FWIW we don't have this documented anywhere but the "carb" bbcode works to link ingredients and "meal" embeds meals, much like our card and deck bbcodes work.
It is a Random Standard Legendary. When you claim it, the Legendary will be from one of our standard sets at the time of claiming it. So if you claim before April 12th it will not include ones from the Sunken City expansion.
You will be able to access this content in all regions you play the game. Please note that Prime Gaming is not available in Russia, China, India and embargoed territories.
This is available on Mac - you just need a Prime membership to redeem them and a Battle.net account to connect to Prime Gaming.
You'll also need to attach your Battle.net account to Prime Gaming, but that'll be easy once the offer is live since they give you instructions on how to do it.
Yeah, I've come across that too! It just doesn't really interest me unfortunately because it isn't the people who were originally designing the game. Thanks for pointing that out though, maybe someone will take interest.
I miss a physical WoW TCG product. It's been so long, I can't even remember how to play.
I wish the cards weren't so expensive. Otherwise, I could see myself using something like Spell Table to play online with friends. I know there's digital versions on stuff like Tabletop Simulator or OCTGN, but it just ain't the same.
Yeah I'd totally buy a booster box if they existed. Would be a neat little thing to have some. The majority of the digital cards cannot be converted into physical ones.
On Duels, maybe you never asked for it, but there was definitely people talking about wanting a PVP version of Dungeon Run back when it was first introduced with Kobolds & Catacombs. To say no one asked for it isn't factual nor is it nice.
But yes, Tournament mode would be a nice addition to the game.
2v2 is definitely more difficult to add with how Hearthstone's UI is setup and how it must be mobile-accessible too. Would it make Hearthstone better? Sure. Personally, I'd rather see development time spent on something more innovative that wouldn't be a niche part of the game.
Dean Ayala has mentioned wanting to do a Sandbox mode several times and I agree, Hearthstone would be more awesome with it. It brings that feel of kitchen table card games into the digital world and it kinda blows my mind that no one has really done it in any of the big card games. Being able to force rules on players through that type of mode would tie-in nicely to tournaments!
I know this isn't what you'd like to hear, but I think Hearthstone is one of the cheaper games to play. Considering that the game is a card game, there is a certain amount of money any non-casual player should expect to pay to continue to be a part of the meta. Hearthstone is cheaper now than it used to be (don't include cosmetics), the bundles have even been better if you look at them historically. Hearthstone is a small drop in the bucket compared to what it costs to play Magic competitively, and many players are completely Free to Play and have some great collections. Hearthstone is generous.
You are right though, cheaper Hearthstone has a possibility of being better.
Blizzard has stated in recent times that they are working on Arena and trying to see where they want to go with it. (Source 1) (Source 2)
I'm a Formula 1 fan and the crypto ads there are hilarious; It's tough to see a camera shot without them! I don't really care much about it, but it does go to show how much money is just being pumped into it when there's no real use cases yet outside of the aforementioned store of value.
And totally, everything is hostile first on the internet and no one actually wants to just talk about stuff anymore. Everyone just blocks blocks and... blocks. Being in a bubble is so awesome!!!!!!! I'm personally looking forward to the studies being done now on how mental illness is on the rise due to social media bubbles because maybe, just maybe, it'll make people rethink their choices. Not saying people have to touch more grass but I do think overall people need to find some new hobbies instead of doom-scrolling.
We might not always see eye-to-eye Sykomyke, but at least we can talk about the way we think.
Oh yeah, there will always be a form of latency, it's tech that unfortunately doesn't scale will without there being a central authority. There are ways around that but of course, that involves some form of centralization which is a bit of a downside, but the upside to that is there's less fees involved then too.
If you take real money, put it into a coin, and use said coin on a side app that lets you transact without major fees and instantly, that's a good way to deal with transactions within a specific game, and then if you want to mint your items, that'll just take a little bit more time as the transaction gets pushed onto the chain. That's sorta the best part we're at with that though right now and the obvious downside is you don't own it until it is minted- though I don't think cheapo stuff would need to ever be minted (a common Hearthstone card vs a Legendary Diamond). The end result of the ledger is a true sense of ownership and if I decided to stop playing a game that made use of minted objects, like a card in a card game, I could either destroy it to reclaim some of the value or sell it to another player.
