“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#211

Post by zitterbewegung » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

58x14 wrote: post #32

In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…

Yes but games now actively have to fight this or they become a Money transfer agent and then you have to comply with anti money laundering laws.

I think that Bitcoin and Ethereum tie a lot of things together that make them weaker but are great technological achievements. Eventually governments will regulate them properly and the whole environmental impact needs at least a layer two solution.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#212

Post by jonwalch » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #155

> Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in themselves. Is this actually true? The linked article doesn't say anything about it being fun or not. I love grinding and think it's fun in itself.

Most of my gamer friends don't like grinding and usually stay away from "grindy" games.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#213

Post by tfang17 » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

Axie is built on Ethereum, meaning in-game assets (NFTs) are technically transferrable off-platform.

Vitalik (creator of Ethereum) attributed one of his reasons for creating Ethereum to Blizzard taking away one of his in-game items in World of Warcraft in 2010:

"I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#214

Post by StanislavPetrov » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

advisedwang wrote: post #29

mherdeg wrote: post #18

Is this different from the phenomenon described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming ? Honestly it seems like a pretty great career -- you get to spend your time indoors, probably somewhere climate controlled with electricity and restrooms. This is way better than the workhouse. Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others, like a kind of privatized welfare. If p…

Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done. There's no actual economic output to paying people to break rocks.

>Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done.

Who decides what work, "needs to be done"? I suppose you could argue that activities that create the necessities needed to survive (food, shelter, clothing), "need to be done", but everything else is simply a matter of choice. Economic output is a subjective, contrived metric.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#215

Post by jayd16 » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

jonwalch wrote: post #202

jayd16 wrote: post #183

Selling digital goods for real money is pretty well tread. What does web3/crypto add here? Game assets can't be used in another game. You need full support from the game developer. The devs could much more easily and cheaply sell the assets direct or support trading. If the game is distributed or has private servers or something that might warrant defi trades, but wouldn't gamers just hack their own items? If they co…

I don't think you're missing a ton. Getting game developer buy in is definitely the biggest challenge. I think "GameFi" is the most compelling use case. Use your in-game items (NFTs) as collateral for a loan, or lend it to other players to use while you retain ownership. Game devs could build all this functionality themselves, but they get it for free if they don't take the walled garden approach.

You say free but they'll need to integrate with the chain for all transactions. Simple loot drops will need to be put on the chain. Seems pretty onerous compared to the normal implementation. Odds are they would need to duplicate all the functionality in game as well.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#216

Post by asenna » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

wswope wrote: post #156

tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpicks because this game was my childhood. I totally support your sentiment though. > It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level * 97 logs (30 minutes) * 293 oaks (1 hr) * 714 willows (2.5 hr) * 19,246 maple (very inefficient compared to willow cutting rate - 60 hour). If you did yews it would be many hundreds of hours. About 70 hours done inefficiently. > What if I wrote a macro Macros w…

> Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. There’s a weird, secret history around Runescape botting that I really hope gets told in full one day. Essentially, the biggest and best botting client from the 2008-2011 era was Powerbot, later rebranded RSBot. It was written and managed mostly by some CS student from the UK, who went by the handle Jacmob, and used some bytecode editing + r…

So glad you shared this story. Runescape was my childhood as well. Would love to hear from Jacmob if he ever sees this.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#217

Post by nohr » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #170

58x14 wrote: post #32

In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…

I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…

Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later, they added more and more content to fill those later levels. So it also suprised them I guess.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#218

Post by StanislavPetrov » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

user-the-name wrote: post #187

bagels wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, inexplicably, people find pleasure (or are merely addicted to) in digital coins in a game too.

The two are in absolutely no way whatsoever comparable, don't be ridiculous.

Says who? Who are you to say that what amuses one person has more value than what amuses a different person?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#219

Post by cardosof » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #170

58x14 wrote: post #32

In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…

I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…

I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more money).

There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics.

Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing.

So most open world games will have a high grinding/content ratio. But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to have a game some players pay to not play it and others have fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop down a magic tree.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#220

Post by z3rgl1ng » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #205

nlh wrote: post #38

A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything crypto/blockchain related (for now, at l…

Is there any difference why anyone would invest in the stock market? Of course people asset prices to inflate. Isn’t that the whole point of investing in anything?

Actually, originally no; stocks paid dividends.