Play-To-Earn Minecraft NFT Servers in sharp decline following ban of NFT from Minecraft

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

Summary

Restofworld released an article detailing the fallout from Microsoft ban of NFT in Minecraft.

 

Minecraft is an enormously popular popular survival, crafting, sandbox game owned by Microsoft. Microsoft allows for custom Minecraft servers to be monetized, to support the modding community and paying for the infrastructure.

 

Critterz is a modded minecraft server that locks some of minecraft content and gameplay behind an NFT paywall and rewards players/workers with a cryptocurrency called $BLOCK for actions like mining, creating a Play-To-Earn economy on top of minecraft. The creators wanted to experiment building a Web3 Play-To-Earn economy on top of an already successful game.

 

Critterz had a complex economy, with NFT that doubled as skins and access tokens for the game (which costed several thousand dollars at the peak), plots of lands and allowed actions tied to ownership certain NFTs, a secondary market to resell the NFT used to gain access to the game, players from low income countries being hired by guilds to mine ingame blocks and earning BLOCK tokens and sharing some of those tokens with guild leaders.

 

Initially, the Critterz allowed some players to earn 100$ per day playing the game. Critterz struggled with inflation of $BLOCK tokens, and with the fact players were selling the BLOCK they earned for local currencies, and not holding onto them, leading to a slow decline in earning down to 10$ per day.

 

On the 20 of July, following high profile failures of other Play-To-Earn games like Axie infinity, Microsoft banned the use of NFT in minecraft servers.

 

What followed is a crash of both the Critterz NFT price, and the BLOCK tokens, leading players/workers to leave Critterz for other Play-To-Earn games.

 

Other NFT projects built on top of Minecraft suddered a collapse as well following Microsoft Ban of NFTs in minecraft. E.g. NFT Worlds is an NFT collection of free minecraft seeds.

 

Quotes

Quote

Big Chief said that he split earnings 60/40 in favor of his scholars, and that, unlike other games like Axie Infinity, most of them actually enjoyed playing Minecraft. “These kids are playing Minecraft, a game that they already liked and played, and earning as much as a CPA (certified public accountant) in the Philippines,” he said.
“We had to make it a requirement that they play eight hours a day, so it was a full-time job,” said Big Chief.
“All my players are selling their $BLOCK, because they need money to live, as opposed to holding it,” said Big Chief.
“With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs (“non-playable characters”), real-life NPCs in your game,” said Kossar
“Game development takes a lot of time and it’s one of the most complex software challenges that exists. You have sound, art, gameplay, game design — that’s just on the non-programming technical side of things,” he said. “If we create something that is similar to Minecraft, we can land in hot water there too,” he added, referring to potential copyright issues.

 

My thoughts

I Play-For-Fun, I never saw the appeal in a Play-To-Earn games.

 

I especially dislike how such games target poorer players/workers in poorer countries, where the low conversion rate of [$/h] of regular work can make a Play-To-Earn game appealing.

 

Games continously botch their ingame economy, and as long as that economy is pixelated gems, it's no big deal. When a Play-To-Earn game botches it's economy, that affect the livelyhood of players/workers, and at worst it causes those player/workers to lose their investment, because Play-To-Earn games rutinely requires thousands of dollars to access the game, and those bought assets can lose 90+% of their value during a downturn.

 

Sources

https://restofworld.org/2022/minecraft-nft-ban-critterz/

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-and-nfts

[Bombastinator]

18 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Summary

Restofworld released an article detailing the fallout from Microsoft ban of NFT in Minecraft.

 

Minecraft is an enormously popular popular survival, crafting, sandbox game owned by Microsoft. Microsoft allows for custom Minecraft servers to be monetized, to support the modding community and paying for the infrastructure.

 

Critterz is a modded minecraft server that locks some of minecraft content and gameplay behind an NFT paywall and rewards players/workers with a cryptocurrency called $BLOCK for actions like mining, creating a Play-To-Earn economy on top of minecraft. The creators wanted to experiment building a Web3 Play-To-Earn economy on top of an already successful game.

