Welcome Voyagers to our third blockchain article.
In our previous articles, we first introduced the RUSH Coin and what it will do in Hash Rush, and in the second article, we spoke about the technical hurdles that we had to overcome to make the system beneficial to our players, and what our future plans are.
However, as is understandably the case, when talking about blockchain to gamers, the question of ‘why use blockchain instead of a regular system’ came up many times. This is a perfectly valid response as even now, blockchain tends to be seen as a hype train filled with empty buzzwords that are not properly explained.
So today, we’re going to dive into why we decided to use blockchain in Hash Rush and just how it benefits the players.
Before we Begin
To start things off, we want to make one thing clear. Throughout the development of Hash Rush, we have always put the game first, and the blockchain integration second. That was a decision we made as we are well aware of the multitudes of projects that arbitrarily throw in blockchain without giving true thought to whether or not the system would benefit the project. Due to our stance, this means that using blockchain in Hash Rush is pretty much optional. Yes, no matter what the player does, their items will eventually be tokenized and their in-game currency will be an Ethereum based token and so hold real-world value.
That said, if the player is of the mindset that they simply want to play the game and not think of anything else, they can entirely ignore the blockchain integration and play the game without missing out on any in-game features. We feel that not only is this vital, but also represents the true soul of blockchain — giving people the freedom of choice.
For those that are intrigued by the use of blockchain in Hash Rush, here are a few of the core benefits that it will provide to you.
Premium Currency Freedom
The First Point
Have you ever played a regular MMO before? Or any other game that has an item shop that runs on a premium currency? If you have then this situation may be familiar to you.
A new item has just been announced, it’s fantastic, it’s visually stunning, it’s talked about by the community, and of it, it is relatively cheap. Let’s say that this new item costs 60 diamonds (diamonds are a common premium currency). As the developer sells the diamonds for packages that are split into 3 euros for 49 diamonds, 10 euros for 110 diamonds, and so on, therefore, 60 diamonds are not that expensive. But is it really?
In this scenario, a player would be forced to purchase far more diamonds than they actually need. If they want just 1 of the new items, they would have to buy the cheapest diamond package twice, even if they do not need all of the diamonds that they buy. Maybe the player would want to buy 2? Well once again, they’re out of luck as the 10 euro bundle would again not be enough, so they’re forced to once again buy more than they really need.
So in the end, the item has an illusion of being very cheap, but when it comes down to it, it costs at least twice as much as the player initially thought that it would be.
How does this relate to Hash Rush and blockchain? Well, this sort of predatory behavior is not possible. RUSH Coin (and all other cryptocurrency tokens) are ultimately in a truly open system. Therefore, even if we were to add packages that players can use to buy RUSH, they still can trade RUSH with other players at prices that they control. Ultimately, they have the option to buy exactly the amount of RUSH they want, and not a single unit more.
The Second Point
This very nicely leads us to the next points about premium currency freedom. In a regular game, what would you do if you had a lot of premium currency on your account, and for whatever reason decided to stop playing? In almost all games, trading the premium currency with other players is not possible. Sometimes games will have it at first but then disable it.
A great example of this would be Runes of Magic, originally the game allowed for diamond trading, however, they eventually disabled it.
Originally, the messaging as to why it was disabled was that it would only be a temporary thing. However, jump two years (from 2010 to 2012) and the (new) publisher, Gameforge, made a statement that the feature would be permanently removed. Though there are valid reasons to do this, what stood out from their statement was this quote.
Being an F2P game we rely on the Item Shop for our revenue which means that any changes we made would have to comply with several regulations. Nevertheless, we wanted to grant you the opportunity again to stock up on your Diamonds through your efforts in-game. So we introduced the two NPCs, Agnes and Cedric, who on a daily basis would trade you gold for your Diamonds and vice versa.
Essentially, the free trade of diamonds in Runes of Magic was cutting into their revenue and so they decided to remove it and replace it with a very controlled new method (with sub-standard trade rates) that prevented players from trading the premium currency with each other.
Once again, in Hash Rush, such behavior is not possible. As RUSH Coin is a cryptocurrency, the player gets to control what they do with the coin. They can use it themselves, they can send it to other players anytime they want, or they can sell it at whatever rate they wish.
So, if you as a player want to quit playing (we hope that you wont, but that is inevitable), you can sell off your remaining RUSH and get something back.
Yes, there are security issues to overcome, however with some effort, they are entirely possible to overcome without limiting the player. This is one of the major challenges of fully dApp games and why on-boarding new players is hard for them, and the largest reason why Hash Rush is NOT fully decentralized.
Freedom of Items
What we mentioned above also transfers to the items in-game. As well as using a cryptocurrency token for our premium currency, our ultimate goal is to tokenize the game items. This means that once again, the items in the game would be entirely free to be moved around whenever the player wants to.
Furthermore, sneaky features like ‘soulbinding’ would be impossible, what is this you ask? Well let us explain!
In MMOs, it is common for items, that once equipped to a character, to be given that status, meaning that no other character can use that item — essentially preventing the player from trading/selling the item.
Though the ‘common’ reason given for the existence of such a feature is usually given as ‘security’ to prevent the theft of items from hacked accounts, the truth is something else. By having the soulbound status, the developers (and/or publisher) then have the option to sell a special item to ‘remove’ the soulbound status. Essentially, this just becomes another way to create an artificial need for the player to purchase in-game currency.
