The new EVE MMO uses blockchain tech to create a "boiling financial hellscape" | Hacker News Reader

The new EVE MMO uses blockchain tech to create a "boiling financial hellscape"

pcgamer.com

24 pointsbpierre31 comments

Why does this need a blockchain, as opposed to snippets of scripting sitting on the server that the game itself runs on?

It reminds me of a 3D version of Screeps, an indie browser survival MMO where you write Javascript for each unit to control their movements, mining, attacks, etc. That doesn't need blockchain.

I can see how smart contracts would be useful in a decentralized trust model, but if the EVE company is running the game centrally anyway, what benefit does it give?

> In the long-term, CCP wants EVE Frontier to be decentralised and (close to) eternal. A game that—by virtue of all being written to a magical series of distributed ledgers—could easily be spun up again if a meteor happens to hit its servers. "We want to have a clear path to a decentralised system," says Pétursson, where "we, CCP, just have the same access to the system as anyone really building on the system." Where players are effectively co-developers, in other words.

That's total nonsense though unless they're open sourcing the game server code itself, creative assets, the player logins and save game states, etc. Otherwise you just end up with a bunch of worthless NFT-equivalents once the game itself shuts down, or you end up having a bunch of third-party reverse-engineered & emulated servers like the ones that already exist for Everquest, WoW, and City of Villains.

Indeed, this is the problem with crypto games, there's no intrinsic value to the currency (and crypto as a whole).

The question is whether they'll get third parties to develop for their blockchain to the degree that it becomes self-sustaining (seems unlikely).

But it's not like other in-game currency hold their value after the game folds either. Just don't dump your 401k into crypto ISK.

Presumably this means the game state is susceptible to a 51% attack. Without anyone having financial incentives to participate in the backend hosting, I assume the server count is merely sufficient to handle the load.

no idea how it’s done in the game, but you can have validation methods other than proof of work. e.g. When blockchain is used as a distributed ledger for international trade, a consortium decides who can have a validating server.

According to the article, the game developers plan on removing exclusive access to the underlying blockchain that is governing the rules of the game. This means other game clients can be created, and activity with the in-game blockchain can be unlocked in ways never intended for by the game developers.

It's certainly unique and ambitious. It's more than the standard web3 playbook of slapping a blockchain on traditional applications. It's an opportunity to extend/mod an MMO in a way that can maintain a functional economy. I wish them luck.

Sounds like a way for high-frequency trading bots to manipulate the financial market from outside the game and automate the hell out of everything, while a few hapless real humans pay money into the system to enjoy the pretty graphics...

That's literally what eve already is.

Heh, fair enough.

So working as they intend then

I am not sure how EVE and high-frequency anything would work. Think of large fleet fights. ;)

Because they want to allow for transactions between players but don't want to become a bank.

...they just want to be an exchange?

CCP's entire business model is on being the financial system behind the game, where real money is converted into virtual currencies to spend on spaceship ammo. But that worked fine in EVE even without a blockchain?

In my experience, blockchain is introduced not to attract users, but to attract funding or stick price.

I crowdfunded an android tabletop device a while back (Taptop aka Blokparty) and when they pivoted to Blockchain I knew it was over and it was time to start trying to root it to get it on vanilla android.

As long as games like this put an EXTREMELY strict rule against exchanging currency and items in-game for real money, they can really thrive without being turned into minmaxxed dystopias full of bots and people in third world countries grinding in net cafes.

Path of Exile is a great example of a game with an available trading API that cracks down on RMT, and it's mostly enthusiasts and cool community projects like Path of Building, PoeDB, Poe Ninja and Filterblade. There's still an underbelly of bots and RMT-ers but nothing on the scale of Axie Infinity.

Well, EVE is quite different from PoE in this regard. PoE is cosmetics-only on paper (they frown upon RMT as you said, but don't really enforce it... and in other countries, like Tencent's Chinese home, you can straight up buy P2W equipment directly from the in-game store).

But EVE is pay-to-win by design. Not only do they NOT discourage exchanging real money for in-game currency, it's actually how CCP makes its money. You straight up buy the in-game "ISK" currency with USD or other fiat money: https://store.eveonline.com/#plex

You cannot, however, sell ISK back for USD (well, you can and people do in third-party marketplaces, but then it becomes a RMT that violates the official terms of service, but it's much cheaper to buy ISK that way than from CCP).

If you're going to make an international game subject to real-world conditions, it doesn't matter what your rules are, people in poorer countries WILL go around them to sell services and items to first-world players – and who could blame them? Beats working in a sweatshop. Every MMO has unofficial RMT marketplaces like that. It sounds like EVE just wants to run the marketplace themselves, like Blizzard tried (and failed to do) with Diablo 3... an idea before its time, I guess?

Since neither the parent of this comment nor its parent mention it explicitly-

This article is about EVE Frontier, a different game from EVE Online. One of the main takeaways I had from the article is that CCP is planning for EVE Frontier's "RMT policy" (heavy scare quotes) to be the opposite of what most MMOs' (like POE or EVE Online) use.

From the article (emphasis added):

"...this is literally cryptocurrency we're talking about, isn't it? CCP is being characteristically libertarian about the whole thing, and says it won't regulate transactions between players inside or outside of the game. Want to buy a new car using your alliance's funbucks? Pétursson won't stop you... 'But we fortunately live in a world where consenting adults can do dangerous things' [says Pétursson]... Dangerous things like, you know, playing a game that's spinning up literal cryptocurrencies for which the devs won't (and perhaps can't) limit out-of-game transactions."