 

Critterz had a complex economy, with NFT that doubled as skins and access tokens for the game (which costed several thousand dollars at the peak), plots of lands and allowed actions tied to ownership certain NFTs, a secondary market to resell the NFT used to gain access to the game, players from low income countries being hired by guilds to mine ingame blocks and earning BLOCK tokens and sharing some of those tokens with guild leaders.

 

Initially, the Critterz allowed some players to earn 100$ per day playing the game. Critterz struggled with inflation of $BLOCK tokens, and with the fact players were selling the BLOCK they earned for local currencies, and not holding onto them, leading to a slow decline in earning down to 10$ per day.

 

On the 20 of July, following high profile failures of other Play-To-Earn games like Axie infinity, Microsoft banned the use of NFT in minecraft servers.

 

What followed is a crash of both the Critterz NFT price, and the BLOCK tokens, leading players/workers to leave Critterz for other Play-To-Earn games.

 

Other NFT projects built on top of Minecraft suddered a collapse as well following Microsoft Ban of NFTs in minecraft. E.g. NFT Worlds is an NFT collection of free minecraft seeds.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

I Play-For-Fun, I never saw the appeal in a Play-To-Earn games.

 

I especially dislike how such games target poorer players/workers in poorer countries, where the low conversion rate of [$/h] of regular work can make a Play-To-Earn game appealing.

 

Games continously botch their ingame economy, and as long as that economy is pixelated gems, it's no big deal. When a Play-To-Earn game botches it's economy, that affect the livelyhood of players/workers, and at worst it causes those player/workers to lose their investment, because Play-To-Earn games rutinely requires thousands of dollars to access the game, and those bought assets can lose 90+% of their value during a downturn.

 

Sources

https://restofworld.org/2022/minecraft-nft-ban-critterz/

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-and-nfts

I shorten the last paragraph to “are often scams” myself.

[Middcore]

And nothing of value was lost.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

 

My thoughts

I Play-For-Fun, I never saw the appeal in a Play-To-Earn games.

 

I especially dislike how such games target poorer players/workers in poorer countries, where the low conversion rate of [$/h] of regular work can make a Play-To-Earn game appealing.

 

Ultima Online, Everquest, World of Warcraft, Archeage,  Mabinogi, FFXI and FFXIV would all like a word with you.

 

Those gold farmers? That's exactly what these "8 hour a day pay-to-earn"'s are doing, but at least the gold farmers and powerleveler's had the right idea, just build bots to do the the thing. Nobody is checking for them, and as long as they interact with players like a NPC, nobody even notices they're there. It's when they start hacking the game (eg teleporting), and spamming, they get noticed and the players then demand the ejection of the bots. The players absolutely want the bots in the game because it's cheaper, time-wise, to buy things from the market once the bots destroy it, and whoever is the first mover on the things that can't be botted, wins.

 

Here's what really should happen, the next time a "big idea" MMO(RPG) comes out.

 

1. Create self-persistence within the game. Once you login, you are "never" logged out. If your game client dies, or you fail to ever log back in...

2. Players affirm themselves to a job schedule in the game. So your character might be a shop keeper, and simply goes and tends their shop when you disconnect. Maybe they're a hunter, and have a list of targets, and if your character is appropriately equipped to hunt those, they will go hunt them until their stamina is exhausted and then go rest until the list is full. This requires a lot more advanced planning for how the game works, but it also requires doing things similar to minecraft, where there is only "one world", and capacity is managed by spreading out and layering smaller and smaller layers over locations that players hang out in.

3. Permit players to connect advanced "AI" to their characters that sits between their game client and the server, as long as it behaves like a player. So maybe you might create an advanced quest-giving NPC which really looks like another player just asking to trade. If the player needs 200 rat tails, it just keeps buying them from players until it gets the necessary ingredients and then starts crafting the things it needs them for.