Using blockchain destroys this sort of behavior. When an item is tokenized, soulbinding is not possible. By design, tokenized items are blockchain tokens and so as long as the player can move items out of the game (a feature of Hash Rush), they can then store it in their private wallet and do what they want with it.
Now at this point, we do want to point out that it is possible to solve all of the problems in a ‘normal’ game system. However, this means that the players need to trust the developers. Unfortunately, in this day and age, thanks to the predatory behaviors associated with free-2-play games and with micro-transactions in games of all genres, trust is extremely hard to find. Blockchain removes the need of trust as the power of choice is placed squarely at the feet of the player.
Do note, this is all ‘choice’ we’ve said it once, and we’ll say it a million times. If the player does not want to use the blockchain side of things then they can ignore it and not miss out.
Tracking Rarity
Though this point is most important for games that rely on the rarity of items as their main selling point, it does have an important role to play in Hash Rush.
As we mentioned earlier, our ultimate goal is to have all of our items tokenized. This has the positive effect that everyone can see just how many items exist in the game, what those items are, and their given rarity.
As we will eventually have an open marketplace with prices controlled by the players, knowing exactly how many of the item that they have exists in the game is vital to knowing its true worth.
The reason that this works is simply because, at its core, blockchain is simply an open database. What’s more, as each tokenized item is entirely unique, anyone who is interested can see a full record of who owned the item. In this way, more value can be added to an item especially if it was used by a well known game celebrity.
What this all boils down to is that our system provides free information to the player letting them see:
- When the item was made
- Who has owned the item
- How many of the same item exist
- And more as the feature is developed…
Put together, this lets the player figure out the real worth of the item, making the in-game (and external) market places all the more powerful, and the benefits do not end there. By using the blockchain, we will be able to add real data to the items, data such as how many kills the item has made (if a weapon), how many damage points it reduced (if armour), what characters used the item, and so on.
We do want to say that we recognize that some games do have databases/tables that display the items in the game, but they are rarely complete and will usually only display the amount of the item in the game and not more.
In regular games, the lack of extra detail is usually not intentionally hidden, however it is one of database sizes — to track each item individually (including their full use cases) would result in huge databases that will quickly be overloaded and slow down the server to no end.
A great example of this is with the digital TCG, Hex: Shards of Fate. During their kickstarter days, and even up to their early beta, they wanted to have a ‘double-back’ feature. This feature would have made each card unique as it would have tracked a lot of data of what the card was used for (pretty much like we will do). What’s more, the feature would have tracked ‘every’ action, keeping all of the previous card owners stats as well.
However, the feature was never implemented. Why? The developers quickly realized that making each card unique in this way would overload their database. They experimented with having the feature only track the stats of the current owner (so not past owners), but that too was unfeasible. The next step was to attempt to track only the rare and legendary cards, but as before, it was simply too much. Ultimately the feature, though extremely interesting, was not possible with the regular game.
However — a lot of this information is naturally a part of blockchain. For example, if you send a token from one address to another, you can essentially track it back to it’s roots.
You can read up on a recent case of tracking Bitcoin that was a part of a recent scam (Twitter hack July 2020) over on this Forbes article.
Play to Earn for Everyone
Finally we come to the inclusiveness of using blockchain. Modern gaming relies heavily on esports to keep players interested. Tournaments are hosted in countries all over the world, broadcasted to giant audiences, and cash prizes of multi million dollars are up for grabs.
The problem with this is that though the promise of winning is used to lure people in (everyone wants to be able to earn money from playing their favorite games), only a tiny fraction of the users will be able to win anything. To be more visual, most people would have an easier time finding a pin in a giant haystack than they would of winning money from esports games.
Now, don’t get us wrong, this is not an attack on esports. We are thrilled that this scene exists and rewarding the top players is perfectly fine. After all, these people treat the game tournaments with as much intensity as athletics would when training and competing for the Olympics, and that does deserve respect as a huge degree of discipline and dedication is needed.
However, what we want to do is expand the potential to earn to everyone, while still rewarding the top players. By means of a player-driven economy powered by blockchain, we are able to achieve this as Tokenized in-game items and premium currency can be withdrawn from the game to the player’s private storage, once the item/currency is in the players storage, they can do whatever they wish with it. Players can take advantage of this and extract value out of the virtual world. Essentially, Hash Rush is providing players with the ability to earn something in return for their time playing.
Though, we must point out that we are not making promises of ‘easy cash’ for everyone. When it comes to item sales, Hash Rush plays no part in setting the prices. The players decide how much each item is worth, and then the buyer decides whether it is worth buying it in the first place. That means that though a player can say that they want to sell their item for the equivalent of 100 USD, whether or not the community finds that to be acceptable (so if a buyer is found) is another story entirely.
This brings us to the end of this initial write up of why we are using blockchain in Hash Rush. We do hope that you’ll see what we mean by the system providing benefits to the players, and that everyone has a choice on whether to use it or to ignore it!
Hash Rush will launch its beta on the 28th of July, so be sure to join us on Discord and/or Telegram to stay up to date with all the latest news!
