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The year is 2030. It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon. You’ve just finished mining 30 obsidian ore playing Crypto Crush Saga, a match-3 mobile game.
You open up The Elder Chains Online and feel a rush of excitement. Your buddy from school has spent the last 2 years becoming a Master Blacksmith, and he has agreed to turn 10 obsidian ore into an Obsidian Battlestaff, a HUGE upgrade over the Mithril Mace you’ve been wielding for the last weeks.
It’ll take him an hour or so. In the meantime, you hop into Clash of Guilds, and use the remaining obsidian to upgrade your town hall to the next level. That should keep your village safe for now.
You wish you could fast forward time to tonight. Your Guild has plans to go for a deep run into the wilderness in Old School Rune Chains, and your prospects of a successful run (and great loot) have never been better.
All members have been spending the past 2 weeks grinding for better weapons, and you’ve agreed (through a vote) to use the Guild treasury to buy everyone a new full set of Red Dragonhide Armor.
Tonight’s objective is to kill the level 128 Frost Giant hiding in the Cave of Sorrow. He has a 5% chance of dropping an Immaculate Orb of Brilliance, of which there are currently only 4 in existence.
The Orb can be used as a power source in an upcoming space exploration game, and should give your guild a great advantage in reaching distant galaxies first. A 5% drop rate is low, but you’re feeling optimistic.
In the distance, you hear a faint ‘BloCkChAIn doEsNT bRiNg AnYtHiNg nEW tO gAmES’. You shrug, and join your friends in the Discord voice channel.
Life is good.
#blockchaingaming
You’ll be shocked to learn that this guy is now in the AI space.
This sounds like a movie description of gaming.
small thing that my brain latched into
the orb has a 5% drop chance and there are only four in existence
this is a misunderstanding of how video games work on the level of the scene from ready player one where nobody has thought to try driving backwards in the race to find the secret
it’s like a game mechanic from sword art online that the author thought he was really cooking with but anyone who’s ever played an MMO knows definitely wouldn’t work like that
the only way this works is if the boss has only spawned about 20 or so times since being introduced, and even launch era FFXI NMs weren’t that stingy
If you actually tried to do this mechanic in real life every time the boss spawned the area they spawned in would be an absolute clusterfuck as everybody tried to get a hit in so they could get in on the drop lottery. it would not be fun.
I think BDO is the closest thing to “what if a hack LN writer designed a game” and even that’s not that absurd, but it absolutely did have the unplayable nonsense pileups around worldbosses as everyone competed to get into DPS brackets with better loot chances while just randomly dying to unrendered attacks. It’s really a shame, because in terms of the specific combat gameplay it is hands down the best MMO I’ve ever seen, it’s just the entire rest of the design is the actual worst it could possibly be without shoehorning gacha purchases into the core progression. It is genuinely like they set out to make the sort of MMO a bad anime would design, with incredible action gameplay but nothing to use it on but mindless trash mobs, the dullest and worst executed bosses ever, and ludicrously imbalanced PVP that favors P2W progression.
I liked BDO for a while but i REALLY do not like “upgrade this weapon 20 times oh and the last few will basically never succeed and probably destroy it or whatever” gameplay mechanics. It’s just gacha shit but for swords and stuff.
Yeah, it sucks so much. It is/was a weirdly common mechanic for MMOs coming out of Korea and Japan before gacha bullshit took over everything and started spreading too, and it’s just such a fundamentally awful design. Like BDO could have been the actual best MMO ever if it just didn’t have all the P2W gambling progression bullshit and if it had real PvE content that isn’t just “run in a circle one shotting trash mobs that you massively overlevel the instant they spawn, while trailed by a herd of RNG P2W cash shop pets to loot the drops and regularly calling up a P2W summonable NPC vendor to clear your inventory, and also only like 10 people can grind in this entire area at once in the entire game because there are only 10 instances and an overleveled character can monopolize the entire set of spawns.”
the other option is to make it an extraordinarily low drop chance. so low that most people could spend an actual human lifetime grinding the mobs that drop it and not see it. then it will drop a few times through the power of large numbers of players.