I agree, there is some artificial scarcity going on right now with NFTs that's a bit on the silly side. I don't believe that to be the end-all-be-all of the tech though. I love being able to relate an NFT to a card game because it makes the most sense in a digital world. I play paper Magic, I own the cards, I can do whatever I want with them. I buy a card on MTG Arena and I can't trade it. If Wizards supported cards as an NFT, my cards would hold value based on the player economy, and Wizards, if implemented correctly, would be able to take a fee on any transaction which gives them access to the secondary card market's large market cap - something they're currently doing a bit of with Secret Lair, which has been printing serious cash for them.
I hate that we don't have any good digital trading card games. Part of it is shitty greed, the other part stems from companies likely not wanting to deal with hacked accounts and players getting their cards all traded away. Trading creates some awesome community and even the Pokemon digital card game is in the process of getting rid of it with their upcoming TCG Online replacement - TCG Live. If I want to sell something for real money, which a lot of games don't support and you can even be banned for it, I can't.
A lot of that comes down to the F2P nature of games these days. They give you a certain amount of free stuff, if that free stuff is tradeable, people start botting hard which even without that in Hearthstone, bots remain a huge problem. My solution is that you can only trade a certain value out of your account, based on how long you've played and how much real money you've spent - if you're giving cards to people for free or if you're trading for a Common with a Legendary (clearly someone is selling something here), that's going to pull value out of that pool you can trade.
Anyway, on scarcity. Card games. Blockchain. We're talking about essentially unlimited numbers of these cards still, with some being minted when players want to keep them in their wallets. The current trend of "there's only 1 of this" or "there's 50 of my item" are kinda shitty and I don't think that'll be a major player long-term. I think, from a card game POV anyway, I could see players getting the option to buy from a limited set of "first edition" packs and those cards would get a special mark on them, with there being like 100 of each Legendary or something like it, but overall, that's just a super exclusive collector piece, which are always fun. Then again, if you stop being interested in the game, you'd have the option to essentially cash out, letting a newer player or more whale-type people get your stuff.
Of course, companies aren't interested in that because now new players can get cards for cheaper to start off their collection. Economies would need to be reconsidered.
That does jump to your point on escapism though and game economies.
Yeah, games can definitely be an escape from the real world and some times people don't want this kind of game. That's fine! I don't think every game is going to become a crypto game and the ones that do will definitely have a more limited base of players. Not every person has to enjoy every game. I'm certainly not very interested in Fortnite despite loving the Battle Royale genre (PUBG 5th Birthday hype).
Though, none of the current games that I've seen that are using crypto look to be worth playing. Either shitty game designs or crazy hoops you have to go through. Also, Gods Unchained was hilarious in that you could pre-order your packs like what, a year in advance before anything was playable? This shits feeling like a Star Citizen (a game which does have some enjoyable content now) Kickstarter.
On proof of ownership and models. Yeah, that's the biggest hurdle I see when it comes to one game integrating another item from another game. I do think cross-game stuff would be very limited in nature and would mostly be a homage thing or one developer bringing forward something or a reference from their older title, perhaps with worse stats.
Game monetization in general is just such a damn drag and that's one thing I think NFTs will do well - giving players some power again. Of course, it means companies properly integrate things and so on.
One thing that I really hate about current monetization is the games that aren't a service. I don't mind buying packs in Hearthstone or a mount in World of Warcraft because I know those games just keep going on. But like, buying a skin in Call of Duty when next year the game is irrelevant? What the actual fuck. Your Battle Pass is absolute pointless garbage, why do I need a 50% XP boost when I just lose the level in a year anyway? I can't even see my skin so who cares what I look like. Granted, NFTs don't even solve that problem, but maybe after I stopped playing after a few months I could sell my skins on the cheap, lol.
Back to your comments though, on JPEGS. Yeah, totally they're just links and it's hilarious. So many people without a doubt have no idea how any of it works and they're going to be in for a rude awakening when these services inevitable shut down or lose content.
