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The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

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Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#131

Post by px43 »

Chabsff wrote: post #121
alanfalcon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I've been thinking about this and working on this for years, so I have a different perspective. Is everything fully better for having blockchain integration? Clearly no. Are the benefits worth the trade-offs? I'd argue yes, on the whole. 1. The global worldwide market place. While this introduces commerce/real money, which come with very real downsides, it also makes the game high stakes (meaning most people play…

Thank you for the verbose answer, though I disagree with most points. 1) "having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It has been long established that this is absolutely the case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH effectively destroying the game by having the entire economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind 2) I consider this t…

#2 is the most important one to me, so I'll address that specifically.

MOST games I've seen don't provide a public API for players to interact with, and even when players do reverse engineer them, they get accused of cheating, hacking, whatever, and often get their accounts banned.

In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools and meta-games around anything, and there's basically nothing that the original developers can do to stop it. I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties with each other, and capture each other's kitties. Then at the end of the day, the winner can go back to the main cryptokitties site, and breed their new kitties like normal. I don't need to ask anyone's permission, and all I need is a stable place to land some HTML, and maybe deploy some contracts depending on the level of integrations I want to build. I don't need to apply for an API key, or start up an email conversation with anyone at Dapper Labs. I can just build it, and anyone with a web3 capable browser can play along.

This is the magic of "permissionless" systems, and it's the standard across the blockchain gaming ecosystem.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#133

Post by im3w1l »

naet wrote: post #117
secretsatan wrote: post #45

I read these articles sometimes about crypto games, but they all never seem to describe the actual game, it’s like crypto is the primary concern, and game is secondary, and i’m getting the distinct impression none of these games are any fun and everyone in the space has to avoid mentioning it. I think that the people writing these things only have a very slim grasp of gaming, but they know it would be a good market t…

Check https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play The reason it seems like they didn't describe the "actual game" is that there is no actual "gameplay". You just pay to collect cats. You can trade the cat tokens with other people, try to sell them on the marketplace, pay to generate semi randomized new cat tokens via "breeding", and... just have them under your wallet / name. There is no action, no RPG, no platfo…

I remember the craze around collecting the cards without really playing the game. And then, separately, playing the game without collecting the cards, with the "Pokemon Trading Card Game" for game boy.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#134

Post by admax88qqq »

firebaze wrote: post #115
glitchc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is akin to gambling: You don’t know how good it is until you start reading. Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.

I suppose I'm overlooking something, since I cannot follow this line of reasoning. When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean, or it is a classic I just never bought yet). Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in either of these…

Not all "risks" are "gambling"

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#135

Post by root_axis »

px43 wrote: post #116
Melchori wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming with being able to earn money is something I normally call gambling or work. It's depressing to think about it. And yes people who made gold in wow were also not gaming but working. It wasn't cool, fun or whatever 10 years ago

The status quo in gaming today is that people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc, and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the…

The idea makes no sense unfortunately. If the game dies so does the meaning of the NFTs. It's even more pointless in the context of Vitalik's WoW example because the NFT has no relationship to the game mechanics, the creators of the game could trivially nerf, alter, or remove previously minted NFTs at their own discretion.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#136

Post by xboxnolifes »

lottin wrote: post #118
Kiro wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that I can build upon CryptoKitties with no obstacle. If CryptoKitties was on a private database I would need to get access to their API and also trust them with the ownership/management of the assets. Now I can just build it on the blockchain and have people destroy CryptoKitties in my smart contract to get benefits in my game. No API functionality or permission from CryptoKitties needed.

So how does this open API works? Every time you use it you have to pay a third party?

What do you mean? All of the data is on the chain. It's a global "third-party" that everyone is a part of.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#137

Post by lmm »

lottin wrote: post #118
Kiro wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that I can build upon CryptoKitties with no obstacle. If CryptoKitties was on a private database I would need to get access to their API and also trust them with the ownership/management of the assets. Now I can just build it on the blockchain and have people destroy CryptoKitties in my smart contract to get benefits in my game. No API functionality or permission from CryptoKitties needed.

So how does this open API works? Every time you use it you have to pay a third party?

You submit the action you want to do, anywhere in the ethereum network, and if it's valid (e.g. if you're running an operation that destroys a kitty then you'd better include a digital signature showing that you own that kitty) then it will be accepted and published. You have to pay a "gas fee" which in theory a) should be pretty small and b) is what pays for the running of that ethereum network. In practice under the current implementation those fees got to be big enough that they kind of killed cryptokitties, but this might be fixable.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#138

Post by alanfalcon »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #112
alanfalcon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breeding is a complex and nuanced game mechanic, which when coupled with the worldwide marketplace unlocks a dizzying rabbit hole. Once you understand the mechanics, you realize just why a Gen 1 Tendertears would be a grail collectible to own. I called it more of a sandbox than a game, but there are also Fancy Chases, events where a specific limited-time breeding goal is introduced and it's a race to be among the fir…

CK's breeding mechanics are about as complex as Pokemon Gen1's breeding mechanics, and simpler than Gen3. Congratulations on passing the GameBoy bar. Additionally, all of the talk about openness is now out the window since the breeding code is closed source. Congratulations on also doing limited time events, welcome to the year 2000 of online gaming!

Just because it's tradition to not let "someone being wrong on the internet" stand: https://www.cryptokitties.co/blog/post/learn-how-our-last-my...

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#139

Post by cowtools »

Kerbonut wrote: post #128
cowtools wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW. You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a…

Game boss dies, triggers a web3 call which mints the NFT. What’s the problem?

Who gets to trigger the web3 call? a centralized server?

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#140

Post by Chabsff »

px43 wrote: post #131
Chabsff wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the verbose answer, though I disagree with most points. 1) "having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It has been long established that this is absolutely the case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH effectively destroying the game by having the entire economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind 2) I consider this t…

#2 is the most important one to me, so I'll address that specifically. MOST games I've seen don't provide a public API for players to interact with, and even when players do reverse engineer them, they get accused of cheating, hacking, whatever, and often get their accounts banned. In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools and meta-games around anything, and there's basically nothing that the ori…

Sure, but my point is that the lack of blockchain technology is not what's preventing most games from featuring this, it's only the developer's willingness to do so.
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