Surely a winning strategy to make an item in your game that no one will ever get to use. Time well spent for everyone involved, both player and dev. No one will get tired of it.
yeah but it gives you crypto and if you don’t have crypto you don’t get to eat
Still would make more sense to sell the item then to have it randomly drop at a super low chance…
Oh wait! That is how these games actually work!
thats how games like path of exile work though. its not to the extreme extent i was talking about but there are some items that you may never see even if you are a regular player for many years.
Isn’t that because items are essentially infinitely varied because of random modifiers though? So having that 100% best item is next to impossible but having an 80-90% item is very possible. That is how I remember looter games like that working.
Plus, there is no scenario in which PoE would be like “Well, that was the 4th drop of this item, remove it from the loot table”. So no, it is not the same.
No what i mean is there are items like mirror of kalandra that are extremely rare and very valuable. But yes you’re right that there’s the other element which is getting 6 of the right T1 mods is up there with picking a given grain of sand on a beach in terms of odds.
Plus, there is no scenario in which PoE would be like “Well, that was the 4th drop of this item, remove it from the loot table”. So no, it is not the same.
that’s not mentioned in this hypothetical either though?
You are right the thing says currently only 4 in existence, implying that more can drop, but also implying that this boss has only been fought like 100 times since the drop rate is 5%
I also looked up the mirror thing and one guy said he had 22 drop over the course of killing 9.400.000 mobs. So yes, rare, but not to the point where the people who REALLY play those games will never see one.
To be charitable I guess in his supposed future everybody would be grinding 30 different crypto games and wouldn’t have time to grind 1 specific game for 1 drop. Still pretty dumb
a 5% drop rate is low
lmao this fucker has never actually played any mmo built on rare drops 5% is fucking nothing people will happily run that 20 times in a single day to get it.
And secondly, absolutely none of this post considers whether the gameplay is fun. None of this fucking matters if the gameplay isn’t fun and frankly the people who think this shit is a good idea do not know what fun even means let alone how to create fun.
You can’t create weapons of mass destruction without the scientific minds that know how to create them. Imagine a country that does everything it possibly can to drive real talent away from it. That’s how these techbro morons operate but for gaming, they drive away the people that want to create fun because they’re not interested in creating fun, they’re interested in creating a manipulative machine that preys on human behaviour to extract money from them efficiently. When the people that want to create fun object to this they get driven out without a single thought about how that will affect the “games” they want to create.
I was really lucky and got the special mount from Karazhan back when The Burning Crusade was current. That was a 0.5% drop rate and the only reason the mount was rare was because you could only run it once a week.
I still saw other people on it in Shattrath reasonably often.
There are countless stories from WoW where some item with a 0.00000001% DR getting bugged and becoming a 0.001% chance during a patch. Once people realise every server would be stuffed with people grinding for hours to get dozens of said item until it wasnt rare at all.
This guy’s idea of “fun” isn’t even grinding for an item, it’s just sitting around doing NOTHING while some animation plays. Like Farmville with better graphics.
lmao this fucker has never actually played any mmo built on rare drops 5% is fucking nothing people will happily run that 20 times in a single day to get it
lvl 128 too so it would be one of the easiest bosses in the game lmao
Diablo 2 Zod Rune: 0.00042% chance
I was confused iwth that as well how the hell is there something with a 5% drop rate wth only 4 in existence is their guild like one of 5 in existnece or something?
given away somehow other than dropping from that boss, the boss is egregiously difficult and has only been beaten a few times, some other shittier ways i don’t want to think through.
Let’s assume that you actually want games interconnected like this (nobody wants this): Why do these people think they need blockchains for this?
Games could just offer an API that offers information about what a player has done. The other game can then just query it and done! Maybe add in some verification. What supposed advantage does a block chain offer here? Each block just stores some data and the hash of the previous one.
Pretty sure this has been possible with the Steam “inventory” thing for like two decades. Why use a blockchain when pretty much everyone is using the same servers, overseen by a single centralized authority?
Nobody actually cares enough to do anything with it, of course. Not even valve, not really.
This is the one good usecase of blockchain. If you have a network of untrusted users (which in this case could either be the games or the users) but need to distribute a trustworthy ledger of transactions information without a single trusted party, a blockchain works pretty well. Granted, if you have a trusted party, the entire thing becomes overkill. I could see a blockchain being a reasonable solution here if you’re trying to connect all games and don’t want to give anyone an unfair advantage, but it’s a niche datastructure.