And on get rich quick schemes, yeah, there's so much nonsense to wade through. I'm just glad we aren't seeing 200 new coins pop up every day anymore with sites actually listing them. I think at some point NFTs will get to that point too, or at least the crap will be so far at the bottom, no one will ever see it.
Just because someone is invested into something doesn't mean I'm shilling for them. I put the disclaimer there because unlike a lot of the "crypto bros", I believe it's good to be transparent about it. It's that exact reason that I don't have any stock investments in Blizzard, which historically speaking is an amazing value, because I'd feel compelled to disclose that somewhere on the site and people would take it out of context. "Oh look you're just saying something positive about Blizzard because you own shares in their company". Meanwhile, I also give them just as much negativity and have no problem calling them out when they're wrong-
And like I said, crypto and NFTs have plenty of their own problems and as of right now I don't think they have found any proper use-case yet. Is it speculative at this point? Sure. But as someone who is a general fan of new technology, it's something I think will eventually have a use-case and I want to support the projects that I think are going to do something innovative. I don't invest in shitcoins and I have zero desire to hold Bitcoin. As far as I'm concerned, the only blockchain that holds any value is Ethereum, partially because of smart contracts and what they enable us to do with the tech. Anything that is purely a store of value, like Bitcoin, is useless overall and eventually, people are going to figure that out. A store of value is stupid if you can't actually do anything with it. Crypto Commerce could have been a thing if these people could make the transactions dirt cheap and quick.
Why you'd jump to thinking I'm going to ban you for disagreeing with me, I can't say I understand. The only people who get banned on here are spammers and bigots.
I made my post knowing 100% it was going to attract some responses that were going to be against my thoughts and that's cool. And no, I don't think everyone who disagrees with crypto anything is a moronic simple-minded Twitter user, that's just from my personal experience one of the more infuriating things about the people who cry about it. I wouldn't even be surprised if some of those artsy folks who shame NFTs all day previously thought it was all cool and then they just couldn't figure out how to make their own art into NFTs to jump on the bandwagon - much anger comes from people not understanding how to accomplish a particular task. In an age where people can't be bothered to do 3 seconds of research, it's quite frustrating.
You're right, using a centralized store is easier than using a blockchain. There's also huge speed advantages to using a traditional database. Though, once validated, folks should be storing these validations, for at least some period of time, in a database or cache to help with latencies.
I'm very much pro-cryptocurrency and pro-NFT, though I agree, we do not have any real-world problems solved so far with either of the technologies yet and there is a ton of scamming and general shit throughout which has hurt any kind of solid adoption. It'll be another 5-10 years at the very least before you really can do much with it as no one has really hit the nail on the head yet with any of their concepts.
My biggest problem with people who are anti-crypto/anti-nft is for the most part, they just simply are not informed. You see plenty of folks on Twitter (I know, a horrible example of logical individuals) who won't even for a second make an attempt to learn about them. They all scream YoUr KiLlInG tHe EnViRoNmEnT at the top of their lungs, meanwhile, I'm sure they've just Uber Eats'd their third meal for the day.
Proof of Work is horrible, don't get me wrong, and Ethereum's Proof of Stake really needs to hurry up, but the electricity being chugged into it isn't going to be a forever thing. Maybe for Bitcoin that remains true and there's some serious problems with that since the Bitcoin Foundation doesn't seem to have a good idea of where it is headed for proper sustainability of their chain (let's increase the damn block sizes as a minimum thx) and with it always being the most valuable of the bunch, it'll always be mined to death, but for that we actually need people to move onto better technologies and forget about Bitcoin.
I really like that you can own digital items via an NFT. As things get even more digital, having "proper ownership" is a really cool idea. It makes player-run economies super easy and the company that runs the game doesn't need to run a marketplace, but they can still get paid via % cuts of each sale of an NFT, meaning they don't have to worry about the financial risks that come alongside with running something like the Diablo 3 Auction House or the Steam Marketplace - a huge barrier to smaller companies when you need to worry about dealing with tax for every single player. Not to say I'd want to mint every single item I owned since there would be fees with doing so, but if I got a really cool mount drop in WoW that could be minted, you bet I'd mint my Ashes of Alar!
