It is a mark of pride for our readers that basically none of you are having CCP Games trying to play around with the idea that EVE Frontier shouldn’t be called a blockchain game. Seriously, no one is buying this. We’ve all had a great deal of fun making jokes at the company’s expense and should continue doing so!
However, I think there is something that is narrowly being lost here in the midst and that is the fact that EVE Frontier‘s stated reason for being a blockchain game is, in and of itself, very stupid.
This is separate of the entire idea of the game supposedly not offering NFTs (but built on top of a chain that just happens to allow cryptocurrency that, in an FAQ, basically describes the function of cryptocurrency without saying that’s what it’s offering). One of the recurring elements of what I do in the Vague Patch Notes column is attempting to assess and understand things taking them at their face value, and I’ve already done columns talking about how NFTs in MMORPGs are a bad, stupid idea. So let’s start with half a step back and examine the concept of a blockchain in the abstract.
One of the most pernicious and frankly ridiculous arguments that’s been bouncing around the crypto sphere for ages is the idea that critiques of cryptocurrency just don’t understand crypto. This is ridiculous because while the programming that goes into these systems is very complicated, the actual concepts behind them are very simple. A blockchain is a distributed ledger that is set to append-only input. That’s kind of it.
“What does that mean?” Essentially, it means that a blockchain is a long list of actions that can only be added to rather than altered. The fact that it’s distributed means that it exists across multiple machines as a shared, accepted value; think of file torrenting systems and you’ll have a good idea. Everyone has copies, and everything is set up so new segments can be written but existing ones cannot be altered.
And that’s kind of it! If you’re thinking “that isn’t so complicated,” you’re right. Oh, the actual mechanisms for programming it and making it work are intensely complex, but in terms of understanding what it does? Yeah, that’s not hard.
Your first instinct might be to ask what makes this particularly useful or desirable to a moddable video game, so let’s break down what CCP is promising in the case of EVE Frontier. The argument in favor of using the blockchain is to create a permanent, immutable universe with elements that are made by players and exist in perpetuity. In other words, CCP creates the framework and then players can explore it forever. And you don’t have to ever worry about those modifications being deprecated because the blockchain makes them permanent.
If this sounds like a dumb argument, you’re right! It is! And to start with the obvious way in which it’s done, let’s look at a different game, called Roblox. You might have heard of it.
Roblox is in many ways a terrible game based on exploiting content creators, mostly kids, but it is not using a blockchain system of any sort and it is – by definition – incredibly moddable. In fact there are now kind of a lot of games that rely almost completely upon user-generated content to operate. Second Life is basically built around user content, being little more than a platform for that.
But if you think that sounds like a dumb argument just because other games can clearly do this without requiring any sort of blockchain, you may have gently missed part of the problem here. And we’re going to demonstrate this with Bree’s first piece of content added to EVE Frontier, the Eliot Sucks Lounge. [Editor’s note: I would never do this, we love Eliot, but follow his logic here for a sec. -Bree]
This lounge is, as you might expect, filled to the brim with all sorts of things that talk about how bad a 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 sort of thing that in most games would be taken down in a matter of minutes because that’s just bad juju to keep around in your game.
Except if your game is based on a blockchain, which is an append-only database, you can’t do that. Remember? Not only is the whole system set up so that nothing can ever be removed from the chain ever, it’s also set up so that the whole thing is distributed. The only way to roll these things back is to make a hard fork of the entire chain and try to recreate all of the legitimate parts of the game that were also in motion during that time while making sure no data are lost in the process.
And this isn’t purely theoretical. If you’re thinking that you would hear about games on the blockchain doing this, it has already happened. Wolf Game was a game that was hosted on-chain that had several bugs found in the NFTs used for the core game mechanics, and since the whole thing was on-chain the tokens couldn’t be patched, only replaced. So the developers tried to re-mint identical fixed tokens for everyone, and it went so badly that this is why you don’t hear about it.
The reason it doesn’t come up more often is because usually these ideas crash and burn long before you bring in the bottom line of suckers.
“Hey, there’s no reason to assume that CCP would keep all of that stuff on-chain!” And that’s a legitimate point to make; we do not actually have a full picture of what will and will not be on-chain. But that’s also not the point. If you’re storing anything on the chain outside of cryptocurrency, the chain is a uniquely terrible place to put it because anything broken cannot be altered. It can only be replaced.
Forget harassment or anything like that – what if someone accidentally makes bugged content that permanently damages your character in some way? You can’t patch it out if it’s on-chain. The reason why most NFTs just link to an image file stored on regular servers is because putting this stuff on-chain makes it actually less accessible. It is a tool that does not work well for doing anything other than running a transaction log because that is what the thing it is built on is designed to do.
And if you’re thinking to yourself that this sounds like something that doesn’t in any way actually support a moddable or permanent universe, you would be correct. Because while it does prevent things from ever being removed, that isn’t even a desirable outcome. It does not usefully map to the way that players expect to interact with a video game.
Now, I don’t know what CCP Games is doing behind the scenes because I don’t work for CCP, and I do not know what secrets lurk within the recesses of its devs’ collective hearts. It is possible that the developers working on this project know that this is a uniquely terrible idea and are building it mostly to chase the investor cash that’s sloshing around for otherwise legitimate brands stapling themselves to blockchain nonsense. But that also isn’t really the point.
CCP has made claims that it doesn’t want people thinking of this game as a blockchain game while also playing up the idea that it needs to be on the blockchain in order to work. But not only is the latter part a lie, the latter part explicitly makes the former part a bad job of smoke and mirrors. Even if the developers know this is just chasing investor cash, it’s trying to trick people into buying in by calling it something it’s not and claiming that it uses technology to do something that the technology is at best bad at doing and at worst actively harmful.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