Lol, this sounds like absolute ass
Let me come home from doing my shitty job to do some more shitty work
Love the thought of having to play a mobile game to get currency for the one that I actually want to do.
You’d think Jobifying our leisure time would be enough to radicalize the
But alas…
To be fair this dipshit pretty clearly doesn’t actually play games.
Hey, EVE Online has a fan base. I don’t understand them, but they exist lol
Fuck my sous chef said something about Brazil ruining EVE Online and i forgot to go back and ask him wtf he was talking about
What if you had a huge multiplayer spaceship game, but instead of flying the spaceships you played with spreadsheets?
No i meant how did Brazilians ruin the game lol
prob just racist
Ah ye,s the classic game mechanic of grinding something in one game that can be used in other games. I always love when I win a monopoly game and can then proceed to use monopoly money in next weeks game of Settlers of Catan.
Not at all an impossible nightmare to balance it all, no sir. I love getting my game’s economy ruined because some other game had a patch and made ore drop more often. Fucking amazing, can’t wait for this to be the standard.
The only games that have achieved something like this do it through the proxy of a unique currency. So if something goes wrong they have a simple number to tweak in order to resolve it.
A simple example here might be WoW allowing you to grind for gold which can be used to purchase battle.net currency, which can be used to buy skins in Overwatch. The currency trade rate between gold and battle.net currency makes balancing easier on them. The idea of a direct “this item works in more than one game” is extremely out there and would require a centralising hubworld like VR in my opinion if it were ever going to work. Different games within the VR could choose whether or not to implement the hubworld items. Essentially the VR world is a platform for the games in that case. Basically relies on each game dev choosing to do the implementation themselves.
The thing is that Blizzard is an old, established company that has a bunch of IPs people actually like. Nevermind that they are also a sex pest factory for this argument, though of course it needs to always be pointed out.
No one would do this with myriad items. No one wants to worry about how much WoW Thorium I need to mine to be able to get the card I want in Hearthstone. Making it one central currency is the only way it can ever make sense and even then, only because Blizzard has agreed with itself what the currency should be used for, how much it should buy and so on. There is no way in hell that it would ever work with competing companies. Even in the example how does it work?
Game A has the ore. You mine it there, spending play time and costing them server cycles. So you would have to pay to move the ore over to your global wallet or something, because there is zero incentive to allow this transaction otherwise.
Meanwhile Game B probably also has a way to mine ore in it, because it is some sort of MMO and farming resources is a good way to have your players spend time and effort in the game so they are tied to it more and keep paying for your subscription. They have zero incentive to allow the ore in from game A, because it will just negatively impact their games economy. So you would need to pay them to import the ore, negating the entire point of this stupid, stupid post in the first place.
Replace ore with game currency here if you like, it changes nothing about the argument. If I can get the currency faster in game A then B, game B is incentivised to speed up the money gain on their end to attract players, or to demand a fee to allow the currency to be used in their game since it wasn’t earned in their game and thus is a net loss for them if it is used in it. It has zero advantages to anyone over just having their own currencies or ores.
And even if these games are both from the same developer or publisher and the publisher doesn’t care if the players are in game A or B: Why would players ever want to play both of these games? What is the point? I wanna play my MMO, but I need ore so I gotta play the mining game? it just doesn’t work on any level. If it’s much easier to get ore in Game A then B, then I could see some players doing this, sure, but the developer is hurting their own game by doing so, making less people play it and making players jump through hoops to get what they want. That’s a very good way to lose these players.
Game A has the ore. You mine it there, spending play time and costing them server cycles. So you would have to pay to move the ore over to your global wallet or something, because there is zero incentive to allow this transaction otherwise.
This is why I suggest it works better on platforms. Take Roblox for example, where Roblox itself is a massive thing and then games within Roblox are individually created by different developers. Or in my original example, VRChat, where VRChat is the overworld and then individual games within VRChat are created by different developers.
In that case, the items themselves can be created by VRChat, and then developers decide whether to integrate them.
