This sure smells like a scam, but I'm not convinced that it actually is a scam. There's a lot of "dumb money" floating around from people who poured a bunch of money into cryptocurrencies and then basically won the lottery. This sort of project seems built specifically to appeal to that sort of person.
They said that there were under 35k applications, but over $200 million in pledges, meaning that the average application was for about $6k. That's not how normal crowdfunding goes for games. While they said it was only 20-30% from people interested more in cryptocurrencies than gaming, those people probably accounted for about $202 million out of the $203 million in applications.
And as with other cryptocurrency stuff, that's going to be extremely volatile, and could vanish very quickly. It wouldn't surprise me at all if telling everyone who applied that their application was chosen actually got under $10 million worth of people willing to give them the promised money.
But even if it isn't a scam, I am convinced that, as a game, it's going to be a train wreck. Let's count the ways.
1) People interacting with a game who care nothing for the game itself but are just trying to squeeze money out of it are a problem. They'll harass the paying players and do a variety of other things that are detrimental to the game. That's why most MMORPGs ban gold farmers and gold spammers to the extent that they can.
Ember Sword has taken the opposite tack. They see the possibility of gold spammers being banned as being the real problem. Instead, the gold farmers will own their loot in ways that the company can't take away. That probably sounds like hyperbole when I state it that way, but look at the article:
"You’d see items sold on the black market for 100,000 dollars, only to have people be banned two days later, and those items disappear forever."
And he says that as if it's a bad thing. I say that for gold farmers who are disrupting the game to have their entire operation wrapped up and banned and their assets deleted is a good thing, not a bad thing. I don't want to play a game that favors the gold farmers over normal players.
2) They have no clue how many players the game will have. Scaling your game to the size of your playerbase is a huge problem for MMORPGs. Done badly, you end up with overcrowded servers that people can't log into or ghost towns where there's no one around to play the game with. Or for a lot of games, both of those, at various times in the game's development, as the size of the playerbase changes. Some games even both at once in different regions of the game world. It's a difficult problem to sell.
But they do know exactly how much land they're going to sell. They know exactly how big their game world will be. And it will probably be wildly wrong for the size of their playerbase for most or all of the game's lifetime. They can't just expand and sell more land later if they need more room to grow, as the whole premise of buying land is that it will be scarce. So they can't scale things to the size of their playerbase, and have already given up on doing so.
3) The in-game economy is sure to be awful. In order for a game economy to work well, you need to have a lot of players who aren't really trying to play the game economy. A handful of traders can then find arbitrage opportunities and make money off the game economy by greasing the wheels to make it work better for the rest of the playerbase. But that only works if most of the playerbase doesn't really care that much. You can't really do that if you're competing against people who are playing the game for a living, which is something that they're explicitly encouraging.
4) Accounts get lost or hacked in games. Sometimes you have to recover your password, as you forget it when you don't play a game for several years and then want to go back. That's just how things are. Games need to be able to handle that, and most games can.
But that doesn't mesh with cryptocurrencies. If your account gets hacked and the hackers sell all your stuff, it's gone and unrecoverable. A lot of games try to counter this by restricting trading between players or making items soulbound so that they can't be sold. Ember Sword is doing the opposite, and that's going to encourage hackers to try anything they can to steal your stuff. That happens with cryptocurrencies all the time, and is a major reason why in their present state, they're pretty much unusable as an actual currency. Ember Sword is going to import that problem into a game.
This sure smells like a scam, but I'm not convinced that it actually is a scam. There's a lot of "dumb money" floating around from people who poured a bunch of money into cryptocurrencies and then basically won the lottery. This sort of project seems built specifically to appeal to that sort of person.
They said that there were under 35k applications, but over $200 million in pledges, meaning that the average application was for about $6k. That's not how normal crowdfunding goes for games. While they said it was only 20-30% from people interested more in cryptocurrencies than gaming, those people probably accounted for about $202 million out of the $203 million in applications.
And as with other cryptocurrency stuff, that's going to be extremely volatile, and could vanish very quickly. It wouldn't surprise me at all if telling everyone who applied that their application was chosen actually got under $10 million worth of people willing to give them the promised money.
But even if it isn't a scam, I am convinced that, as a game, it's going to be a train wreck. Let's count the ways.