Another cool part that I like about the whole NFT portion with games is having potential for items to be useful across other games. There's a bunch of interesting legal issues that need to be figured out before that actually happens, but if I did get Ashes of Alar in World of Warcraft and another game company who really wanted to pay tribute to WoW made some sort of Phoenix pet, maybe that was given out for free to players who validated that they owned an Ashes of Alar NFT. It's not the greatest example but it's a showcase into how different companies could pay homage to each other.
NFTs need to have value though. The JPEG trash that we see in 99.9% of them right now is hilarious. The NFTs which grant access to a secret club is cool, though when those clubs don't actually do anything, that's basically just a JPEG. There's a couple of neat clubs that do special events together and being a part of something exclusive like that is nice. It's like a digital version of a secret cigar lounge that only the best get access to.
Real world, I'd love to see blockchain voting honestly. There's a lot to figure out to make that really happen, with the big hurdle being most people would never understand it so realistically, why even bother, but it would be one of the things we have right now that would make sense and it would make the stats more open. Big privacy concerns though, harassment potential, and compromised private keys are a negative. I like to think if done right, we'd have a better audit trail than what exists now. Now, a malicious actor could pretty easily get setup at the polling station as a volunteer and shove some extra ballets into the box (I'm sure it has been done somewhere). Though, I also don't think that we desperately need blockchain voting either.
Excited to see where it all goes, less excited about the scams that keep plaguing us, and even less excited about good games being bought out by crypto bros because I don't believe we have perfected the use-case for blockchains in games yet.
Sidenote: Enjin (disclaimer: I was a part of their original drop and continue to hold coins and thus may profit off any potential positive discussion about Enjin) is an exciting project and their product feels like the right beginnings to integrate NFTs and payments into games using this technology. The group has solid leadership and their wallet apps for your phone are great.
FWIW we don't have this documented anywhere but the "carb" bbcode works to link ingredients and "meal" embeds meals, much like our card and deck bbcodes work.
Update: We now have confirmation that these legendaries are from Standard. Wait until the expansion launches to claim your loots.
This is available on Mac - you just need a Prime membership to redeem them and a Battle.net account to connect to Prime Gaming.
Rewards are live!
Yeah, if you overlap the months with a free trial, you can time it out to get 2 months worth of stuff!
Yup! Once it goes live at least.
You'll also need to attach your Battle.net account to Prime Gaming, but that'll be easy once the offer is live since they give you instructions on how to do it.
Mech Mage is 100% back! One of my all-time favourite archetypes returning to Hearthstone. DIS GONNA BE A GOOD YEAR.
This wasn't supposed to be live yet =)
Yeah, I've come across that too! It just doesn't really interest me unfortunately because it isn't the people who were originally designing the game. Thanks for pointing that out though, maybe someone will take interest.
Interesting. I wonder if that last card is RNG then.
I miss a physical WoW TCG product. It's been so long, I can't even remember how to play.
I wish the cards weren't so expensive. Otherwise, I could see myself using something like Spell Table to play online with friends. I know there's digital versions on stuff like Tabletop Simulator or OCTGN, but it just ain't the same.
LUL!
That's unfortunate. Has anyone else had the same experience? Are the daily packs going to be super rigged then lol.
Yeah I'd totally buy a booster box if they existed. Would be a neat little thing to have some. The majority of the digital cards cannot be converted into physical ones.
I really don't understand this. It's so... pointless. Plus, aren't we a little past the 30th anniversary now LOL.
On Duels, maybe you never asked for it, but there was definitely people talking about wanting a PVP version of Dungeon Run back when it was first introduced with Kobolds & Catacombs. To say no one asked for it isn't factual nor is it nice.
But yes, Tournament mode would be a nice addition to the game.
2v2 is definitely more difficult to add with how Hearthstone's UI is setup and how it must be mobile-accessible too. Would it make Hearthstone better? Sure. Personally, I'd rather see development time spent on something more innovative that wouldn't be a niche part of the game.
Dean Ayala has mentioned wanting to do a Sandbox mode several times and I agree, Hearthstone would be more awesome with it. It brings that feel of kitchen table card games into the digital world and it kinda blows my mind that no one has really done it in any of the big card games. Being able to force rules on players through that type of mode would tie-in nicely to tournaments!
