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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

I used to play the game, like 13 years ago. I recall a similar drama about someome inflitrating a major organisation and stealing everything.

Endless arguments on whether this is a feature or a bug. Last time it was more of a sociel engineering and betrayal, this time it's more of a mechanical exploit.

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Disclaimer, been an extremely long time since I played as well, I think 12 years in my case. Though I honestly kind of regret quitting. Back then I thought EVE was merely an early progenitor of what would be a bunch of better sandbox MMOs, and was upset with some of the directions CCP was going and potential they were squandering. Little did I know :(.

>Endless arguments on whether this is a feature or a bug. Last time it was more of a sociel engineering and betrayal, this time it's more of a mechanical exploit.

One thing I do remember a lot of us being frustrated by though was that while they sunk lots of development effort into "walking in stations" and planet stuff that wasn't space, a lot of the corporate mechanics stayed pretty primitive. I do think it's kind of a bug if more serious corporate structures couldn't be developed. EVE would have been a neat place for smart contracts and programmatic corporate structures and so on, just let everyone go wild setting up constraints and checks within some reasonable computational cap. Interesting options to tie in (or not, depending on reputation, could be another neat set of tradeoffs) to NPC governments as well. But having a lot of corp/alliance aspects be kinda clunky in terms of management, comms, stores and so on always felt like one of the various wasted opportunities.

Wow, amazing how it comes back in pieces. It really is quite the project whatever its flaws. A lot of other MMOs from its era have come and gone. Glad it still exists at all.

>EVE would have been a neat place for smart contracts and programmatic corporate structures and so on

I don’t know if you’ll laugh or cry to hear this… last month, CCP accepted an investment led by a16z to develop a blockchain-enabled game.

In the press release, they say: “With key game systems developed on-chain, this new project will also leverage smart-contract blockchain technology, focusing on persistence, composability and truly open third-party development to create a new relationship between virtual worlds and players.“

[1] https://www.ccpgames.com/news/2023/ccp-games-has-secured-usd...

oh noes!

game studios have full control over client and server(-s) who would benefit from a distributed consensus and storage here?

As far as I understand, it is possible for the devs to hand over control over aspects of the game such as the in-game market or the corporation-related contracts to the players via the blockchain. The dev servers would query the blockchain for this information instead of storing it. This allows for potentially massive and breaking changes to the game engine, without players losing any progress they had in the game. Or, potentially, if the dev studio dies for some reason, the community could be given the sources. Or, other games could be developed around EVE which also have access to this blockchain. The possibilities are big. It's similar to how Steam untangled player inventory, market, and mods from the games themselves, but with blockchain, you don't even need Steam to do this.

The players

In what way would they benefit?

> Back then I thought EVE was merely an early progenitor of what would be a bunch of better sandbox MMOs

What would a better sandbox MMO even look like?

What sandbox MMOs do you like more?

My reading was they anticipated better Sandbox MMOs for the near future, but none eventually were better...

Oh I see. Yeah, I read that weirdly

Instead, we have these experiments in digital corporate governance on blockchains instead. Which would be more fun if there wasn't so much hype and fraud.

I couldn't even name any other game that gives as much freedom as Eve.

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