part of basically all MMOs, many ARPGs, some TCGs, etc. It's a huge thing in many games, including some of the most

by Lazare 4y ago

Er...trading items between players is a core part of basically all MMOs, many ARPGs, some TCGs, etc. It's a huge thing in many games, including some of the most popular games on the planet. ...none of them use or need NFTs or a blockchain, and in every instance I know of, the existence of such would be actively harmful. For a blockchain to make sense, you need a number of factors, probably chief among them that there is no single trusted entity that can run the DB. For bitcoin, that makes (some) sense. There is no Bitcoin Inc that could plausibly track the balance of every BTC wallet, after all! For World of Warcraft gold it makes no sense; Activision Blizzard is already running a centralised database of how much gold every player has, and every player WoW has obviously trusts Activision to run the DB, just like they they trust them to run every other aspect of the game (eg, content creation, balance tweaks, competitive content, etc.). WoW (like any MMO) is an extremely tightly curated experience.

reidjs 4y ago
You don’t need a blockchain for a digital TCG, but it feels like you “own” the digital product more when it’s tied to a protocol like ERC-721 instead of some random developers implementation.
- Lazare 4y ago
  Citation needed, I think. :) Keep in mind: 1) I "own" some cards in MTGO. That is, there's a line in a DB run by Wizards that associates them with my account ID. I can log in and confirm they're in my collection, and I can trade and sell them to other people. It feels a lot like I own them right now, and it's hard to see how that feeling can be notably enhanced. 2) Of course, all that goes away if the MTGO servers shut down, or if my account is banned, etc. My MTGO cards are mine only as long as Hasbro cooperates, which is...exactly the same as if they were using ERC-721 tokens. Nobody else can run an MTGO server, and the hypothetical token showing that my account owns a valuable card is useful only to the extent that Hasbro lets me use it or trade it to others, which they could stop doing at any time. The token has no possible value or use outside the MTGO ecosystem, and if Hasbro has blacklisted the token (or shut the MTGO servers down), no value inside it either. Blockchains can have significant value, but they are fundamentally a DB technology (certainly in this context). There are very, very few times where it makes sense to argue that a game would be better if the devs had just used a different DB tech. And this doesn't seem to be one of those times.

by Lazare 4y ago

reidjs 4y ago

You don’t need a blockchain for a digital TCG, but it feels like you “own” the digital product more when it’s tied to a protocol like ERC-721 instead of some random developers implementation.

Lazare 4y ago
Citation needed, I think. :) Keep in mind: 1) I "own" some cards in MTGO. That is, there's a line in a DB run by Wizards that associates them with my account ID. I can log in and confirm they're in my collection, and I can trade and sell them to other people. It feels a lot like I own them right now, and it's hard to see how that feeling can be notably enhanced. 2) Of course, all that goes away if the MTGO servers shut down, or if my account is banned, etc. My MTGO cards are mine only as long as Hasbro cooperates, which is...exactly the same as if they were using ERC-721 tokens. Nobody else can run an MTGO server, and the hypothetical token showing that my account owns a valuable card is useful only to the extent that Hasbro lets me use it or trade it to others, which they could stop doing at any time. The token has no possible value or use outside the MTGO ecosystem, and if Hasbro has blacklisted the token (or shut the MTGO servers down), no value inside it either. Blockchains can have significant value, but they are fundamentally a DB technology (certainly in this context). There are very, very few times where it makes sense to argue that a game would be better if the devs had just used a different DB tech. And this doesn't seem to be one of those times.