1) People interacting with a game who care nothing for the game itself but are just trying to squeeze money out of it are a problem. They'll harass the paying players and do a variety of other things that are detrimental to the game. That's why most MMORPGs ban gold farmers and gold spammers to the extent that they can.
Ember Sword has taken the opposite tack. They see the possibility of gold spammers being banned as being the real problem. Instead, the gold farmers will own their loot in ways that the company can't take away. That probably sounds like hyperbole when I state it that way, but look at the article:
"You’d see items sold on the black market for 100,000 dollars, only to have people be banned two days later, and those items disappear forever."
And he says that as if it's a bad thing. I say that for gold farmers who are disrupting the game to have their entire operation wrapped up and banned and their assets deleted is a good thing, not a bad thing. I don't want to play a game that favors the gold farmers over normal players.
2) They have no clue how many players the game will have. Scaling your game to the size of your playerbase is a huge problem for MMORPGs. Done badly, you end up with overcrowded servers that people can't log into or ghost towns where there's no one around to play the game with. Or for a lot of games, both of those, at various times in the game's development, as the size of the playerbase changes. Some games even both at once in different regions of the game world. It's a difficult problem to sell.
But they do know exactly how much land they're going to sell. They know exactly how big their game world will be. And it will probably be wildly wrong for the size of their playerbase for most or all of the game's lifetime. They can't just expand and sell more land later if they need more room to grow, as the whole premise of buying land is that it will be scarce. So they can't scale things to the size of their playerbase, and have already given up on doing so.
3) The in-game economy is sure to be awful. In order for a game economy to work well, you need to have a lot of players who aren't really trying to play the game economy. A handful of traders can then find arbitrage opportunities and make money off the game economy by greasing the wheels to make it work better for the rest of the playerbase. But that only works if most of the playerbase doesn't really care that much. You can't really do that if you're competing against people who are playing the game for a living, which is something that they're explicitly encouraging.
4) Accounts get lost or hacked in games. Sometimes you have to recover your password, as you forget it when you don't play a game for several years and then want to go back. That's just how things are. Games need to be able to handle that, and most games can.
But that doesn't mesh with cryptocurrencies. If your account gets hacked and the hackers sell all your stuff, it's gone and unrecoverable. A lot of games try to counter this by restricting trading between players or making items soulbound so that they can't be sold. Ember Sword is doing the opposite, and that's going to encourage hackers to try anything they can to steal your stuff. That happens with cryptocurrencies all the time, and is a major reason why in their present state, they're pretty much unusable as an actual currency. Ember Sword is going to import that problem into a game.
"Accounts get lost or hacked in games. Sometimes you have to recover your password, as you forget it when you don't play a game for several years and then want to go back. That's just how things are. Games need to be able to handle that, and most games can."
I've seen some games with the email logins most of those were still very early on and most the game if any wasn't blockchain intergrated. It'd be crazy for Ember Sword to use web2 logins.
Web3 wallet logins are damn near hack proof outside of quantum computers. That's were most blockchain games are at.
People are paying all this money and don't actually "own" anything...That is what's wrong with it. Like others have said, they can take in all this money for "land", then shut down the game and you have zilch.
Kind of. First, how is that different than any other crowdfunded game. Second, at least they actually get the NFT even if they can't visit their land yet.
This is an incredibly long winded advertisement to sell digital crap in some software that isn't even a game yet.
How so if you can't even buy any of it, and it's an interview of the sale after it closed? You can't buy it even if you wanted to.
What good will that NFT be if the game has no players or closes down? You're still gambling that this game will be successful enough for your NFT to increase in value.
The only people who win in these situations are the developers and some of the early adopters who get in and then get out with a quick profit. Everyone else will just be left with a useless token proving that they own absolutely nothing.
How is that different than any other game that ever existed? Anything you buy on any other game, once the game is gone, it's gone. You technically still own NFT's outside the game even if the game closes down. Even if they're "worthless" and you can't use them, 10 years down the line you can still open up a crypto wallet and see all your shiny objects.
You can't do that in all the other games that ever shut down. Even when they do get resurrected, like SWG, you never get your stuff back. All the money you spent in those games is gone.
1) People interacting with a game who care nothing for the game itself but are just trying to squeeze money out of it are a problem. They'll harass the paying players and do a variety of other things that are detrimental to the game. That's why most MMORPGs ban gold farmers and gold spammers to the extent that they can.