 

Anything that actually moves the character's progress (eg leveling, storyline) is on pause while there is nothing controlling them.

 

So far we haven't seen this, though the "intent" by Ultima Online was for it to work this way on some level, and even games that still adhered to that, where there were player-run shops, fell well short of it working that way due to the games having limited space, or poorly working "market boards/auction houses" that didn't allow player to negotiate quality, quantity or price.

 

And game developers haven't done this because they don't want to build servers to do it. If you have 20,000 players that are just idle, that's the same as 20,000 players that are just spinning in circles with an elastic band on their controller to defeat the idle timer kickout. It ultimately requires that games are designed to scale with the player base, not simply fork another copy of the game server.

 

But to bring this back to the OP about NFT's, what if your "game client" actually earned the game currency by being connected. What if the game servers themselves were decentralized, so that each "tile" in the game was seamless, and actually running on all the connected game clients at the same time, and the distributed ledger is how it keeps everyone honest? Whenever "property" in the game is traded, (not generated) all the game clients in the tile have to agree on who has it because the "players" never stop persisting in the game world. What if it was possible to do this with the generated things (eg quests, monsters, game "currency") etc, in which it self-corrects the "gold farming" problem by letting players just trade the game currency outside the game to each other.

 

As much as I dislike cryptocoins and NFT's, if a true decentralized game world were to be designed, it would require a high speed mechanism to verify all property exchanges, and I think games that work like minecraft would just fall over dead if they had to deal with the consequences of players figuring out how to do a world-split to loot a low-populated tile of the world when there are no online players around to oppose a malicious transaction. Minecraft already performs poorly with large amounts of players and "npc" players when modded to act like MMORPG's, imagine the consequences if people "lose their paycheck" because the game world tile got rolled back that they happened to be in when it went offline.

 

NFT's as an "access" mechanism, and as a form of intangible property is always doomed to fail because to date, the people who have been doing them have been doing rug-pulls, and aren't genuinely interested in the NFT's themselves. The last loser to be holding on to them ends up with nothing but a bad life story.

 

 

[Bombastinator]

13 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Ultima Online, Everquest, World of Warcraft, Archeage,  Mabinogi, FFXI and FFXIV would all like a word with you.

 

Those gold farmers? That's exactly what these "8 hour a day pay-to-earn"'s are doing, but at least the gold farmers and powerleveler's had the right idea, just build bots to do the the thing. Nobody is checking for them, and as long as they interact with players like a NPC, nobody even notices they're there. It's when they start hacking the game (eg teleporting), and spamming, they get noticed and the players then demand the ejection of the bots. The players absolutely want the bots in the game because it's cheaper, time-wise, to buy things from the market once the bots destroy it, and whoever is the first mover on the things that can't be botted, wins.

 

Here's what really should happen, the next time a "big idea" MMO(RPG) comes out.

 

1. Create self-persistence within the game. Once you login, you are "never" logged out. If your game client dies, or you fail to ever log back in...

2. Players affirm themselves to a job schedule in the game. So your character might be a shop keeper, and simply goes and tends their shop when you disconnect. Maybe they're a hunter, and have a list of targets, and if your character is appropriately equipped to hunt those, they will go hunt them until their stamina is exhausted and then go rest until the list is full. This requires a lot more advanced planning for how the game works, but it also requires doing things similar to minecraft, where there is only "one world", and capacity is managed by spreading out and layering smaller and smaller layers over locations that players hang out in.

3. Permit players to connect advanced "AI" to their characters that sits between their game client and the server, as long as it behaves like a player. So maybe you might create an advanced quest-giving NPC which really looks like another player just asking to trade. If the player needs 200 rat tails, it just keeps buying them from players until it gets the necessary ingredients and then starts crafting the things it needs them for.

 

Anything that actually moves the character's progress (eg leveling, storyline) is on pause while there is nothing controlling them.

