Topic: Potential Games LLC - Island Forge BTC Discussion (Read 5699 times)

I am all for PvP! It is indeed more fun and more immersive.
But then, if players calculate through chances and don't take risks because loss of "real stuff" is imminent, the fun surely lessens. I want to be able to annoy other players which are two heads above me, get killed eventually, have some lulz and not lose real world assets or too much time (by losing experience, gold, items).
Thats my, more or less recreational, view.

But then, with nyhm's last post, it is clear now anyway.

Ente

Thanks for the continued input, folks. Island Forge does not have PvP, and I have no plan to add PvP any time soon (that would be a v2.0 thing, if ever). Not that it's a bad idea, just that it doesn't really fit the game. Nonetheless, I like hearing all the different perspectives.

I don't think that is a good idea.. It seems too scary for the targeted audience, which is youngsters with much time but low/no money. Getting 0.1 Bitcoin stolen will be reason enough to quit for some of them.
Remember all the drama caused here in the forum by individuals who probably lost single-digit Bitcoin on one of the scams?
In WoW, for example, you don't even lose gear when you die. You have some penalty, but no experience or gear or gold is lost.

Ente

I think that you can try to use the same idea of the next auction house on blizzard games.
You can make some items hard to drop in-game, and people will be able to exchange them in an in-game auction house.
They will chose the price IN GP, and you will take a cut. ( ex: 0.9% )

Preface: This post has become rather long, but I wanted to document my thought process, to give the Bitcoin community a look at what must be considered before embracing Bitcoin in a non-Bitcoin-centric project (that is, not a business that exists solely because of Bitcoin), which is something I think is really lacking in the world of Bitcoin at large.

Wonderful comments, fornit and Ente. I've been devoting a great deal of thought to all manner of subscription vs. freemium. Currently, I'm considering something in the middle. This is still highly speculative, but  I really appreciate community input, so I'll briefly describe it here, and would appreciate any feedback folks can provide:

Tentative Plan: In addition to the in-game currency (GP), integrate a secondary currency called Island Points (IP), which can be used to buy specialty features, which are not directly tied to character development. They'd be conveniences, including items such as fornit suggested, as well as other upgrades (character slots, island slots, maybe specialty tilesets, cosmetic avatar enhancements, etc.). IP can only be gained by spending USD or BTC.

Whether IP can be traded for GP (or vice versa) is a big question. Ente suggested that everything should be attainable via the in-game currency (GP), even if ridiculously expensive (which then becomes a matter of GP-to-IP exchange rate and balance). This is only tangentially related to Bitcoin, but community input is welcome.

More specific to Bitcoin, I've given a good deal of thought to the prospect of cashing out BTC, as Ente mentioned. I have a number of ideas, but wonder about the business concerns of such an approach. As an aside, to emphasize that I am quite serious about Bitcoin+Games, I'd like to mention that I've drafted the design for an MMO game which is all about BTC (spending and earning). However, I must get Island Forge off the ground (with or without BTC) before even considering another game.

I designed Island Forge before Bitcoin existed, yet I see the potential for Bitcoin in this game. As Ente suggests, there could be viral interest just for the sake of having a Bitcoin MMORPG (especially if the game lets you earn it). Although I have the technical capability to do this, I'm at the point in development (wrapping up beta) where I must be very cautious about introducing whole new systems. Nonetheless, I'm extremely eager/tempted to actually start using Bitcoin (beyond general donations and experimentation).

Question: What's the level of interest in Island Forge (or any game) accepting BTC as an alternative to USD, without any gameplay-related integration? Is the Bitcoin community only really interested in projects that exist expressly for the sake of moving Bitcoin around (which seems to be the predominant case)?

I hope the community recognizes my reasons for hesitation and appreciates that I'm giving this serious consideration. Again,  much of this post is to document my business/thought process, and I hope someone finds it instructive. More insights from the Bitcoin+Game community are most welcome, and I thank you for your interest.

Nice to see more movement again in the Bitcoin+Gaming department!