Your platform owner has to be the one creating the items, and developers may be incentivised to integrate them on the basis of it providing value of some sort through the platform integration. Over time and with more and more items though you’re just creating an overwhelming burden upon developers where there will eventually be too many items for them to integrate.
okay. How is it not immediately a race to the bottom then? If game A sets item drop rate at 1 an hour, and game B sets it at 10 an hour, you would play B if you just want the item. So everyone would just crank up the drop rate until VRChat steps in and caps it, at which point all the games just drop at the same maximum rate.
This is assuming that anyone actually cares about the items and it’s not just an incidental thing that will fill up your virtual bags so that you eventually need bigger ones.
Which does bring us back to making it just a currency. You can mine in the mining game and sell your mined ores for currency, which you can then spend in game B to do whatever it is that game is about…except why is that a good thing? We are back to what I said before now, with each of these games needing to account for this currency that can easily net them a loss either in players or in money.
The way this actually works is how platforms like VRChat, Roblox and Second Life actually do it: The platform offers a currency you can buy for real money. That currency is good to spend in any of the shops, games and experiences on the platform that choose to charge for their services and the developers using the platform can then cache it out again for real money and profit. This way, the individual developers, model makers etc. avoid having to deal with issuing this virtual currency, but they can still make a living, while the platform has already been paid for any funbucks bought by players, no matter if they ever spend them or not. Making this system less convenient by multiplying the number of currencies makes it useless.
Like, I don’t know how much clearer to say it. Would you rather:
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Buy VRCbux and spend them on a cute anime girl skin:
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Have a developer in VRC make a game in which you can earn VRCbux through play, but you have to spend money to play their game (because how else is this developer gonna get paid?), only to then go to the shop you actually wanted to buy from and buy?
What good does the indirection do anyone? The game dev now has to deal with incoming money transactions directly, potentially getting credit card scammed or back charged and having to deal with that headache, while the anime girl skin shop can’t sell skins unless someone engages with games that the shop doesn’t care about. Not to mention that the player isn’t playing the game because they love it but to earn the currency as fast as possible and they are probably gone as soon as they got enough for their purchase, since that was their original goal in the first place. Great system.
Because you’re thinking of implementation solely as a drop rate, rather than as a gameplay item that functions completely differently in one game or another.
In one game you might not even implement the ability to drop it. Want players to come from game x to try game y? Implement an item that they all got in game x as a cool weapon in game y. In game x it might just be a currency drop as you point out, but in game y it might be a core item with its own animations and effects.
Whether it’s cool or not is entirely on the developer’s implementation. It could be dogshit and contribute absolutely nothing. Or it could be high-effort implementation and be genuinely fun. You want your players to try out your friend’s game? You make an item for your game only drop in their game. Voila, your players will now go try that other game, cross promo.
There are creative possibilities there. For the most part the issue is that ghouls want to do the worst possible thing with them and which means the lighter implementations will never be seen or even tried before everyone is completely against the idea.
I have already answered this and I did think of it. I invite you to reread my comments.
Answer me this though: Why if you want to get players of game A to try game B would you require these players to first spend X amount of hours grinding something in your old game to be allowed to have an advantage in your new game? Classically, games have just done crossover events where you get these items for free if you own both on your account.
None of this makes sense and I have exhaustively explained why. There is no scenario in which this is a positive addition for ANYONE, neither Dev nor Player not Platform.
would you require these players to first spend X amount of hours grinding something in your old game to be allowed to have an advantage in your new game?
Isn’t it obviously up to the developer implementing it? That’s how it would be in the platform format.
None of this makes sense and I have exhaustively explained why.
You seem to be frustrated, why? I was under the impression this was a conversation but now you’re making it sound like an argument.
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You still don’t understand you can use multiple slurp juices on one gacha waifuBefore I saw that this was in “slop” I legit thought this was satire lolol
I thought it was satire until I saw this comment.
If you want to throw yourself into a time sink chasing after rare drops just play Old School RuneScape. A 5% droprate is nothing (also only 4 in existence with a 5% drop rate? Clearly a tourist with 0 understanding how it works) and you can play mobile if you want
That being said I can’t recommend it, I’ve spent way too much time and money on that game. It will always hold a special place in my heart because it’s helped me through some rough times but I hope I’m never in a place where I need to fall back on that coping mechanism
Going extremely dry on drops is soul crushing. You can be way past the drop rate and you still have the exact same chance at getting the item as when you started.
