It’s a mark of pride for our readers that, basically, none of you are asking CCP Games to try to play with the idea that EVE Frontier should not be called a blockchain game. Seriously, no one buys this. We all had a lot of fun making jokes at the company’s expense and we should continue to do so!
However, I think there is something that is narrowly lost here, namely the fact that EVE FrontierThe reason given for this being a blockchain game is, in itself, very stupid.
This is separate from the general idea of the game not supposedly offering NFTs (but built on top of a chain that just happens to license cryptocurrency which, in an FAQ, essentially describes the function of the cryptocurrency without saying that this is what it offers). One of the recurring elements of what I do in the Vague Patch Notes column is to try to evaluate and understand things at face value, and I’ve written columns before explaining how the NFTs in MMORPGs are a bad and stupid idea. So let’s start half a step back and look at the concept of blockchain abstractly.
One of the most pernicious and frankly ridiculous arguments that has been circulating in the crypto sphere for ages is the idea that criticism of cryptocurrencies simply doesn’t work. to understand crypto. This is ridiculous because even though the programming of these systems is very complicated, the concepts behind them are very simple. A blockchain is a distributed ledger configured to only add entries. It’s a bit like that.
“What does this mean?” Essentially, this means that a blockchain is a long list of actions that can only be added to rather than changed. The fact that it is distributed means that it exists on multiple machines as a shared and accepted value; think about file torrent systems and you’ll have a good idea. Everyone has copies of it, and everything is set up so that new segments can be written but existing ones cannot be edited.
And that’s it! If you’re thinking “it’s not that complicated”, you’re right. Oh, the actual mechanisms for programming it and making it work are extremely complex, but in terms of understanding what it does? Yeah, it’s not difficult.
Your first instinct might be to wonder what makes this particularly useful or desirable for a moddable video game. So let’s see what CCP promises in the case of EVE Frontier. The argument for using blockchain is to create a permanent, immutable universe with player-created items existing in perpetuity. In other words, CCP creates the setting and players can then explore it forever. And you never have to worry about these changes being depreciated because blockchain makes them permanent.
If this sounds stupid to you, you’re right! It is! And to start with the obvious way this is done, let’s look at another game, called Roblox. You may have heard of it.
Roblox is in many ways a terrible game based on the exploitation of content creators, mostly children, but it uses no blockchain system of any kind and it is – by definition – incredibly moddable. In fact, there are now many games that rely almost entirely on user-generated content to function. Second life is essentially built around user content, being little more than a platform for it.
But if you think this seems like a stupid argument just because other games can clearly do this without requiring any sort of blockchain, you may have slightly missed part of the problem here. And we’re going to demonstrate this with Bree’s first piece of content added to EVE Frontierthe Eliot Sucks living room. (Editor’s note: I would never do this, we love Eliot, but follow his logic here for a second. -Bree)
This living room is, as you would expect, filled to the brim with all sorts of things that say what a bad person I am. It also contains photos of me and my cats, my home address and an invitation to throw eggs at me. You know, general harassment stuff. The kind of thing that in most games would be removed in a matter of minutes because it’s just bad juju to keep in your game.
Unless your game is based on a blockchain, which is an append-only database, you can’t do this. Remember? Not only is the entire system set up so that nothing can ever be taken off the chain, but it is also set up so that everything is distributed. The only way to roll back these things is to hard fork the entire chain and try to recreate all legitimate parts of the game that were also in motion during this time, while ensuring that no data is lost. is lost in the process.
And it’s not purely theoretical. If you think you hear about games on the blockchain doing this, it’s it already happened. Wolf game was an on-chain hosted game that had several bugs found in the NFTs used for the game’s core mechanics, and since the whole thing was on-chain, the tokens couldn’t be fixed, only replaced. So the developers tried to recreate identical fixed tokens for everyone, and it went so badly that that’s why you don’t hear about it.
The reason this doesn’t come up more often is that usually these ideas crash and burn long before you bring any bottom-line results.
“Hey, there’s no reason to assume the CCP would keep all of this on chain!” And that’s a legitimate point to make; we don’t really have a complete picture of what will and won’t be on-chain. But that’s not the question either. If you store anything on-chain outside of cryptocurrency, the chain is a particularly terrible place to put it, because anything that’s broken can’t be changed. It cannot be replaced.
Forget harassment or anything like that: what happens if someone accidentally creates buggy content that permanently damages your character in some way? You can’t fix it if it’s on-chain. The reason most NFTs are simply linked to an image file stored on traditional servers is that putting these items on chain actually makes them less accessible. It’s a tool that doesn’t work well for doing anything other than running a transaction log because that’s what the thing it’s built on is designed for.
And if you’re thinking that sounds like something that doesn’t support an editable or permanent universe in any way, you’d be right. Because even though it prevents items from being deleted, it’s not even a desirable result. This doesn’t usefully reflect how players expect to interact with a video game.
Now, I don’t know what CCP Games does behind the scenes because I don’t work for CCP, and I don’t know what secrets lurk in the recesses of its developers’ collective hearts. It’s possible that the developers working on this project know that this is a particularly terrible idea and are building it primarily to chase away investor money flowing to otherwise legitimate brands that focus on blockchain nonsense. But that’s not really the point either.
CCP has claimed that it does not want people to think of this game as a blockchain game, while emphasizing the idea that it must be on the blockchain to work. But not only is this last part a lie, it explicitly makes the first part a bad smokescreen. Even though the developers know it’s just chasing investors’ money, they try to get people to buy by calling it something they’re not and pretending they’re using the technology to do something that technology is at best bad at doing and at worst actively harmful.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s happening in the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are vague patch notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior journalist Eliot Lefebvre likes to analyze these kinds of notes as well as vague elements of the genre as a whole. The power of this analysis may be adjusted in certain circumstances.