I know this isn't what you'd like to hear, but I think Hearthstone is one of the cheaper games to play. Considering that the game is a card game, there is a certain amount of money any non-casual player should expect to pay to continue to be a part of the meta. Hearthstone is cheaper now than it used to be (don't include cosmetics), the bundles have even been better if you look at them historically. Hearthstone is a small drop in the bucket compared to what it costs to play Magic competitively, and many players are completely Free to Play and have some great collections. Hearthstone is generous.
You are right though, cheaper Hearthstone has a possibility of being better.
Blizzard has stated in recent times that they are working on Arena and trying to see where they want to go with it. (Source 1) (Source 2)
I'm a Formula 1 fan and the crypto ads there are hilarious; It's tough to see a camera shot without them! I don't really care much about it, but it does go to show how much money is just being pumped into it when there's no real use cases yet outside of the aforementioned store of value.
And totally, everything is hostile first on the internet and no one actually wants to just talk about stuff anymore. Everyone just blocks blocks and... blocks. Being in a bubble is so awesome!!!!!!! I'm personally looking forward to the studies being done now on how mental illness is on the rise due to social media bubbles because maybe, just maybe, it'll make people rethink their choices. Not saying people have to touch more grass but I do think overall people need to find some new hobbies instead of doom-scrolling.
We might not always see eye-to-eye Sykomyke, but at least we can talk about the way we think.
Oh yeah, there will always be a form of latency, it's tech that unfortunately doesn't scale will without there being a central authority. There are ways around that but of course, that involves some form of centralization which is a bit of a downside, but the upside to that is there's less fees involved then too.
If you take real money, put it into a coin, and use said coin on a side app that lets you transact without major fees and instantly, that's a good way to deal with transactions within a specific game, and then if you want to mint your items, that'll just take a little bit more time as the transaction gets pushed onto the chain. That's sorta the best part we're at with that though right now and the obvious downside is you don't own it until it is minted- though I don't think cheapo stuff would need to ever be minted (a common Hearthstone card vs a Legendary Diamond). The end result of the ledger is a true sense of ownership and if I decided to stop playing a game that made use of minted objects, like a card in a card game, I could either destroy it to reclaim some of the value or sell it to another player.
I agree, there is some artificial scarcity going on right now with NFTs that's a bit on the silly side. I don't believe that to be the end-all-be-all of the tech though. I love being able to relate an NFT to a card game because it makes the most sense in a digital world. I play paper Magic, I own the cards, I can do whatever I want with them. I buy a card on MTG Arena and I can't trade it. If Wizards supported cards as an NFT, my cards would hold value based on the player economy, and Wizards, if implemented correctly, would be able to take a fee on any transaction which gives them access to the secondary card market's large market cap - something they're currently doing a bit of with Secret Lair, which has been printing serious cash for them.
I hate that we don't have any good digital trading card games. Part of it is shitty greed, the other part stems from companies likely not wanting to deal with hacked accounts and players getting their cards all traded away. Trading creates some awesome community and even the Pokemon digital card game is in the process of getting rid of it with their upcoming TCG Online replacement - TCG Live. If I want to sell something for real money, which a lot of games don't support and you can even be banned for it, I can't.
A lot of that comes down to the F2P nature of games these days. They give you a certain amount of free stuff, if that free stuff is tradeable, people start botting hard which even without that in Hearthstone, bots remain a huge problem. My solution is that you can only trade a certain value out of your account, based on how long you've played and how much real money you've spent - if you're giving cards to people for free or if you're trading for a Common with a Legendary (clearly someone is selling something here), that's going to pull value out of that pool you can trade.
Anyway, on scarcity. Card games. Blockchain. We're talking about essentially unlimited numbers of these cards still, with some being minted when players want to keep them in their wallets. The current trend of "there's only 1 of this" or "there's 50 of my item" are kinda shitty and I don't think that'll be a major player long-term. I think, from a card game POV anyway, I could see players getting the option to buy from a limited set of "first edition" packs and those cards would get a special mark on them, with there being like 100 of each Legendary or something like it, but overall, that's just a super exclusive collector piece, which are always fun. Then again, if you stop being interested in the game, you'd have the option to essentially cash out, letting a newer player or more whale-type people get your stuff.
