An Idea Regarding Digital Currency and Gaming

So, I was watching an episode from The Orville season 1, and they mentioned that in the future, they did away with money. You see, the crew of The Orville are tasked with infiltrating a 21st century human world, and they are given stacks of paper bills. They ask, "What is this?" It turns out that in the future world that The Orville is a part of, paper money doesn't exist. Reputation is the new currency.

This idea of reputation being a currency sounds like it could integrate well into social media and gaming, as well as cryptocurrencies. Think about it this way, how many connections you have is worth something. Cryptocurrencies are worth something based on how many people own them, and how many companies or governments accept them as payment. Also, the more American dollars of value that are circulating for each unit of a digital coin determine its value, as well.

So how does this relate to social media? Why not get paid to get views on your YouTube channel where you stream content about your interests. Like in gaming, there are professional streamers who stream themselves playing video games. I'm not quite to where I'm going yet, but almost. So, streamers can sign up to include ads on their YouTube channel so that they earn money per view on the content they make.

I love this idea personally for a few reasons - it allows ANYONE to make affordable content about something they enjoy. There is the potential to work from home, set your own hours, and the like. There are drawbacks, as well. I wonder if YouTube will ever have to pay people who make a living on their site health insurance. I'm not promoting that, but I mean within the next 50 years.

That is not my point, so I'll get right to it - I remember when Diablo III first came out, they had a market system where ANYONE could sell their loot on the IN GAME MARKET for REAL MONEY. I think this kind of system should be used more. I know some companies are going pay-to-play, which is lame, especially in the case of Star Wars: Battlefront II, which required over $2000 to unlock all of the content, with payments needed to unlock things like entire characters or weapons (although you could unlock Luke Sywalker or Darth Vader after 40 hours of gameplay).

You could grind out loot in an RPG and then sell it for real money to someone else. Or even better, there could be a digital currency that was accepted by multiple games, that you could also exchange for other digital currencies or through a regular online exchange for real money, too.

If someone were to make that currency, they could negotiate with the game companies to use it, just like Ripple is negotiating with banks. This would bring us closer to a few decent ideas, such as working for oneself, setting one's own hours, doing a job you enjoy - at least for the professionals, who would be serious about it. For those who want to dabble, maybe they could earn enough money to go to a movie once a month or out to dinner.

In the end, if our standard of living increases, especially with the possible advent of AI and better technology in general, this would be a way to still offer work for people even if there is a decrease in traditional job opportunities, maybe 50-100 years from now. If the games got harder and more complex, people could take years to become high-end experts. As long as enough gamers with some money to slap around were willing and able to input real-world currency into enough games that were attached to the same trade network, interesting things could happen.

It would be much better than the "traditional" pay-to-play methods, as the gamers could earn money, too. And each game company could take a percent of profits, not too much.

a reply to: darkbake
I use to sell Diablo 2 stuff on ebay all the time. With the right magic find build, I would be generating about $100 worth of stuff every week. That was fun in high school. It eats alot of time, and duping/cloning items pretty much drove prices to the ground after a few months.

It kept me stoned out for some time. I wish I would have been smart enough to spend it on gold and silver though. I just kept buying clothes and shoes every other week though.

originally posted by: darkbake

That is not my point, so I'll get right to it - I remember when Diablo III first came out, they had a market system where ANYONE could sell their loot on the IN GAME MARKET for REAL MONEY. I think this kind of system should be used more. I know some companies are going pay-to-play, which is lame, especially in the case of Star Wars: Battlefront II, which required over $2000 to unlock all of the content, with payments needed to unlock things like entire characters or weapons (although you could unlock Luke Sywalker or Darth Vader after 40 hours of gameplay).

You could grind out loot in an RPG and then sell it for real money to someone else. Or even better, there could be a digital currency that was accepted by multiple games, that you could also exchange for other digital currencies or through a regular online exchange for real money, too.

If someone were to make that currency, they could negotiate with the game companies to use it, just like Ripple is negotiating with banks. This would bring us closer to a few decent ideas, such as working for oneself, setting one's own hours, doing a job you enjoy - at least for the professionals, who would be serious about it. For those who want to dabble, maybe they could earn enough money to go to a movie once a month or out to dinner.

In the end, if our standard of living increases, especially with the possible advent of AI and better technology in general, this would be a way to still offer work for people even if there is a decrease in traditional job opportunities, maybe 50-100 years from now. If the games got harder and more complex, people could take years to become high-end experts. As long as enough gamers with some money to slap around were willing and able to input real-world currency into enough games that were attached to the same trade network, interesting things could happen.