Ember Sword has taken the opposite tack. They see the possibility of gold spammers being banned as being the real problem. Instead, the gold farmers will own their loot in ways that the company can't take away. That probably sounds like hyperbole when I state it that way, but look at the article:
"You’d see items sold on the black market for 100,000 dollars, only to have people be banned two days later, and those items disappear forever."
And he says that as if it's a bad thing. I say that for gold farmers who are disrupting the game to have their entire operation wrapped up and banned and their assets deleted is a good thing, not a bad thing. I don't want to play a game that favors the gold farmers over normal players.
But in those games where players get banned, the game either 1- doesn't sell the currency already or 2 - sells it but still allows players to earn it which gives sellers the ability to undercut the cost. In a crypto game where the price is pretty much determined by the market how will that happen? If you have a coin that is available on a crypto market for purchase, how exactly will a gold seller undercut that price? The purpose of earning crypto currency is to own it low and sell it high. If the market automatically manages the price of the currency, it doesn't make sense to sell it lower.
It's like, you don't have crypto miners out there who mine a coin and then turn around and say "bitcoin is selling for 32 thousand dollars, I'll sell mine for 10 thousand, come buy it from me." They didn't spend their money on the bitcoin they earned if they mined it, but why would they sell it for less than what it's worth on the market, and there's no reason they would sell it for more.
Plus, in those games gold sellers are just a handful of the population. We've never seen this happen in a game where the majority of the players actively engage in this kind of behavior.
2) They have no clue how many players the game will have. Scaling your game to the size of your playerbase is a huge problem for MMORPGs. Done badly, you end up with overcrowded servers that people can't log into or ghost towns where there's no one around to play the game with. Or for a lot of games, both of those, at various times in the game's development, as the size of the playerbase changes. Some games even both at once in different regions of the game world. It's a difficult problem to sell.
But they do know exactly how much land they're going to sell. They know exactly how big their game world will be. And it will probably be wildly wrong for the size of their playerbase for most or all of the game's lifetime. They can't just expand and sell more land later if they need more room to grow, as the whole premise of buying land is that it will be scarce. So they can't scale things to the size of their playerbase, and have already given up on doing so.
Just because they have 4 nations right now, all of which probably won't be actually playable for like.. 4 to 6 more years, it doesn't invalidate the possibility that a 5th nation could be added. There's really no reason that they couldn't add it. What's important is where the nation is.
For example, if nation 1 is known for a resource or has guilds or the most active players, then the premium to own land there is going to be higher. Think about that through the entire population. They can always add land later if, after years the population has grown enough to warrant another area. It doesn't invalidate the other 4 nations. Just like an expansion for a game doesn't invalidate the original game.
3) The in-game economy is sure to be awful. In order for a game economy to work well, you need to have a lot of players who aren't really trying to play the game economy. A handful of traders can then find arbitrage opportunities and make money off the game economy by greasing the wheels to make it work better for the rest of the playerbase. But that only works if most of the playerbase doesn't really care that much. You can't really do that if you're competing against people who are playing the game for a living, which is something that they're explicitly encouraging.
If that were the case, then all blockchain games would fail. Already games like blankos block party is selling blankos for like 25k dollars. When everyone is able to participate in the market, it doesn't make it awful, but it does make it a place where you won't see larger swings in costs for items. Whether someone plays for a living or not, if the items they are selling are worth their cost to someone, they'll buy them, but if everyone is selling these items, it will drive the price down, not up. In the end it may not be a great moneymaking opportunity, we really don't know.
4) Accounts get lost or hacked in games. Sometimes you have to recover your password, as you forget it when you don't play a game for several years and then want to go back. That's just how things are. Games need to be able to handle that, and most games can.
But that doesn't mesh with cryptocurrencies. If your account gets hacked and the hackers sell all your stuff, it's gone and unrecoverable. A lot of games try to counter this by restricting trading between players or making items soulbound so that they can't be sold. Ember Sword is doing the opposite, and that's going to encourage hackers to try anything they can to steal your stuff. That happens with cryptocurrencies all the time, and is a major reason why in their present state, they're pretty much unusable as an actual currency. Ember Sword is going to import that problem into a game.
