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Comment by LoveMortuus | Hacker News Reader

I know the blockchain has been kind of tainted by the way it's been used for the past few years, but I do believe that there can be valid uses for it.

Lately I've been thinking if it would be possible to have an MMORPG game where instead of a server all the data would be saved in a blockchain/linked list. The biggest concern I have though is the latency and speed.

Could blockchains be fast enough or in some other way protected from malicious actors to allow actual real time game play? Like World of Warcraft, or would it just be too slow.

I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues.

There would be no coins or NFTs or anything like that.

Just a decentralised MMORPG server/game thus saving the developers from the server costs.

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> Lately I've been thinking if it would be possible to have an MMORPG game where instead of a server all the data would be saved in a blockchain/linked list.

What for? What advantage would this have over storing data on a server?

> I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues.

You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain.

I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot.

>What for? What advantage would this have over storing data on a server?

Mostly because I'm kinda poor and can't even think about buying it renting servers. That's why I thought that such a solution would allow me to keep developing my game while the players could still play the game.

If it would be possible, which from replies to my comment, I'm guessing isn't, it would also mean that even if I died, people could still play because the "servers" wouldn't shutdown.

>You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain.

That's kind of the point, MMORPG are, from what I understand, quite expensive to run. Thus if they were run by the community it would be cheaper for the developers and those resources could be further used to work on the game.

>I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot

I am surprised by the negativity that the HN crowd has poured onto me. Since it would solve one of the biggest issues with MMORPGs, which is - servers shutting down.

I love MMOs and it breaks my heart knowing that I'll probably never ever again be able to play Tera and many other MMOs...

It’s a non-zero cost to develop the game. I sympathize with your desire to build an mmorpg that will pass the test of time without relying on servers, but you will definitely need a lot of money to make this come true. Crypto or otherwise.

Block times are complete state updates. The transactions that rely on the state of another transaction in the chain are 100% optimistic, and will roll back all dependent transactions. Now, that’s fine if you’re willing to roll back say…3000ms of your game state. But that’s all client side stuff, and that code is 1000% exposed, and you can’t upgrade it in the normal fashion. You also need validators for chain transactions, and your game can just be forked at any time by validators, splitting the player base. Kind of cool, but kind of defeats the balance and minimum population required to keep a game running. Also…the validators still need to run. Recovering a forked chain can only happen is someone has the state somewhere and is willing to seed new validators.

Sometimes, things need to end for another thing to begin. Sometimes it’s just best to move on.

> I am surprised by the negativity that the HN crowd has poured onto me.

I'm sorry. I'm not trying to insult you directly - but I do think your idea is not a good one, I don't think it solves the problems you think it does, I don't think the problems you posit are the biggest issues with MMORPGs, and I think it'll create even more problems even if it did address the issue you brought up.

I guess what I'm looking and thinking about is just peer-to-peer MMORPG game, but because the data has to be stored somewhere, it could be stored everywhere.

That's is if the latency could be fast enough for normal gameplay.

"Cost savings" is never a valid reason to use blockchain technology. It is and always will be inherently more expensive than running a normal database.

The only reason that users might be willing to eat that cost is if they believe they are "owning" an asset that will appreciate somehow (a la Cryptokitties). The second the thing they own stops appreciating, they stop paying to play.

Do you not think that keeping the servers alive for the game that they love would be enough?

It would be for me and since many private servers exist for many different games, it is for others too.

This would, if it would be functional, just spread the burden of the server to all players.

In that sense, just by playing the game, you would be keeping it alive.

If such blockchain would be truly distributed (a-la Ethereum or BTC) then it's bandwidth would be atrocious for an MMO, or it would require some insanely powerful and centralised nodes to handle this, or it would use some L2 solution which would mean a lot of exploits and bugs in the game due to async issues.

Or the the blockchain would be centralised and so useless.

This idea fails even in the abstract.

I had a feeling that it might not be doable, but I had hoped that maybe I've missed something and that the HN crowd would shine the light upon it.

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