Comment by fvold | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fvold | Hacker News Reader

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That's such a minor part, though.

Yes, your NFT will always be linked to object 238947872, but absolutely nothing about NFTs makes object 238947872 "a game sword" or even "a valid object in Game A", much less "Equivalent objects in form an function in both Game A and Game B".

Even if you somehow encode the visual representation and the stats into the NFT, using the most awesome method you could ever think of, that does not stop the power creep in a game.

Your Sword of Awesomeness does 3600 damage per second to the undead. You paid 36 ETH for this insta-kill weapon, and no undead could even be in the same instance with you without instantly becoming re-dead. Then the game gets a new zone where undead enemies have 40000 hitpoints and generate 7200 hitpoints per second. Your expensive sword is now a very impractical toothpick.

Even if you could make the stats permanent, you can't make it's usefulness permanent, nor can you guarantee it will be valid in any game for ever, much less several games at the same time.

Am I wrong? I want to know. Please elaborate on how you solve the "Object 238947872 is now a bag of chicken feed" problem and the "Object 238947872 is now obsolete because of power creep" problem.

Not even being sarcastic here. If I've misunderstood this whole thing, I want to know.

There are on-chain NFTs that have both the image and metadata on-chain, and the smart contract could allow for user manipulation of that meta-data (like leveling up, etc). Doesn't make the rest of your point any less valid, but these two things can and do exist in various NFTs already.

But for power creep specifically, not sure why the game developer can't see that metadata for a particular project and go "nah that's going to be too strong/weak, we'll divide/multiply all X stat for the objects from this NFT to make it even". There could even be a third party library that keeps track of this for multiple NFTs and does its best to keep things of relative equality that game developers could import like they do any other library.

Not saying that's for sure going to happen, just that it's not necessarily as big of a technical challenge as people keep making it out to be with the help of third party tool ecosystem that is likely to develop alongside this assuming these things become more and more popular, just like in any other space.

> Not saying that's for sure going to happen

It’s not going to happen. What financial incentive does a gaming company have to keep the item they sold you effective? They made money selling the item, and will not receive further money from it. They will have already moved on to selling the next, more effective item.

> What financial incentive does a gaming company have to keep the item they sold you effective? They made money selling the item, and will not receive further money from it.

I think you probably have a good point in your head, but the way you've worded this makes no sense as written as no company does this today.

The simple answer to what you've written is they wouldn't do this for the same reason that any virtual item gets support today. Halo Infinite doesn't get any further money when they sells a unique costume for a week in their game store, but if a future update breaks support for it and they go "welp, not going to fix it, already got your money, not going to get any more for that item, just buy the new item in the store this week plzkthx" their users would be pissed and they most likely wouldn't buy future items.

Let me rephrase the question then: what financial incentive would a gaming company have to remove power creep, when they make money off of selling new, more powerful items?

Sounds like you’re depending on some form of loyalty from the gaming company, which I think is naive.

I'm not depending on anything personally :) I'm not buying any NFTs with the expectation that I'm going to be using them in anything beyond what already exists (or will exist in the short-term) today.

But power creep management will exist to the extent that gaming companies make an active attempt to control, just like any other game. Magic The Gathering might be a good template for how companies could (but won't necessarily) handle it.

Magic The Gathering is almost 30 years old at this point, has released over 140 sets over that 30 years, and has developed techniques to manage power creep pretty well (maybe not perfectly, I don't really pay attention to MTG much anymore, but they clearly think about it, as they have articles they've written about it[1]).

You can pretty much consider each type of card in MTG as an NFT. Certain tournaments allow certain cards or don't if it turns out they're too powerful, or only allow the most recent sets where they've balanced things better, or whatever.

Different types of games allow different types of things. Some games or game modes might let anything go, whatever you've got, bring it, no matter how broken it is, while more tournament like games or game modes might limit what's included to more tightly control it.

Kind of like what I heard in Halo Infinity, where professional players think the Mangler gun is too powerful and want it nerfed, while casual players are having fun with it and asking the devs not to nerf it, or at least not in more casual modes.[1]

It's not like these solutions don't exist elsewhere, it's just up to the developer how they're going to incorporate it. Will some players hate that X NFT gets banned in Y game mode for Z game, and will it devalue it some? Oh I'm sure it will, just like I got annoyed that my Mind Twist card and a couple dozen other cards I had in Magic The Gathering got banned. But I still have it 20 years later, and I still throw it in to play with friends every once in a while.

[1]: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-develop...

[2]: https://kotaku.com/halo-infinite-players-to-343-ignore-the-p...

So what you're saying is that the problem people are trying to solve with NFTs has nothing to do with NFTs, and relies heavily on the good will of the corporation in control to work?

Yeah, nah, I'll stay on the fence until there is at least a strong proof of concept for this.

Absolutely. I don't advise jumping into these things right now unless you're wanting to take big gambles and speculate on flipping them, as that's about the only proven (but super risky) use case at the moment. From what I've seen immersing myself in the space I can see possible futures that these things might go down that are very interesting, and in general I see several interesting and creative things being tried with smart contracts (albeit not necessarily good or useful) at the moment.

Online/MMO things do this today! Destiny 2 for instance actively removed areas from _paid_ expansions. WOW updated away the game that people liked and paid for and over a decade later decided that it was actually worth the trouble to give back what they had removed, purely because they judged they could re-sell it.

And, as the GP posters described, every time there is an update or expansion the value of existing items depreciates.

So it'll probably exist in NFTs at the same level that it already exists in non-NFT MMOs today.

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