That’s what caused me to quit during my last stint, and I haven’t felt any desire to pay for that “privilege” since.
i relearned my basic statistics and probability math while extremely not-mad about drop rates in warframe, i had to find out for sure that yes i was well over the “99% chance to have seen at least one drop” mark, no i’m not mad
That’s what caused one of my friends to quit for over a year, dude went ridiculously dry on a boss, he greenlogged it twice except for the single item he was chasing.
For me it wasn’t the drop rates (though I have been spooned some stuff so maybe that why) themselves but the sheer amount of time I can easily dump into the game, it was fine when I was unemployed & depressed but now that I have more going on osrs is far down the list of games to play. I’ll watch others on YouTube do ridiculous grinds and live vicariously through them lol
I owned items with a 0.0001% drop rate in Ragnarok Online
I regret nothing because that game was fun as fuck. These people don’t know what fun is though.
Does he have a pixel art blackface profile picture in your second image? lmao
So weird. He also shortened his name to Nico. Maybe it’s his attempt at doing a “soft rebrand” because people on the internet made fun of him, lol.
That paired with the fucking swamp-dweller Dutch name lmao
Guys looking at the worldbuilding of Sword Art Online and thinking the game design was too grounded and sensible and didn’t involve enough stonk speculation.
Like every part of the ecosystem the NFT dorks imagine is so incoherent and not how games work at all. To make it even possible you’d effectively need a closed ecosystem of what are basically mods running on a generic core game, where this is either a collection of games being produced by one dev (in which case there’s no reason to even have some random third party marketplace and super expensive account inventory storage at all) or an ecosystem of multiple devs buying licenses to the centralized ecosystem so that they can profiteer off producing assets (which would quickly crash the entire ecosystem if they weren’t tightly controlled as to how much of a given thing they can churn out or what qualities it could have to stop them from just cannibalizing each other, so again this is better served by a centralized and tightly controlled database operated by the core dev). In practice that would mean the central dev is the one making absolute bank off of just providing the core framework and serving as the middleman for all of this, with incentives to either just pump and dump the licenses to make as much as they can before the whole thing implodes or to tightly control and squeeze the individual game devs to keep the cash cow going as long as possible. You just can’t do this without a centralized framework at all because there is literally no reason for competing profiteers to ever honor each other’s bullshit and it’s completely infeasible for them to be mechanically able to accept items from other games in the first place.
I realized like a third of the way through that that I was basically just describing Roblox (from what I’ve heard about how it works, at least) where there’s one actual dev that just rentseeks off the contributions of other “devs” (children) in one big unified architecture, although even that isn’t as incoherent and dysfunctional as what crypto losers imagined would become the norm for all games, it’s just a bad game that exploits children.
The pivot to “AI” is so perfect
Meanwhile, on the actual timeline, we got Hades II
Guess there are circles of hell below ours.
this is literally the functionality of money. replace “obsidian” with play store gift cards, and you can now buy lives in candy crush and bonds in OSRS from the same resource. real-world trading your drops in Runescape to buy star citizen ships is possible today, including blockchain is just a way to do this while wasting electricity and getting your wallet stolen.
I had to read this twice to realize he wasn’t doing a bit on how bad gaming would become in 2030.
Sounds like an awesome time to grind in a mobile game so I can grind in an MMO for an item that can potentially be used in Star Citizen. Not to mention that none of this requires the blockchain to work.
Wasn’t there an Assassin’s Creed game that had a mobile game counterpart where you could do shit to get various currencies for the main game? There’s a reason they don’t do this shit anymore because it’s fucking trash.
Black Flag had a mobile app where you could send ships out on missions to get resources. I don’t think the app was necessary, you could do that from within the game itself, but I don’t remember that clearly.
I think I’m melding that Black Flag feature up with this Facebook game thing that unlocked shit for Brotherhood (after trying to look it up). I do remember doing the ship thing being entirely in the game (maybe, who really cares lol), but taking IRL time.