I, personally, would not buy in-game items for real-world money. Not because of the money (I payd monthly fees before), but because I want to do that stuff by myself. Including grinding several days for a silly, useless pet dragon. That was many years ago, but still.. ;-)

There seems to be a big market for such semi-useless prestige things. Like special pets and mounts for special-edition buyers, for example. That stuff gets expensive on ebay too!

I suggest that everything is possible without paying (monthly fees not counted here). Even if it is ten times slower to reach the same by "hand". A lot of people would probably not join or quit once they understand paying BTC as inevitable.


So the BTC thing is strictly one-way? You cant dump a bag of GP and receive Bitcoin? If you implemented that, you have a good chance to make it viral instantly. Sure, you will have lots and lots of farmers (if it all works well). But with some clever algo it should work, automatically adjusting the buy and sell price according to the in-game market. Even if the sell price is just a tenth of the buy price, there will be farmers (kiddies and professionals) as well as buyers.
Don't underestimate virability and crowds :-)
(Again, Stephenson's REAMDE comes to mind..)

Ente

free to play games have different ways to deal with this. one is to sell something that gives a advantage you cant earn otherwise, like special objects with convenient abilities you dont necessarily need to enjoy the game, like skins, teleports between save places, extra storage space or small stat boosts. another one is to allow paying customers faster leveling or just buying leveled characters.
you are suggesting a variation of the latter. in my experience, one dollar or euro usually buys you are several hours of advancement. so for games where you can play more than 100 hours, possibly playing multiple characters, you can easily pay the equivalent of multiple month of subscription if you dont like the low-level grinding.
in my opinion, games that still offer a good experience when you are not willing to pay money work best, since they are much more likely to gain the necessary amount of players.
in a big player base, there will always be players that dont like playing the early game.
but conveniece items can work very well too. for example, if you have to walk back to town every 30 minutes for 1 minute or instead buy town portal scrolls for 1-2 cent real money, people will buy them. that wont make you rich but if there are few more useful things to buy its not that hard to spend as much as on a regular subscription. and the low price of each single item makes it very very easy to just spend a few dimes now and then even for players who would never buy a subscription or a pre-leveled character for 10-20$.
its soooo hard to resist, especially if the payment option is so easy that the drug of choice is just a copy&paste away *g*

a negative example: i once tried a game where you had to pay real money for crafting recipes, all but the most basic backpacks and even health potions. it was a total disaster. emptiest game ever. the free to play part was way too hard and and missed a big part of the most addictive mechanics of mmorpgs.

Brilliant - Mint is the perfect name for a direct BTC-to-GP shop. I also love the Alchemist concept, because it would require a gameplay integration (earning Lead) to get the GP. Suppose the Alchemist gives a better exchange rate than the Mint, because you had to accomplish in-game tasks to earn the required Lead. If you just want the GP immediately, visit the Mint.

This is so compelling that I've made a task for such a feature in Island Forge. The first step would just be a working Mint. However, I do not know if I will attempt it for 1.0. I'm wrapping up beta, and this would introduce a significant new feature. Nonetheless, let's continue this great discussion:

Next Question: How likely are players to buy GP with BTC, when GP can also be earned by other means in the game? I suppose this is all a matter of balance. To be wildly speculative, how would players feel if I shut off all other means of earning GP, requiring you to spend BTC at the Mint (or Alchemist) to advance in the world? This might be interesting for Bitcoin at large, but would anyone actually play?

Thanks for your suggestions, as well, senbonzakura! I'm excited to here more community input.

call it the "royal mint" or something...
or the alchemist. extra credit if you have to pay the alchemist in bitcoin and bring him some lead that he can transform into gold 

Right - of course - how institutional of me! Thanks for catching that, Bruno. A primary tenet of Bitcoin is no banks. I think the term would make sense to players, though. More technically, the in-world shop would represent a one-way Currency Exchange, but that's an awkward name. Any better name suggestions for an in-game shop where you can convert BTC into GP (the in-game currency)?


Thanks for your input on that, senbonzakura. My initial goal would be to integrate Bitcoin as a way to augment the game, not as a central feature in the world's item economy. A big part of playing Island Forge is earning items through a crafting process (which also requires GP). There would not be a direct BTC item market right away. Thank you for your comment, since this is exactly the kind of input I need from the Bitcoin community.