It's a little early to really get into that, but yeah there's a lot of safeguards when you sign up for a cryptowallet or service. It's often way more secure to log in to most wallets than it is to log into your bank account online.
But in those games where players get banned, the game either 1- doesn't sell the currency already or 2 - sells it but still allows players to earn it which gives sellers the ability to undercut the cost. In a crypto game where the price is pretty much determined by the market how will that happen? If you have a coin that is available on a crypto market for purchase, how exactly will a gold seller undercut that price? The purpose of earning crypto currency is to own it low and sell it high. If the market automatically manages the price of the currency, it doesn't make sense to sell it lower.
It's like, you don't have crypto miners out there who mine a coin and then turn around and say "bitcoin is selling for 32 thousand dollars, I'll sell mine for 10 thousand, come buy it from me." They didn't spend their money on the bitcoin they earned if they mined it, but why would they sell it for less than what it's worth on the market, and there's no reason they would sell it for more.
Plus, in those games gold sellers are just a handful of the population. We've never seen this happen in a game where the majority of the players actively engage in this kind of behavior.
Part 2:
Just because they have 4 nations right now, all of which probably won't be actually playable for like.. 4 to 6 more years, it doesn't invalidate the possibility that a 5th nation could be added. There's really no reason that they couldn't add it. What's important is where the nation is.
For example, if nation 1 is known for a resource or has guilds or the most active players, then the premium to own land there is going to be higher. Think about that through the entire population. They can always add land later if, after years the population has grown enough to warrant another area. It doesn't invalidate the other 4 nations. Just like an expansion for a game doesn't invalidate the original game.
Part 3:
If that were the case, then all blockchain games would fail. Already games like blankos block party is selling blankos for like 25k dollars. When everyone is able to participate in the market, it doesn't make it awful, but it does make it a place where you won't see larger swings in costs for items. Whether someone plays for a living or not, if the items they are selling are worth their cost to someone, they'll buy them, but if everyone is selling these items, it will drive the price down, not up. In the end it may not be a great moneymaking opportunity, we really don't know.
Part 4:
It's a little early to really get into that, but yeah there's a lot of safeguards when you sign up for a cryptowallet or service. It's often way more secure to log in to most wallets than it is to log into your bank account online.
1) The problem with gold farmers is not the price at which they sell the gold. It's that they're a nuisance to the normal players who are paying to play the game. Having more of that problem doesn't fix it.
2) If the problem is that you have 10 times as many players as the game world can comfortably hold, starting development on a fifth nation doesn't really fix it. Nor does it fix the problem if you've got a deserted game world after everyone leaves.
3) If the objection is that something isn't interesting gameplay, then "but you can make money at it" doesn't really address the objection. There are plenty of respectable jobs that aren't fun games to play and few people would want to do for free, but pay good money. Those aren't entertainment, though. What they are, and that Ember Sword won't be, is productive.
4) The ability to recover your account after forgetting a password or whatever does add some amount of insecurity to game accounts and online banking. But it's also a key feature that makes them usable, and something that you can't do with cryptocurrency.
These kind of things are aimed at human greed...it's that simple...People have no idea what the game will be like or anything else, but if they think they can get rich quick then they are all in......We see this in all walks of life all the time.
I would point out that in the advent the game was relaunched, there'd be a high chance that such assets would be tagged as 'legacy' so that they could run a new set of NFT land sales and assets for a fresh start.
It would be in the interest of the studio to do so because it allows them more money, and avoids the problem of accounting for the impact those old NFT assets would have on the availability of land or overall state of the game world.
If the game ever shut down, there's a very low chance anything from the game being held in a wallet will ever be useful again.
1) The problem with gold farmers is not the price at which they sell the gold. It's that they're a nuisance to the normal players who are paying to play the game. Having more of that problem doesn't fix it.
2) If the problem is that you have 10 times as many players as the game world can comfortably hold, starting development on a fifth nation doesn't really fix it. Nor does it fix the problem if you've got a deserted game world after everyone leaves.
3) If the objection is that something isn't interesting gameplay, then "but you can make money at it" doesn't really address the objection. There are plenty of respectable jobs that aren't fun games to play and few people would want to do for free, but pay good money. Those aren't entertainment, though. What they are, and that Ember Sword won't be, is productive.
