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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.
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:
Buy VRCbux and spend them on a cute anime girl skin:
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.
Isn’t it obviously up to the developer implementing it? That’s how it would be in the platform format.
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.
I guess because I don’t understand what you don’t get about it. And becuase if you really think this is in any way a desirable thing to have happen, I am unable to parse it and I think our tastes are more fundamentally different then I thought would be possible when it comes to games.
I don’t think I stated anything about my own personal desires. There’s lots of things I like and dislike, I neither play Roblox nor VRChat. To me this was a conversation about where it can work, not a conversation about whether I would personally like it. Those audiences wouldn’t reject or dislike it, I am not one of them.
Everything doesn’t have to be for me. I’m capable of talking about the correct execution of things I don’t personally enjoy in a way that others might.
The conversation about mechanics does not need to be about something being objective. I like Korean loot grinders with open marketplaces like Ragnarok Online, most people do not, I also like random +1 upgrades for gear that can fail and break the gear, most people do not like that, that’s ok though, mechanics that one person likes are not necessarily what another likes.
The foundational cornerstone of everything I’ve said in this conversation has come from a place of if you were to try and implement it in a way that works, rather than in a way that is inherently designed to just be toxic systems to players by ghouls only looking to find more ways to extract money from wallets.