(aside- as a currently-winning EVE Online player who enjoyed the spreadsheets more than the pewpew and who writes code to buy food, the new game sounds ambitious and amazing. I'll keep an eye on it.)

Good clarification. Thank you :)

Can someone ELI5 what is the blockchain part of this? i.e. what emergent behaviors can it unlock that a DB will not.

I tried reading what redstone blockchain was but I cannot make heads or tails out of this:

>> Redstone is a chain built from the ground up for onchain games and autonomous worlds.

Man, what a waste of the term "autonomous worlds." When I hear that, I think "game where the world evolves independently, with or without direct interaction from the player" which is EXACTLY the type of game that I love to play. But if you look up that term you just get a bunch of boring blockchain junk.

The chief emergent behavior will be the crypto-bros and college kids who join up because they follow the buzz added to EvE's existing reputation. There's no such thing as bad publicity.

This is an experimental game. CCP inc. is owned by a venture capital firm Pearl Abyss, and are occasionally funded a moonshot game here or there.

tl:dr: I'm an EvE Online Veteran of many years having participated in many game-defining events from a variety of levels. I think this game has a near-zero chance of surviving, but maybe the contract language will be interesting enough to generate some interest.

EvE Online gameplay is defined more by an interaction of social, economic, organizational and strategic interactions than a particular gameplay loop. This is kind of unusual in my opinion and as a result CCP inc. is not very good at creating the kinds of arcade or MOBA experiences that people are used to.

From my position it looks like CCP inc. is kind-of sort-of trying to create a game with aspects of Second Life, and the "hardcore" feel of EvE Online or its sister company's property, Black Desert Online.

One of the reasons I can see that a "blockchain" "smart contract" might make sense is that CCP inc. prioritizes interoperability and third-party functionality. For example, we have an Official MS Excel Plugin. they are quite serious, with very fine grained APIs and players have many, many complex software suites ranging from mapping, (GIS), communications, organizations (SAP-alike systems) forecasting suites, analysis, intelligence gathering, it is endless.

There have been many issues with the maintenance and interoperability of these APIs, so its possible that they see the blockchain smart-contract as a way that they can enable a similarly vibrant third-party development community around another game in a way that will put people who are interested in doing so in a first-class position, being integrated directly in the game.

Why do you need a blockchain for this ? The implementation resembles a hyperledger instead where people can write smart contracts but it is permissioned and instead of mining you use a standard raft consensus model.

Modding a game isn’t unheard of but instead of using a blockchain just add hooks to the engine where people can enforce new behavior and persist it. Like just an JavaScript electron app and a API that has a built in API key when you create your character (they seem to be making an electron app or browser integrated into the game already.

I think EVE has the potential to really push the limits of blockchain gaming. The ability for users to develop and leverage their own smart contracts in game could allow for some really innovative ideas. While it might ruin the game I think the experiment will benefit the industry overall.

I don't see how this is different from games like Screeps or Second Life or Roblox, which had user-contributed code and functionality long before (and after) blockchains were a thing. There is nothing about user-contributed programming that inherently requires smart contracts, especially when the game is still run on traditional server models.

To my understanding, Second Life has always centrally controlled the currency (Linden dollar) and the purchase transactions of land and objects. So it hasn't been possible for players to create their own marketplaces, exchanges, tokens, etc. where trading would happen independently and peer-to-peer.

...isn't that a good thing? Maybe I'm missing something here, but why would I want to play a game in which my in-game assets can be arbitrarily manipulated by out-of-game actors? It doesn't even sound like a game anymore then, just another crypto market.

Or is that the point? Lol, I was drawn to EVE by the customizable ship loadouts and group combat and such. But maybe that's not really the core audience and it's finance types who really play the game as it was envisioned...? Probably why I prefered Elite Dangerous to EVE...

I was just stating what the difference is to a closed market environment like Second Life. Whether it's good or bad is another matter. In my view experimentation is good. I would assume that nobody can control your in-game assets arbitrarily unless you grant them permission via some contract.

> I would assume that nobody can control your in-game assets arbitrarily unless you grant them permission via some contract.

Sorry, I don't mean that somebody is going to just hijack my spaceship, but that having a totally decentralized marketplace of assets might mean that an API bot army that doesn't even bother playing the game could just buy up all the space stations around me, hire a fleet of pirates, and destroy everything I earned in human playtime. It's like the Borg meets aimbots.

A closed market environment like most MMOs have allows the game devs to at least try to balance the economy for fun vs absolute liberty, such as marking some items as notrade or controlling inflation by adjusting money sinks (repair costs) and currency production (coin drops) as well as introducing new ships and weaponry on a human timescale. Fleets also require human coordination and real-time communications, at least in the current EVE. And exploits (dupes, infinite gold glitches, etc.) are frowned upon and can be retroactively removed from the economy by altering the central DB state.

If all of that is externally transactable and decentralized, it sounds like an automation hellscape that'll very quickly trend towards a megamonopoly or oligarchy of bots that can analyze everything and instantly respond 24/7... what gameplay will be left for the mere humans?

Finally, a positive use case for monopoly money:

Playing games with it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com