Keep NFT out of FF14

[Elim]

Meh. I recently returned to the game with a handful of others. Planned to play the game seriously again. I use to be pretty devoted. Don't know about them, but if the game gets NFTs ill just unsub. I'll find some other game and forget about this ones existence. :shrug: Hope it doesnt happen but there are other options out there so whatever.

[ApolloGenX]

There will always be bad actors. In your example since the parents are asked for the money then it would be up to them to do their due diligence. What is the item? what markets does it trade on? and is it a fair trade? If they did not have time to do this then deny the child until they do. If the child has their own money to buy the item then the parents should teach them how to do this due diligence on their own. Nothing wrong with a parent deciding to not allow purchases until they are confident in the child's ability to discern. Additionally, parental controls are something that can also be added.

There will always be bad actors- true. However, you are talking about a system that is hard to understand for many people, much less children. SE has a responsibility to minimize bad actors... which you could argue they are not great at with bots...but introducing a financially risky vector to this game? To what end? What does it add to a game? If this was a gambling app or something like that, I think it would make a little more sense, but this is a completely different concept that would be shoved into a subscription based game. Isn't the Mog Shop enough? I also think it's one thing for a parent to understand this game's rating and let a kid play.... it's completely different to subject them to this kind of activity without fully even being aware of it..... it is.... almost nefarious, imo.

[LittleArrow]

I just wanted to add to this thread. Please do not add NFT / Crypto to FFXIV or any main title Final Fantasy. This really cheapens your brand and pushes away a very loyal customer. I know I can't be the only one.

[Elim]

almost nefarious, imo.

NFTs absolutely get used for nefarious activities (leaving victims), among other problems mentioned in this thread. I cannot morally support NFTs. But I'm not shocked Blizzard overlooks all of this in favor for money.

[Melorie]

edit: wait didnt you say it was impossible for artists to market their work before nfts? grats to your friends for defying reality

I find this so funny. People publish stuff at gumroad, they have patreons, ko-fi, they can commission artists for personal things, you can do crowdfunding for your project, every day I see a new artist open a shop... Meanwhile, I don't even KNOW the name of the artist of these ugly ass monkeys because there's no artist. A company commissioned (hah!) artists to develop that hideous monkey piccrew and I bet that the original designers are not taking any % from this fiasco.

If you want to support an artist, it's easier today than ever before. An e-mail can suffice. NFTs are hurting more artists than helping them, with people having to lose their precious time hunting stolen arts on "decentralized" marketplaces that are hosted on google (LMAO). Nothing that any NFT game offers is revolutionary, just please go play Entropia instead of pushing this bs as some kind of savior with empty buzz words when it brings nothing to the table.

This obsession with "ownership" of things and having the possibility of profit on everything is literally rooting our society. If this is the future, what a pos future we have.

[Miiu]

Let's be completely honest here. The reason NFTs blew up are because of nefarious reasons and money laundering. Some artists benefiting from that pyramid scheme is a nice byproduct. But it is not the norm nor the intended reason why NFTs are even are thing in the first place.
It's an unregulated market that offers ZERO costumer protection and has ZERO oversight.

Implementing those systems into games where minors have access to it is completely unethical.

[Elim]

Implementing those systems into games where minors have access to it is completely unethical.

Yes. And those victims I mentioned in my last post? Children are among them. Fuck. NFTs.

[Kakure]

I get that people are concerned about the business practices that can be taken. I think people have every right to be skeptical however this has nothing do with the underlying technology of NFT's. If any company puts in practices that negatively impact gameplay or are unjust then defy them with your wallet. Nobody is making you buy anything and not buying sends a clear message.

As I've noted several times before, this is not about the underlying technology of NFTs. In any way. At all. It is about the social milieu of frenzied speculative investment that surrounds them. It beggars belief to think that these game executives are all tripping over themselves in an effort to figure out a way to use some anodyne data storage technology that by all accounts has little if any particularly obvious use in the gaming space.

From Matsuda's letter:

Another term that gained quick currency in 2021 was “NFT” or “non-fungible token.” The advent of NFTs using blockchain technology significantly increased the liquidity of digital goods, enabling the trading of a variety of such goods at high prices and sparking conversations the world over. I see 2021... as “NFTs: Year One” given that it was a year in which NFTs were met with a great deal of enthusiasm by a rapidly expanding user base... To address these changes in our business environment, the medium-term business strategy that we unveiled in May 2020 identified AI, the cloud, and blockchain games as new domains on which we should focus our investments, and we have subsequently been aggressive in our R&D efforts and investments in those areas.

This is very explicitly about SE trying to engineer some justification to tap into the burgeoning, speculative, overheated market for anything NFT so they can get in on "the trading of... such goods at high prices." That's the reason, right there. And everyone knows it. It has nothing to do with the actual technology.

