Sure, but again the amount of actual player to player interaction involved in that is minimal. Like I said, I’m in a clan, and outside of obtaining my initial invite (which basically went “Clan plz” in chat followed by clicking accept) I’ve had literally zero social interaction with my current clan. Trading has been effectively automated by Warframe market. You copy and paste something into chat, and the rest of the interaction consists of a pro forma exchange of "ty"s. Also, you don’t actually need a clan to trade, because anyone you’re trading with will inevitably invite you to theirs, so they’re only really important when selling.
This is absolutely nothing like the way that raiding and guilds are core to World of Warcraft. Clans play an almost purely mechanical role in Warframe, they’re not remotely the same thing, and do not have remotely the same requirement of social interaction.
A lot of the game is built around guilds and player to player interactions.
For a while that was true. But that entire design direction has basically been abandoned. Clans are more or less a vestigial organ at this point. Literally the only interaction I have ever had with a member of my clan was when I asked for an invite.
The core story content is single player only. The rest is multiplayer, but unlike Destiny there’s nothing that requires you to form your own group outside of the game, and all the gameplay is designed in such a way that you really don’t need to communicate. You can basically just turn on public matchmaking and get a bunch of humans who might as well be bots for all you’ll have to actually interact with them.
You can play all the content solo if you want to, but the difficulty might get a bit much, especially starting out (there are also certain game modes / mission types that really lean on having a full group).
First thing that comes to mind is Warframe. It’s a co-op third person looter-shooter, with full crossplay, so you can all party up across your platforms. It’s all very controller friendly, with lots of shotguns, SMGs, melee weapons and space magic that are all really forgiving of imprecise aim. It cares less about twitch reflexes and more about movement.
The scifi setting and “space ninja” aesthetic may or may not be to your taste, although I promise if you take the time really sink into the world it’s actually one of the most refreshingly different and unique scifi settings out there. There’s a lot of weirdness, but as you dig deeper into the story that weirdness all makes sense. And, like, it’s the good kind of weird if you get me? Stuff that makes you go “Holy fuck I want to know what the deal with that is!”
It does have a lot of MMO elements, so it can get grindy at times, but in my experience it’s a really solid game for hanging out and chilling on Discord together. Plus the game itself is free, with no paid DLC or add-ons, and for an adult with an income a few bucks here and there skips a LOT of grind, especially if you check out the third party market website where players will sell you a lot of the rare drops you’ll want for less than a dollar.
Added bonus, it’s made by the original developers of Unreal Tournament, Digital Extremes (there are actually a bunch of UT references squirelled away in the game).
The fact that “plateaued” is a cause for concern is everything wrong with our global economic system. Infinite growth shouldn’t be a necessary component of stability. A plateau should be a goal to aspire to.
I don’t say that lightly. And I’m not saying it’s the greatest game ever made or anything like that. What I’m saying is that everything it’s trying to do, it does perfectly.
The writing is incredible. The voice performances absolutely nail it, every line read feeling like a mic drop. The art is gorgeous. The music is subtle and evocative. The design of the branching narrative is brilliant.
There’s not a single thing I can find to criticise. Slay the Princess is an absolute gem and you owe it to yourself to try it.
Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are the games. Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) is the organization. It also operates as Roberts Space Industries (RSI) but that’s primarily a marketing arm.
I think what people imagine will happen, if they’re thinking about the economic conundrum at all, is something rather like the Warframe economy. Players with real dollars to spare buy platinum (the premium currency), which they then either use to buy things directly from DE, or trade to other players in return for loot those players want to sell. Effectively, players flush with time grind on behalf of players flush with dollars. If there was a way to convert platinum back into dollars, it could be imagined that a player in a country with a weak currency might make a living from selling rare mods and prime parts.
In practice the reason this doesn’t work is because DE would lose a huge amount of their income if players could cash out platinum. Any dollars put into the system for the purpose of buying things from other players would then leave the system when those players cash out. So there’s no incentive for DE to do this. There’s also the problem that you need to make a game that is actually worth putting real dollars into, and these crypto games are universally dogshit (ideal time to plug Jauwn’s YouTube channel, his crypto game reviews are hilarious and really highlight what utter trash the entire field is). So no one has any incentive to buy the tokens that the play-to-earn players are trying to sell. That’s a big part of why the price always instantly crashes.
The only way to make cashing out work is to have players directly sell their tokens to other players, instead of the money coming out of the developer, but that means now the players are competing with the developer on price. Whatever price the dev sells the token for becomes the ceiling. And if course, every token sold by a player basically steals income from the developer. If the dev instead gives the token out for playing the game, then there’s no mechanism at all for the dev to make any money from the token, other than issuing large amounts to themselves and ultimately crashing the price by cashing out. None of these options work, and the model these games actually go with basically guarantees rug pulls as the only actual way for the developers to make any money.
Yup. Smart contracts aren’t even contracts, and they certainly aren’t smart.
An algorithm is, by its nature, dumb. It does the thing it’s programmed to do, without any hesitation. It doesn’t stop to consider the situation or ask relevant questions. This is a terrible idea for a system that facilitates trades, because all someone has to do, to use the example you cited, is wash trade a newly minted token back and forth a few times to set a price, and then find a smart contract that’s happy to spew out some amount of a token you want, at the price you just set, like a busted slot machine.