It would be much better than the "traditional" pay-to-play methods, as the gamers could earn money, too. And each game company could take a percent of profits, not too much.

Just because you brought up Diablo III's aution house; lets talk about why it was absolutely terrible for the game, and virtually all of it's players and how it was absolutely fantastic for Blizzard, until the player base dropped off the map.

A game like Diablo III with random loot drops, where there is no loot table, and no reliable way to get a particular item you're looking for, having an auction house sounds like a great idea. It even feels like one at first glance.

The reality is, in order for items to have value, the drop rate for the entire community has to be so laughably low, that it's literally like hitting state lottery to get an item worth any real value, if they weren't so poor, then the auction house would be flooded with items which would drive the value down, which would mean you couldn't make any real dollar profits.

So the auction house forced the game to suffer by starving the actual players of any meaningful drops, so there would be value in items, so they would sell in the hundreds of dollars. Because of this, in order to get any character a full suit of high end gear required you to use the auction house. This was great for Blizzard, because they got 30% of every transaction, 15% from the seller, 15% from the purchaser. Once players caught on to the scam, they quit playing and then the AH was subsequently removed and the total inverse extreme happened.... Drop rates went up significantly but items were no longer tradeable. This is the worst possible outcome and is in fact what ruined the game completely.

The side effect of monetary value in items, is players purchasing "bots" which automate the play of the game, these bots farm 24/7, it's like a brute force hack, because they are always in play, they always win the odds. The owners of the bot accounts then take the excess gear they got that legitimate players can't have gotten [because of time constraints] and sell it for real world profit. The reason they removed trading entirely was because if Blizzard couldn't have their 30%, they weren't going to allow the botters to sell on a black market.

In both scenarios the actual players of the game lost. Botters who basically cheated to print money ruined the AH by driving costs so, so, so high with market manipulation, players were left without any real way to obtain good items. Blizzard removed trading because they stopped making a ton of money from their double dip as a result, and spitefully killed the bots while making the game trash in the opposite extreme.

Diablo III is the poster child for why in game items shouldn't be monetized. The game becomes politically charged, and policy doesn't produce fun design, it's produces design with profit in mind, which is often at the expense of fun.

This hit home for me, I've been playing the Diablo franchise since the original in 1998. Diablo 3 was the worst of them all and was ruined completely from the inclusion of the auction house -- the removal of the auction house led to a knee jerk in the total opposite extreme. If people want to take their chances on black market purchases, let them -- don't ruin my fun to protect morons who can't manage safe transactions.

In short;
Auction house ruined the drop rates; which ruined the games fun because progression had to be purchased.
The removal of the auction house lead to the removal of trading as well, so even with increased drop rates, it's still incredibly too difficult to get what you're building for, which ruins the fun in the exact same way, but worse, then having to purchase your progression. With trading; you could trade items you don't need for ones you're looking for, without trading, the items you don't need have no value to you, and the odds of you getting the items you do need stay just as improbable.

The reason Diablo II was so good, is because it was dead in the middle of both of these extremes. There was fun and skill in trading, just as there was in playing, just as there was when you obtained a great item. The loop was fun all the way through, where as the loop is broken with both the Auction house, and the removal therein.

Also;
P.S.
The Orville? Really? The Orville is a parody homage version of Star Trek. Star Fleet has never used money.

Also; that Battlefront II blurb is totally untrue, and was never true, at any point in time. Theoretically if you never played the game, and just tried to purchase everything with real money, because duplicates are a thing, couldn't be done with any kind of realistic estimate, secondly; it was "40 hours" of play time not counting loot crates, or currency earned with win bonuses or dailies. Luke's 60,000 credit cost was reduced to 15,000 credits before the game even launched and real money purchases were also pulled.

The game was never designed to be pay to win, the beta just had ridiculous values set for unlocks. That's part of beta. I own BFII, and I unlocked every hero in the first night, and have basically maxed out all my favorite characters kits with my preferred load outs in about 80 hours total.

It's really not that grindy despite what the internet wanted you to believe.

a reply to: SRPrime
Damn they had MF bots? Did they have those in D2?? I coulda just left the game running instead of doing the runs myself? Damnit! Well either way, I managed to stay fresh with my attire for a year or so. My parents were actually surprised and somewhat proud that I was making money from a video game, on top of my part time job. It also kept my PC top notch.