4) The ability to recover your account after forgetting a password or whatever does add some amount of insecurity to game accounts and online banking. But it's also a key feature that makes them usable, and something that you can't do with cryptocurrency.
1 - I don't disagree that gold sellers are a problem, but I don't understand how a game that sells their own premium currency on a crypto market would have gold sellers. But selling currency at a loss is a terrible business practice. If they are selling and trading the currency on an exchange there would be no gold sellers., it wouldn't make sense.
On the opposite end, if there's an in game currency apart from the paid currency, maybe some people would try to sell that. But if there's any kind of conversion of currencies, it falls apart again. By opening up and standardizing the currency on an exchange, it removes the need for gold sellers altogether. How many people are selling cryptocurrencies outside of exchanges on the "down low" ?
2 - This isn't an issue, really. If the game world is busy, then it's busy. If it's dead then it's dead. It's the same with every other game on the market, especially single or mega server games. It's too early to even call this a problem, because, we don't know how large each nation is really. Just trying to think on it rationally, if you look at a video, they say that one plot is equal to 1 screen size? Basing this off the info on the website. So if 1 plot is the size of one screen, then you're looking at 40K screens per nation. Each screen could comfortably house, lets pretend 10 players? 400k players per nation? Multiplied by 4? If the game only ends up with 100k players it might seem dead in some areas, if it ends up with 3 million players it might seem crowded.
3 - I don't think this really matters. Some people play games like jobs right now. How does it really compare? In one game they make money on their time in game, in the other they don't. It doesn't mean you're the one that has to buy what ever they sell. I have never bought a blanko on the blankos market, and I haven't sold any either. I buy them to have them, if I like them. If the game is good enough it's okay just to play it for fun without money being the main reason you're there.
4 - It just depends on what we're talking about. If you mean that someone is going to hack your account and sell all your stuff and there's nothing you can do.. that is a difficult question to answer.
If you're saying that games don't allow you to recover your account, mostly these cryptocurrency games, I don't really know how to answer that. If you lose your account information to a cryptocurrency wallet, that is difficult to recover, but if you lose your game account to something like ember sword, I don't think they're going to lock you out and not allow you to get into the game. I've never seen or heard of that happening.
Comments
I don’t think anything sums it up better than this. As long as everyone plays along and make believes it will all work out
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
They said that there were under 35k applications, but over $200 million in pledges, meaning that the average application was for about $6k. That's not how normal crowdfunding goes for games. While they said it was only 20-30% from people interested more in cryptocurrencies than gaming, those people probably accounted for about $202 million out of the $203 million in applications.
And as with other cryptocurrency stuff, that's going to be extremely volatile, and could vanish very quickly. It wouldn't surprise me at all if telling everyone who applied that their application was chosen actually got under $10 million worth of people willing to give them the promised money.
But even if it isn't a scam, I am convinced that, as a game, it's going to be a train wreck. Let's count the ways.
1) People interacting with a game who care nothing for the game itself but are just trying to squeeze money out of it are a problem. They'll harass the paying players and do a variety of other things that are detrimental to the game. That's why most MMORPGs ban gold farmers and gold spammers to the extent that they can.
Ember Sword has taken the opposite tack. They see the possibility of gold spammers being banned as being the real problem. Instead, the gold farmers will own their loot in ways that the company can't take away. That probably sounds like hyperbole when I state it that way, but look at the article:
"You’d see items sold on the black market for 100,000 dollars, only to have people be banned two days later, and those items disappear forever."
And he says that as if it's a bad thing. I say that for gold farmers who are disrupting the game to have their entire operation wrapped up and banned and their assets deleted is a good thing, not a bad thing. I don't want to play a game that favors the gold farmers over normal players.
2) They have no clue how many players the game will have. Scaling your game to the size of your playerbase is a huge problem for MMORPGs. Done badly, you end up with overcrowded servers that people can't log into or ghost towns where there's no one around to play the game with. Or for a lot of games, both of those, at various times in the game's development, as the size of the playerbase changes. Some games even both at once in different regions of the game world. It's a difficult problem to sell.
But they do know exactly how much land they're going to sell. They know exactly how big their game world will be. And it will probably be wildly wrong for the size of their playerbase for most or all of the game's lifetime. They can't just expand and sell more land later if they need more room to grow, as the whole premise of buying land is that it will be scarce. So they can't scale things to the size of their playerbase, and have already given up on doing so.