Of course, companies aren't interested in that because now new players can get cards for cheaper to start off their collection. Economies would need to be reconsidered.
That does jump to your point on escapism though and game economies.
Yeah, games can definitely be an escape from the real world and some times people don't want this kind of game. That's fine! I don't think every game is going to become a crypto game and the ones that do will definitely have a more limited base of players. Not every person has to enjoy every game. I'm certainly not very interested in Fortnite despite loving the Battle Royale genre (PUBG 5th Birthday hype).
Though, none of the current games that I've seen that are using crypto look to be worth playing. Either shitty game designs or crazy hoops you have to go through. Also, Gods Unchained was hilarious in that you could pre-order your packs like what, a year in advance before anything was playable? This shits feeling like a Star Citizen (a game which does have some enjoyable content now) Kickstarter.
On proof of ownership and models. Yeah, that's the biggest hurdle I see when it comes to one game integrating another item from another game. I do think cross-game stuff would be very limited in nature and would mostly be a homage thing or one developer bringing forward something or a reference from their older title, perhaps with worse stats.
Game monetization in general is just such a damn drag and that's one thing I think NFTs will do well - giving players some power again. Of course, it means companies properly integrate things and so on.
One thing that I really hate about current monetization is the games that aren't a service. I don't mind buying packs in Hearthstone or a mount in World of Warcraft because I know those games just keep going on. But like, buying a skin in Call of Duty when next year the game is irrelevant? What the actual fuck. Your Battle Pass is absolute pointless garbage, why do I need a 50% XP boost when I just lose the level in a year anyway? I can't even see my skin so who cares what I look like. Granted, NFTs don't even solve that problem, but maybe after I stopped playing after a few months I could sell my skins on the cheap, lol.
Back to your comments though, on JPEGS. Yeah, totally they're just links and it's hilarious. So many people without a doubt have no idea how any of it works and they're going to be in for a rude awakening when these services inevitable shut down or lose content.
And on get rich quick schemes, yeah, there's so much nonsense to wade through. I'm just glad we aren't seeing 200 new coins pop up every day anymore with sites actually listing them. I think at some point NFTs will get to that point too, or at least the crap will be so far at the bottom, no one will ever see it.
Just because someone is invested into something doesn't mean I'm shilling for them. I put the disclaimer there because unlike a lot of the "crypto bros", I believe it's good to be transparent about it. It's that exact reason that I don't have any stock investments in Blizzard, which historically speaking is an amazing value, because I'd feel compelled to disclose that somewhere on the site and people would take it out of context. "Oh look you're just saying something positive about Blizzard because you own shares in their company". Meanwhile, I also give them just as much negativity and have no problem calling them out when they're wrong-
And like I said, crypto and NFTs have plenty of their own problems and as of right now I don't think they have found any proper use-case yet. Is it speculative at this point? Sure. But as someone who is a general fan of new technology, it's something I think will eventually have a use-case and I want to support the projects that I think are going to do something innovative. I don't invest in shitcoins and I have zero desire to hold Bitcoin. As far as I'm concerned, the only blockchain that holds any value is Ethereum, partially because of smart contracts and what they enable us to do with the tech. Anything that is purely a store of value, like Bitcoin, is useless overall and eventually, people are going to figure that out. A store of value is stupid if you can't actually do anything with it. Crypto Commerce could have been a thing if these people could make the transactions dirt cheap and quick.
Why you'd jump to thinking I'm going to ban you for disagreeing with me, I can't say I understand. The only people who get banned on here are spammers and bigots.
I made my post knowing 100% it was going to attract some responses that were going to be against my thoughts and that's cool. And no, I don't think everyone who disagrees with crypto anything is a moronic simple-minded Twitter user, that's just from my personal experience one of the more infuriating things about the people who cry about it. I wouldn't even be surprised if some of those artsy folks who shame NFTs all day previously thought it was all cool and then they just couldn't figure out how to make their own art into NFTs to jump on the bandwagon - much anger comes from people not understanding how to accomplish a particular task. In an age where people can't be bothered to do 3 seconds of research, it's quite frustrating.
