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Comment by erwinh | Hacker News Reader

You'd think it would be the ideal candidate for nft integrations but seems their experiment with minting kill certificates on the tezos chain was short lived...

https://thestackreport.xyz/dashboards/tezos/contracts/KT1WQ1...

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What benefit would NFTs provide over storing item ownership in a database, as games usually do?

Nothing. It's not like game developers are going to implement NFTs from other developers' games into their own, that's work.

Not even that it's work. It makes zero sense on multiple levels

NFT's are a waste of time and the sooner they die out like the digital beanie baby fad they are the better

That reminds me I need to feed my Tamagotchi

EVE, no, but you could imagine a game with a mechanic in which players may write and deploy code. Some sort of distributed coordination layer may be the best choice to enable this mechanic. It may make the most sense in that context to store ownership inside the execution environment rather than externally in a database.

What advantage would be gained from distributing the coordination layer? It seems cheaper, more efficient, more performant,you have more control, can enforce game rules and tweak them for fun and fair gameplay more easily, etc. if you do this with centralized control.

I’ve always thought a cyberpunk game with this type of a mechanic as a core ethos to the system would be sweet as hell to both write and play.

Emphasis on "hell"?

No more so than any other game dev ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now you've gone and made me want to see corewars played on a blockchain:)

coughEthereumcough

I'd say two things: 1. Proof to players that game actions are actually permanent instead of something that a server moderator can change at will. 2. A publicly accessible API layer which does not need to be paid for by the developer* that can be used for community-driven plugins & third-party integrations, guild & tournament websites etc.

(*because it is paid for by transaction fees)

You're not making a very convincing case.

(1) Unless the server itself is running on the blockchain, which is impractical for anything like Eve, nothing stops the server owner from ignoring what the blockchain says about ownership and changing things at will.

(2) This is just externalizing costs incredibly inefficiently. The blockchain transaction fees will necessarily be greater than the costs of simple database storage, probably by several orders of magnitude based on current implementations. Eve already provides a fairly full-featured API [1], so this would provide little to no benefit at exponentially increased cost.

[1] https://esi.evetech.net/ui/

Nfts are unnecessary. You can get those benefits with just boring old PKI.

1. Trading card game leagues that have banned cards you purchased and irrefutably own because you have it in your hand would like a word

It would not, it takes new players months to get to 1 billion in-game currency while it takes veterans logging in for a few minutes to do that. A friend has reached 1 trillion in net worth after playing for 2 years (I only reached 300b before realizing I should grind IRL instead of in-game, but I had an operation that made it somewhat easy to gain 50B/month).

So if I can sell my 50B per month for like $100 or $200 I'd probably do it (because if you're lucky in market speculation you can make way more)

So what about new players? Eve is a zero-sum game. You take resources and other players can't use it anymore. Imagine playing a game that emphasis that you can sell items for real world money but playing for a year would only get you $10 or less.

Eve Online isn't zero-sum, it's a semi-managed economy where resources are balanced by a team of actual economists. The goal of the company isn't perfect economics either- it's about getting as many players as possible.

There are a lot of levers the company can use to move that economy. For base resources they can spawn more resources in easier to access areas, for items they can release more through their NPC traders or increase drop rates.

Even outside of that there are a lot of aspects that aren't zero sum. There are more resources in the game, by far, than are currently mined. As new players enter the game then more resources start flowing through the economy as a result. The only resource that is really limited is territory, but even that has been increased over time (such as when wormholes were introduced).

There are, as far as I know, no economists at CCP anymore. They had one economist for a number of years but he left somewhere around 5-7 years ago.

It's zero sum for the lucritive activities.

Wanna go ratting? Oh the BRM tanked because someone else uses the same system.

Wanna go after npc sotiyos? There's a monopoly on them and your alliance probably has deals with the guy involved in RMT

Wanna go hauling? You hunt for public contracts against other haulers or join a private company and someone takes all the lucritive stuff. Or you have to compete to be the hauling company for your null-sec alliance

Wanna manufacture? Someone else started manufacturing the same ship and tanked the market

Wanna do reactions? The index is going up and taxes are eating into your profits because someone started using the same system as you.

Wanna mine r64s? Yeah so do other players. It's a race to get there and the guy multiboxing 30 hulks is hogging it all.

If you want to liquidate an investment you have to becareful with not crashing the market. And then someone else just dumped all their Isogen on the market so your net worth just got a big haircut.

Almost everything other players do are hurting you. Yeah there's unlimited npc missions which give low isk rewards, but for the good stuff there's always competition.

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