 

So far we haven't seen this, though the "intent" by Ultima Online was for it to work this way on some level, and even games that still adhered to that, where there were player-run shops, fell well short of it working that way due to the games having limited space, or poorly working "market boards/auction houses" that didn't allow player to negotiate quality, quantity or price.

 

And game developers haven't done this because they don't want to build servers to do it. If you have 20,000 players that are just idle, that's the same as 20,000 players that are just spinning in circles with an elastic band on their controller to defeat the idle timer kickout. It ultimately requires that games are designed to scale with the player base, not simply fork another copy of the game server.

 

But to bring this back to the OP about NFT's, what if your "game client" actually earned the game currency by being connected. What if the game servers themselves were decentralized, so that each "tile" in the game was seamless, and actually running on all the connected game clients at the same time, and the distributed ledger is how it keeps everyone honest? Whenever "property" in the game is traded, (not generated) all the game clients in the tile have to agree on who has it because the "players" never stop persisting in the game world. What if it was possible to do this with the generated things (eg quests, monsters, game "currency") etc, in which it self-corrects the "gold farming" problem by letting players just trade the game currency outside the game to each other.

 

As much as I dislike cryptocoins and NFT's, if a true decentralized game world were to be designed, it would require a high speed mechanism to verify all property exchanges, and I think games that work like minecraft would just fall over dead if they had to deal with the consequences of players figuring out how to do a world-split to loot a low-populated tile of the world when there are no online players around to oppose a malicious transaction. Minecraft already performs poorly with large amounts of players and "npc" players when modded to act like MMORPG's, imagine the consequences if people "lose their paycheck" because the game world tile got rolled back that they happened to be in when it went offline.

 

NFT's as an "access" mechanism, and as a form of intangible property is always doomed to fail because to date, the people who have been doing them have been doing rug-pulls, and aren't genuinely interested in the NFT's themselves. The last loser to be holding on to them ends up with nothing but a bad life story.

 

 

This would have to be a monthly fee per toon thing.  Only way to pay for the potentially immense servers it would generate.  This model is talked about in a science fiction book.  Their game had geology. 

[Cyberspirit]

10 hours ago, Kisai said:

-snip-

 

 

Black Desert Online kind of does what you've described but instead of having the player's character go around in the world, you can set up workers who farm and craft things.

You can also level your character's life skills while not playing by setting up tasks for it to do, however, you do have to be logged into the game for all of it to work but you can minimize the game and have it run in the background.

[Bombastinator]

31 minutes ago, Cyberspirit said:

Black Desert Online kind of does what you've described but instead of having the player's character go around in the world, you can set up workers who farm and craft things.

You can also level your character's life skills while not playing by setting up tasks for it to do, however, you do have to be logged into the game for all of it to work but you can minimize the game and have it run in the background.

There has to be a way to pay for the server time or they will be used for something else.  What is it?

[Cyberspirit]

43 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

There has to be a way to pay for the server time or they will be used for something else.  What is it?

Not sure I understand the question, sorry.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Cyberspirit said:

Black Desert Online kind of does what you've described but instead of having the player's character go around in the world, you can set up workers who farm and craft things.

You can also level your character's life skills while not playing by setting up tasks for it to do, however, you do have to be logged into the game for all of it to work but you can minimize the game and have it run in the background.

Setting up workers isn't the same thing, as it's just setting up NPC's that nobody else sees. Final Fantasy XIV's retainers do this as well.

 

Ultimately these don't really add any value to the game unless it's the "player" character doing the work. Like think about games that have PvP elements. The fact that these player NPC's don't actually exist in the world means they aren't subject to any of the risks, and the player itself has zero risk.

 

One of the more fun aspects of Archeage was in fact using the PvP to steal (a specific loot) things from other players and then sell it before another player does the same to you. The ship to ship battles was interesting, but you could usually despawn the ship before it was destroyed, thus nothing permanent was achieved.

