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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

#181

Post by stale2002 »

Chabsff wrote: post #113
Kiro wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say I want to build a game where you can destroy your EVE Online spaceships to get bonuses in my game. How would that work? That's what happened with CryptoKitties and HyperDragons. Just to clarify: someone who owns a CryptoKitty decides to send it to the HyperDragons smart contract that handles the absorption. It's not about stealing anything. You use your assets in CryptoKitties to boost your dragon in HyperD…

This is not inherently made possible by the blockchain itself though. The mechanisms to transfer a Kitty to the HyperDragons lie within the CryptoKitty Smart Contract. This is not particularly different than a regular API, where the available operations have been chosen, specified, and made available to the public at large by the developers. The only real difference with a public-facing documented traditional API is…

> This is not inherently made possible by the blockchain itself though.

It basically is. This is impossible on Eve, if you don't have permission from the people who make Eve.

But, with something on the blockchain, you don't need permission from the person who made the original asset, on the blockchain.

The asset is on the blockchain, and it is much more difficult to stop me from using that asset, compared to a centralized Eve database.

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

#183

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

everfree wrote: post #180
mkaic wrote: post #87

> What Went Wrong? It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game". That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its inception. Blockchains are pretty cool from a math/cryptography standpoint, but they really do not provide added value in most areas people try to apply them to. CryptoKitties is a digital trading card game. You get cards, you can "breed" cards together to make new cards, you trade/b…

> The idea of an artist signing their work in a cryptographically unique way is not new or revolutionary, and it certainly doesn't need a blockchain. It creates a provable, transferable, composable, tamper-proof "ownership" record of the digital signature.

doesn't gpg do a pretty decent job of that? i guess it's not transferable but... why do you need that?

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

#184

Post by ClumsyPilot »

notahacker wrote: post #23
simsla wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.

There's a big difference between an illiquid market where wealthy collectors are so keen to hang onto things they only change hands at crazy possibly-not-to-be-repeated prices and a fake market where the illusion of deep-pocketed collectors is created by the auctioneer and owner colluding to pretend an item changed hands at a massive amount of money.

There is also a big difference between Russia having to shut down a gas pipe for maintenance and politically motivated energy blackmail.

...Or is there?

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

#185

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

XCSme wrote: post #176
saurik wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, people play trading card games all the time and a big part of the ecosystem is trading the trading cards. Only, it is really annoying to have to ship around and maintain physical cards, and I want my card collection in the cloud. Some people would thereby prefer to play an online version of, say, Magic: The Gathering, or whatever the Pokémon one is called, etc. The problem now is... how do you do t…

> If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking digital assets Isn't this any relational database where you can set the owner_id of an item? > your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company Most online games have some sort of digital assets they have to keep track of, and that's one of the tr…

i think you missed the part about having to run that service yourself and all the headaches that entails

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

#186

Post by thrown_22 »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #169
pwillia7 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a magic the gathering like trading card game on ethereum that seems neat. I doubt it will get big enough to make sense, but having come from paper MTG as a kid and not being able to really digitally collect cards since... that would be super cool. You would actually 'own' the cards.

This is one of the few areas where I think there's a legitimately useful role for NFTs. WoTC (the owners of MtG) could "mint" a limited number of cards each year, just like today, controlling the rarity of certain ones, etc. People could pay WoTC for them, and they could be traded in the blockchain, which shows the "chain of custody" all the way back to WoTC, which is what makes it "authentic". Online tournaments cou…

I hate it so much that you've outlined a very viable use of a blockchain.

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

#187

Post by max51 »

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…

>It's basically like that except there is no underlying game to play,

Do you think anyone paying >1k for a Pokémon or Magic card is actually using them to play?! That shit is in a sealed case and only sees daylight to impress people or to resell it. I've met collectors who use home printed cards because they are too scared to damage even 10$ cards.

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

#188

Post by foerbert »

rideontime wrote: post #170
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the few areas where I think there's a legitimately useful role for NFTs. WoTC (the owners of MtG) could "mint" a limited number of cards each year, just like today, controlling the rarity of certain ones, etc. People could pay WoTC for them, and they could be traded in the blockchain, which shows the "chain of custody" all the way back to WoTC, which is what makes it "authentic". Online tournaments cou…

> They already do this sort of thing with MtG Online Exactly. They can track all this stuff in their own database. WotC doesn't stand to benefit from putting anything on a blockchain.

I think it's possible they might see some benefit. It would basically hinge on people's faith in WotC vs a blockchain to administer that data. If the blockchain was more trusted - say because of concerns WotC might go out of business one day, etc - then using it might entice people to put more money in.

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

#189

Post by swalsh »

TylerE wrote: post #151
px43 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#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…

These reads to me as: Haven for asian bot farms.

Why do anti-crypto people always seem to go into all every conversation with completely bad faith?

It's fun to take something someone else built, and do something new and not planned by the origional devs with it. That's it, it's just not necessary to assume bad faith.

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

#190

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

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…

There is no gambling involved in buying a book. I give you $X you give me a book.

Gambling is I give you $X I have a,b,c % chance of getting A,B,C. Usually I get nothing. Nothing I can do can effect the outcome.

Colloquially, you might say "I don't like this author, but the reviews say blah was a blah, so I took a gamble". But that is clearly not the same as pure chance gambling.

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