To be honest though, I enjoyed doing the runs. I would just join an 8 person Hell run that started in Act 1 and go straight to act 3 Mephisto and rape the dungeons until Baal while they were trying to work their way from the beginning.

I believe that the Act 2 sewer boss was another good target though.

originally posted by: worldstarcountry
a reply to: SRPrime
Damn they had MF bots? Did they have those in D2?? I coulda just left the game running instead of doing the runs myself? Damnit! Well either way, I managed to stay fresh with my attire for a year or so. My parents were actually surprised and somewhat proud that I was making money from a video game, on top of my part time job. It also kept my PC top notch.

To be honest though, I enjoyed doing the runs. I would just join an 8 person Hell run that started in Act 1 and go straight to act 3 Mephisto and rape the dungeons until Baal while they were trying to work their way from the beginning.

I believe that the Act 2 sewer boss was another good target though.

Radament [Act II sewers] Pindleskin, Baal, Mephisto, Cow Level runs, were all the best runs; and yeah -- they totally had bots in Diablo II. Botters got banned regularly back then. Botters would then offload their items every few hours to stash accounts, but Blizzard caught on and started removing all items that were originally found on accounts that were banned.

So botting was actively fought back then, in DIII they do a ban wave every once and again, but they were too afraid to delete the items found from botters because people spent real money on the official AH and Blizzard was taking 30% of those transactions, so they'd ban the bot, but leave the items; I reckon they'd have been legally liable of theft if they didn't, since they officially provided a means for the botters to sell those items and earned profit by doing it too.

It'd be like; if you bought Luke Skywalker for cash, and you unlocked him, went to bed, came back tomorrow and he was locked again despite the fact that you already paid for him. Can't believe that'd be legal.

a reply to: darkbake

Should these cryptos be more integrated,that would be nice, if the sites can due to legality issues. Though, that seems to be changing, due to the impending taxes of cryptos and as you already mentioned about Ripple.

There are sites, Bitcoin and Litecoin that I know of, that offer, albeit small percentages of the coins for payment of viewing videos, leaving a web page open for x amount of time, participating in chat rooms, etc., to completing 'capchas'(typing in words and letters, etc., to confirm "you're not a robot").

Also, there are people hiring/will pay in cryptos for internet related tasks such as Graphic Design and Web Design.

There are some games as well, such as gambling types to bet coin and win.

For now with the streamers and YouTubers they are limited to just sharing their crypto addresses for donations.

I believe one of the social media sites was mentioning about wanting to accept BTC-Reddit maybe?

I like the idea of cryptos with gaming overall but see a valid concern for them going to the P2W side.

a reply to: SRPrime
Hopefully we get a Diablo 4 by 2025. You know how Blizzard likes to time their Diablo releases 10-15 years apart. We will be playing on the VR headsets. I can't wait for that.

a reply to: worldstarcountry

Thanks for the information about the Diablo series. I guess there are secondary markets online where you can arrange to meet up and sell goods? I think that Blizzard was taking too high of a percentage of the profits. Maybe they were trying to make a gold sink or money sink or something. There is the danger that games will end up on the play-to-win side, which means that even though you spend $60 on a game, you have to spend hundreds of dollars more to play competitively.

I did recently get a VR headset for the PlayStation 4. I am waiting for the next generation of headsets to come out because I can still see the individual pixels in mine. The games are still in their youth, too.

a reply to: darkbake

Probably equate to the survival of the fast and quick as opposed the rich and powerful.

Plus what would happen to the rest of our commerce and industry as AI and robotics could only cover so much?

I do agree however that as time goes by and things become more automated the majority of humanity will need to graduate to fields and employment within the entertainment, leisure, arts, and science industry but i imagine that won't be happening until we broach the singularity by which such time monies and power structures will hopefully have also matured to the point of non-existence.

a reply to: darkbake
...time to fire up my multi-phone fake-like apparatus!

Jk...

This is where China is going with social media...
And if eventually done honestly...
Would really evolve our global citizenship's conscientious individual mindset into quality, philanthropic giving types...

Any remnant of greed would be only rewarded through altruism to the whole..

It's like a front-end of capitalism with a backend of communism...

If popularity and reputation is your coin value...
That could be based on how much GOOD you've done..
Good being helping advance the culture, and helping others whom are less off, elevate in the system...
NOT JUST YOUR CRONIES...
because that's limited...
Helping the masses, where each of their votes massively out weigh any small group of cronies votes...
Makes it a meritocracy.. Not an oligarchy..

..what a great concept!

Reputation for the win!