You're right, using a centralized store is easier than using a blockchain. There's also huge speed advantages to using a traditional database. Though, once validated, folks should be storing these validations, for at least some period of time, in a database or cache to help with latencies.
I'm very much pro-cryptocurrency and pro-NFT, though I agree, we do not have any real-world problems solved so far with either of the technologies yet and there is a ton of scamming and general shit throughout which has hurt any kind of solid adoption. It'll be another 5-10 years at the very least before you really can do much with it as no one has really hit the nail on the head yet with any of their concepts.
My biggest problem with people who are anti-crypto/anti-nft is for the most part, they just simply are not informed. You see plenty of folks on Twitter (I know, a horrible example of logical individuals) who won't even for a second make an attempt to learn about them. They all scream YoUr KiLlInG tHe EnViRoNmEnT at the top of their lungs, meanwhile, I'm sure they've just Uber Eats'd their third meal for the day.
Proof of Work is horrible, don't get me wrong, and Ethereum's Proof of Stake really needs to hurry up, but the electricity being chugged into it isn't going to be a forever thing. Maybe for Bitcoin that remains true and there's some serious problems with that since the Bitcoin Foundation doesn't seem to have a good idea of where it is headed for proper sustainability of their chain (let's increase the damn block sizes as a minimum thx) and with it always being the most valuable of the bunch, it'll always be mined to death, but for that we actually need people to move onto better technologies and forget about Bitcoin.
I really like that you can own digital items via an NFT. As things get even more digital, having "proper ownership" is a really cool idea. It makes player-run economies super easy and the company that runs the game doesn't need to run a marketplace, but they can still get paid via % cuts of each sale of an NFT, meaning they don't have to worry about the financial risks that come alongside with running something like the Diablo 3 Auction House or the Steam Marketplace - a huge barrier to smaller companies when you need to worry about dealing with tax for every single player. Not to say I'd want to mint every single item I owned since there would be fees with doing so, but if I got a really cool mount drop in WoW that could be minted, you bet I'd mint my Ashes of Alar!
Another cool part that I like about the whole NFT portion with games is having potential for items to be useful across other games. There's a bunch of interesting legal issues that need to be figured out before that actually happens, but if I did get Ashes of Alar in World of Warcraft and another game company who really wanted to pay tribute to WoW made some sort of Phoenix pet, maybe that was given out for free to players who validated that they owned an Ashes of Alar NFT. It's not the greatest example but it's a showcase into how different companies could pay homage to each other.
NFTs need to have value though. The JPEG trash that we see in 99.9% of them right now is hilarious. The NFTs which grant access to a secret club is cool, though when those clubs don't actually do anything, that's basically just a JPEG. There's a couple of neat clubs that do special events together and being a part of something exclusive like that is nice. It's like a digital version of a secret cigar lounge that only the best get access to.
Real world, I'd love to see blockchain voting honestly. There's a lot to figure out to make that really happen, with the big hurdle being most people would never understand it so realistically, why even bother, but it would be one of the things we have right now that would make sense and it would make the stats more open. Big privacy concerns though, harassment potential, and compromised private keys are a negative. I like to think if done right, we'd have a better audit trail than what exists now. Now, a malicious actor could pretty easily get setup at the polling station as a volunteer and shove some extra ballets into the box (I'm sure it has been done somewhere). Though, I also don't think that we desperately need blockchain voting either.
Excited to see where it all goes, less excited about the scams that keep plaguing us, and even less excited about good games being bought out by crypto bros because I don't believe we have perfected the use-case for blockchains in games yet.
Sidenote: Enjin (disclaimer: I was a part of their original drop and continue to hold coins and thus may profit off any potential positive discussion about Enjin) is an exciting project and their product feels like the right beginnings to integrate NFTs and payments into games using this technology. The group has solid leadership and their wallet apps for your phone are great.
We don't have a concept of games with the countdowns, that's why it doesn't display. Known problem, eventually will be solved.