 

What literately needs to exist in MMORPG's is a self-persistence of the player, and if the game contains PvP type activity, that has to be taken into account, not simply "logging out in a safe space", for example. You could have many players who are assigned "the town watch/guards" when they are in a logged-off state, and that would give them the ability to use the PvP to their own advantage. Most MMO's have "town guards", PvP or not, that are basically immortal by design, because in earlier games like Ultima Online and Everquest, Players would lure monsters into the town, and in those games, other players could loot the bodies of players if they don't loot their own bodies in time. Current generations of MMO games really treat players with kid gloves, having taken all the world/player risk out of the game, and instead trying to scam them out of money for things that are part of the game.

 

 

[Bombastinator]

9 hours ago, Cyberspirit said:

Not sure I understand the question, sorry.

Servers cost money.  There are bills to pay.  This game has to take in money somehow for it to be sustainable.  How are they doing it. Because if they aren’t the servers will eventually shut down.

[Cyberspirit]

6 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Servers cost money.  There are bills to pay.  This game has to take in money somehow for it to be sustainable.  How are they doing it. Because if they aren’t the servers will eventually shut down.

Oh, I see. Well, I would assume that most of their money comes from people who buy a bunch of cosmetics, which is pretty common to do but you can also buy things like a "Value pack" which give some nice buffs like more storage and carry capacity.

[williamcll]

Yes but when will Pay to win Minecraft dollar servers be banned.

[spartaman64]

On 9/8/2022 at 11:11 AM, Bombastinator said:

Servers cost money.  There are bills to pay.  This game has to take in money somehow for it to be sustainable.  How are they doing it. Because if they aren’t the servers will eventually shut down.

 

20 hours ago, Cyberspirit said:

Oh, I see. Well, I would assume that most of their money comes from people who buy a bunch of cosmetics, which is pretty common to do but you can also buy things like a "Value pack" which give some nice buffs like more storage and carry capacity.

theres also people who pay hundreds of thousands for costumes to melt into cron stones to prevent their gear from downgrading on failed enhancements. some guy spent 300k usd got banned for piloting made a new account and spent another 270k usd LUL

 

they also use leaseweb one of the cheapest server providers but very low quality. after the server migration i heard they also started using AWS but im not sure what's the split

 

also a ton of stuff in bdo is client side. unfortunately this leads to people being able to do stuff like speedhacking and i think its one of the things increasing desync issues in the game

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

 

theres also people who pay hundreds of thousands for costumes to melt into cron stones to prevent their gear from downgrading on failed enhancements. some guy spent 300k usd got banned for piloting made a new account and spent another 270k usd LUL

 

they also use leaseweb one of the cheapest server providers but very low quality. after the server migration i heard they also started using AWS but im not sure what's the split

 

also a ton of stuff in bdo is client side. unfortunately this leads to people being able to do stuff like speedhacking and i think its one of the things increasing desync issues in the game

*doesn’t know what piloting is in this use case but thinks it probably doesn't matter*

so cosmetic and non-cosmetic micro transactions.  As long as those keep up the game will keep going then. Pay-to-win could wind up being an issue here.

[spartaman64]

41 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

*doesn’t know what piloting is in this use case but thinks it probably doesn't matter*

so cosmetic and non-cosmetic micro transactions.  As long as those keep up the game will keep going then. Pay-to-win could wind up being an issue here.

Yep but I didn't really mind since the p2w "exchange rate" is terrible. You could spend 1000 dollars and get nothing out of it lol. Enhancing is heavily rng based 

[Bombastinator]

55 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

Yep but I didn't really mind since the p2w "exchange rate" is terrible. You could spend 1000 dollars and get nothing out of it lol. Enhancing is heavily rng based 

So gambling.  Yay.  The thing about rng when money is involved is the rng is frequently a lot more limited than it seems.  It looks like true rng but isn’t. Take slot machines.