I am not content to just sit back and not buy NFT items or not play some blockchain game because, besides being scuzzy behavior from people I give money to every month and expect better from, I view this shift in gaming as actively harmful and I am absolutely certain that if NFTs infest gaming it will negatively impact the things I enjoy and care about. Whether that takes the form of artificially scarce, numbered items a la Ghost Recon, companies using this as an excuse to take a cut out of player-to-player transactions, a shift in resources away from content that caters to "players who 'play to have fun'" (Matsuda's words), a greater environmental footprint for the hobby, or who knows what else, this is going to affect all of us and not in any good way. Gaming executives clearly see this as a potentially seismic inflection point in gaming and they need to be slapped down hard and fast and made to understand that players will not tolerate it.

As to your example between person A and person B with the tin cans: I see nothing wrong. If someone came up to me with a tin can and wanted me to buy it and I had no need for a tin can I would tell them to go away. If I for some reason wanted a tin can I would make them an offer. It's very curious that people think that just because you see no use in something that it's a scam. People really don't understand what the word scam means. If I wanted a tin can I as the buyer can set the price if there is no other demand. I can pay $1 for my tin can or $10 million. Either way, nobody got scammed. If I offered $1 for a tin can and got a cardboard cut out of a can then that would be a scam as I did not get what I wanted. Also, speculative investments are not a scam. I am again just purchasing a good with a fluctuating value. Most people try to make a profit on any item that they sell however sometimes you take a loss. This is life. Nobody got scammed because the value of something moved in the wrong direction.

That's probably because it wasn't an example of something wrong. It was an illustration of value assignation. It was a rebuttal of the claim that the value of something is whatever someone pays for it, that no one can say an NFT of a rock from a free clipart database isn't worth 1.3 million dollars if someone somewhere is willing to pay for it.

I'll go one further and happily defend the claim that this kind of grotesque nonsense is a scam though. I flatly reject the idea that just because someone knows what they are getting for their money it cannot be a scam. See: Pyramid Schemes; Televangelism.

One of the most critical purposes that NFT communities serve is to proselytize and legitimize the whole endeavor, to convince other people that forking over (often vast amounts of) money for things that have no value at all is normal and reasonable. Why would they do that? Because the more people who buy into this garbage and decide to become NFT speculators themselves, the more money existing NFT speculators can make. They might not say that in so many words. They might genuinely think of themselves as nothing more than a group of like-minded people who enjoy remortgaging their homes to purchase the honor of having their identifier on a little digital registry associated with a tweet or a meme JPEG, but the whole thing only works if they can keep drawing other people in. Else the bubble bursts and they all get left holding the bag of beanie babies.

I don't mean to suggest that every NFT enthusiast is explicitly and deliberately trying to mislead people. Some of them might just be caught up in this cool new techbro thing they genuinely think they understand better than all the haters. Some are probably just really, really dumb. And hyping stuff you like and trying to get more people involved is totally natural. We do the same thing in gaming communities. Everyone does.

But when the thing you're hyping is ridiculous and the thing you're trying to get people to be enthusiastic about is the sale of worthless junk (like an NFT of a tweet -- something that still exists as it always has as a public tweet on Twitter, with the sender's (not the NFT buyer, but the person who originally sent the tweet) name and profile pic and responses and likes and stuff -- something that anyone can view at any time or print out and put on their wall, for which the concept of transferrable "ownership" is all but meaningless) for vast amounts of money, that's pretty much a scam.

Someone buying a tin can for $10,000 is just an idiot. Someone claiming that used tin cans are worth thousands of dollars and working to normalize and prop up a system of overheated, speculative trade in tin cans knowing full well they have no underlying value is participating in a scam.

[elizeugba]

Just showing my support for this thread. The moment FF14 adds NFTs I unsub.

[Mysticp]

Snip.

On the first part of your reply I think we mostly agree here. You are skeptical of SE business practices and I get it.

As for your second part this is where I have to disagree. Not getting what you wanted or having it be misrepresented is the key component of any scam. You mention Pyramid scheme here but I think you mean a Ponzi scheme as a Ponzi scheme deals in investments. Regardless, NFT's do not qualify as either scheme as the representation of what you are buying and the fact that you get what you are buying rule it out. A scam requires some form of fraudulent activity. If I buy a picture of an Ape for $100, I receive a picture of an ape. I understand that my ape picture can go up or down in price just like any other good if I sell it. This is not a scam. Speculative investments are not scams, they are just goods with fluctuating market demand. Every market is essentially a bubble. If demand bottoms out then the bubble breaks. This is how markets work.

You make an interesting comment on Jack Dorsey selling his tweet. You claim that it has no value and no ownership because the tweet itself is easily available for people to read an take a picture of. I think it's interesting that you frame it this way because it shows your lack of belief of NFT's. Instead, another way of looking at this is that Jack Dorsey created a digital art piece of his tweet in the form of an NFT. If does not matter if the original tweet still exists. The product is the digital art that was created in the form of an NFT. That has ownership, had a market, a buyer and was most definitely not a scam. They buyer purchased a digital art piece and got exactly that.

I also notice a fixation on price in your arguments. How much something is worth is inconsequential and a high purchase price does not make something a scam. To some $100 is a lot of money and to some $10 million is peanuts. If someone was going around trying to convince people that used tin cans are worth $10,000 then good luck to them. You can say they are price gouging but seeking a ridiculous price is not a scam. This is because the market will determine if that person is justified in their asking price or not.