To keep in the spirit, I suggest anything else besides Bank.

~Bruno~

This is highly speculative (i.e., not likely to happen unless folks are really interested), but I've been contemplating integrating Bitcoin into Island Forge in some form or another. I'm the sole developer of Island Forge, which is a player-created content MMORPG (with an old-school style), currently wrapping up open beta.

Minimally, I could add a town shop (maybe called a Bank) where players can send in BTC to get in-game currency (GP) for their character.

I have more ideas, which integrate more deeply with the gameplay, but let's focus on this first step.

Would you (as a player) buy GP for BTC? Please see the site (and try the open beta) to understand what the game is about and how GP is used. Like most things in Island Forge, old-school traditional elements are designed in a new unique way. For instance, even if your character has thousands of GP, you must still earn the resources and materials (from fighting creatures) required to craft weaponry, equipment, potions, spells, etc. GP is used for healing, leveling, and training, as well as crafting.

This is another game that can support BitCoin, and the name is already perfect: BitMMO
http://8bitmmo.net
Someone should go to give some help to the main dev of this game

I have also made a suggestion:
http://8bitmmo.uservoice.com/forums/150844-general/suggestions/2892337-bitcoin-currency
Give your votes!

Unfortunately though it is not open source. Trying to recreate it, or something very like it, from scratch is likely to be quite expensive. SO we should start with less expensive projects first to raise funds for the more-expensive ones.

There is however a purported World of Warcraft server clone on SourceForge. It does not seem to have clients though, it seems to epxect people to use the existing actual World of Warcraft clients. I am not sure if that is really a great idea, but it is something that is actually available so is probably worth looking at.

Basically we need to start with free stuff to raise money for hosting and bandwidth at first, then eventually once hosting and bandwidth is covered we can start adding actual development, and so on. Hopefully DeVCoin will help with some of this, since development is after all what DeVCoin is all about.

I expect too though that we will need a core population of cryptocurrency-oriented players, because in any multi-player game the population of players is a very major aspect of the appeal of the game. We need our games to be heavily populated with friendly players who welcome new players, help them get into the game long term, and get them informed about cryptocurrency. Without this core of players we will either end up with empty worlds or worlds whose players simply have no interest in cryptocurrencies thus just push for normal fiat if they want to get currency involved in the game at all.

Unfortunately as I have mentioned before the population of bitcoiners found here at this forum does not actually seem at all interested in games, so how to establish the initial core population of cryptocoin-oriented players is still an unsolved problem. We need active, friendly players, preferably ones who will get all their friends into it too. After all it is the early population that will presumably have the most wealth to be made selling things to the later arrivals, so getting in early should actually be advantageous provided that eventually outsiders do start to be brought in. There are a number of good "residual" marketing tools the core team can deploy though to help bring in insiders, so maybe it will also be important to have some mechanism for determinine who actually brought in each new player, so they can be rewarded for such recruiting/marketing.

(On the other hand, maybe that will take care of itself, since presumably those players who have accumulated things to sell will probably be mentioning their ability to provide such things as part of their marketing of the game, thus can expect the players they bring in to be contacting them about aquiring such resources.)

-MarkM-

what about league of legends? it has more players than WoW, an thered there are chars ans skins buyable...
i think bitccoin will have a good chance

Since the main bottleneck to implementation is funding, it seemed reasonable to look into the economic-game and trading-game aspects first, since it seems possible that the popularity of rampant speculation could really drive some epic development.

I came across Bitcoin and Open Transactions when I went looking for market/trading code. I wanted players to be able to trade and to run trading houses, with the stuff they are trading having a location as well as whatever other attributes it might have so that a transportation/shipping game would naturally arise around it as a form of arbitrage when the locations of the things being traded starts to get in the way of the trading.

Location can also cover things like "this gold is over in the World of Warcraft universe", "these ISK are located in the EVE Online universe", "this suit of magic gear is in the Falling Swords universe" and so on.

However, currencies based on blockchains seem to offer an out from having to worry so much about location. Cryptocoins are easy to ship from place to place even among places where things like swords or grams of gold or local fiat currencies might not be exportable / importable.

Then along came DeVCoin, a coin anyone working on free open source games can easily aquire. The whole design of DeVCoin is based on putting it into the hands of such people. Of course I helped make sure that coin got created, it seemed a perfect fit...

-MarkM-

..watching this thread here as well.
(besides "Create a game that accepts Bitcoin for currency" https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/create-a-game-that-accepts-bitcoin-for-currency-48088 )

Ente

I was just kidding with my one-word response to your epic prose, markm.

To elaborate, your vision of a meta-commerce between all games is compelling. I can imagine the mindset of players looking for which games offer the optimal earning potential. Some games would be good for farming value, which can be used to support actions in other games. That would change the landscape of in-game economics. More than I would get into, but a great concept.

Actually, this sounds like a sci-fi future-scape foundation for a Neal Stephenson novel.

Nifty

In the Galactic Milieu, we introduce players to the general concept of bitcoin, the technology, by having a number of nations that use blockchains for their national currencies, and we mention actual bitcoins in particular by attributing them to the legendary/mythical "Hacker" nation.

Thus we take a soft-sell approach. The fact that a Hacker known as Satoshi actually visited the mythical planet "Earth" and introduced the "Hacker" currency, Bitcoins, there early in the 21st century is just a bit of historical trivia, players can have fun with various other blockchain-based currencies, hopefully ones they can actually realistically mine some of for themselves, before worrying about the actual real live bitcoins that, it turns out, someone known as Satoshi actually *did* introduce here on Earth in the early 21st century.

The thing is, the "Hacker" nation is so insanely advanced that their currency is ridiculously valuable, even more valaube than those of the very powerful and advanced Brits, Canucks and Martians. Plus, the Hacker nation is approximately as mythical as the planet known as Earth, so it is far more likely that players will find themselves dealing with one of the "big three" national currencies - United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB), Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) and Martian BotCoins (MBC) - or the currencies of the largest intergalactic megacorporations General Mining Corp (GMC) and General Retirement Funds (GRF), or even the relatively new United Nations Scrip (UNS) than actual Bitcoins; and probably often simply using bitNicKeLs, which all of the preceding use as the small-change denomination for day to day stuff smaller than, say, battlestars or space-stations or leases of entire planets or suchlike. Even bitNicKeLs are actually pretty hefty really for small game stuff like buying a beer, so individual-adventurer scale players will thus tend mostly to use DeVCoins or, if relatively well-healed, GRouPcoins.

It is probably not necessary to build into the games software for directly dealing with blockchains at all. It should suffice that tokens be used, or even that the various coins are simply assigned a relatively stable value in copperpieces, silverpieces, goldpieces, platinum pieces etc and use these normal familiar tokens in game, only bothering to actually directly use blockchains when sending funds to other players for use in possibly some other game (aka, some other sub-game of the meta-game, since actually hacking the code of all the subgames to make them smoothly transfer stuff between them is probably lower priority than simply getting them all working and working out what exactly they do each have to offer to the others in terms of export and import opportunities.)

The big thing that blockchain based coins have to offer for gaming is precisely this ability of the players to move them from game to game. They are rather like "real money" in that way, except that in most games you usually find in practice that you cannot in fact move "real money" out of a game. Most games explicitly forbid you from moving "real money" out of the game, you can only put it in, not take it out.

Basically it is simpler and more generic/homogenous to move cryptocoins from game to game than it is to move, for example, specific types of starship, or specific species of played character having specific skills and experiences and vital-statistics. Games tend to represent the latter types of things in such different ways that each thing to be shipped between games can involve a huge amount of theoretical work just to formulate the conversion algorithms before even getting to actually implementing them. But fungible "money" is an item many games represent quite similarly, that is, as a numeric value having various uses/effects in the game. So money seems the simplest place to start in weaving together many games into a larger metagame/economy... Your rich uncle who runs a village on a "Devana" based planet might not be able to come kill rats in the sewers with you in the Crossfire RPG or CoffeeMUD MUD based city you live in, but he can send you pocket-money or buy shares in the XNova-Redesigned or 2Moons based intergalactic mining venture you intend to finance with the loot you find in those sewers...

-MarkM-