3) The in-game economy is sure to be awful. In order for a game economy to work well, you need to have a lot of players who aren't really trying to play the game economy. A handful of traders can then find arbitrage opportunities and make money off the game economy by greasing the wheels to make it work better for the rest of the playerbase. But that only works if most of the playerbase doesn't really care that much. You can't really do that if you're competing against people who are playing the game for a living, which is something that they're explicitly encouraging.
4) Accounts get lost or hacked in games. Sometimes you have to recover your password, as you forget it when you don't play a game for several years and then want to go back. That's just how things are. Games need to be able to handle that, and most games can.
But that doesn't mesh with cryptocurrencies. If your account gets hacked and the hackers sell all your stuff, it's gone and unrecoverable. A lot of games try to counter this by restricting trading between players or making items soulbound so that they can't be sold. Ember Sword is doing the opposite, and that's going to encourage hackers to try anything they can to steal your stuff. That happens with cryptocurrencies all the time, and is a major reason why in their present state, they're pretty much unusable as an actual currency. Ember Sword is going to import that problem into a game.
I've seen some games with the email logins most of those were still very early on and most the game if any wasn't blockchain intergrated. It'd be crazy for Ember Sword to use web2 logins.
Web3 wallet logins are damn near hack proof outside of quantum computers. That's were most blockchain games are at.
Honestly ty for the write up.
You can't do that in all the other games that ever shut down. Even when they do get resurrected, like SWG, you never get your stuff back. All the money you spent in those games is gone.
It's like, you don't have crypto miners out there who mine a coin and then turn around and say "bitcoin is selling for 32 thousand dollars, I'll sell mine for 10 thousand, come buy it from me." They didn't spend their money on the bitcoin they earned if they mined it, but why would they sell it for less than what it's worth on the market, and there's no reason they would sell it for more.
Plus, in those games gold sellers are just a handful of the population. We've never seen this happen in a game where the majority of the players actively engage in this kind of behavior.
Just because they have 4 nations right now, all of which probably won't be actually playable for like.. 4 to 6 more years, it doesn't invalidate the possibility that a 5th nation could be added. There's really no reason that they couldn't add it. What's important is where the nation is.
For example, if nation 1 is known for a resource or has guilds or the most active players, then the premium to own land there is going to be higher. Think about that through the entire population. They can always add land later if, after years the population has grown enough to warrant another area. It doesn't invalidate the other 4 nations. Just like an expansion for a game doesn't invalidate the original game.
If that were the case, then all blockchain games would fail. Already games like blankos block party is selling blankos for like 25k dollars. When everyone is able to participate in the market, it doesn't make it awful, but it does make it a place where you won't see larger swings in costs for items. Whether someone plays for a living or not, if the items they are selling are worth their cost to someone, they'll buy them, but if everyone is selling these items, it will drive the price down, not up. In the end it may not be a great moneymaking opportunity, we really don't know.
It's a little early to really get into that, but yeah there's a lot of safeguards when you sign up for a cryptowallet or service. It's often way more secure to log in to most wallets than it is to log into your bank account online.
2) If the problem is that you have 10 times as many players as the game world can comfortably hold, starting development on a fifth nation doesn't really fix it. Nor does it fix the problem if you've got a deserted game world after everyone leaves.
3) If the objection is that something isn't interesting gameplay, then "but you can make money at it" doesn't really address the objection. There are plenty of respectable jobs that aren't fun games to play and few people would want to do for free, but pay good money. Those aren't entertainment, though. What they are, and that Ember Sword won't be, is productive.
4) The ability to recover your account after forgetting a password or whatever does add some amount of insecurity to game accounts and online banking. But it's also a key feature that makes them usable, and something that you can't do with cryptocurrency.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
It would be in the interest of the studio to do so because it allows them more money, and avoids the problem of accounting for the impact those old NFT assets would have on the availability of land or overall state of the game world.
If the game ever shut down, there's a very low chance anything from the game being held in a wallet will ever be useful again.
On the opposite end, if there's an in game currency apart from the paid currency, maybe some people would try to sell that. But if there's any kind of conversion of currencies, it falls apart again. By opening up and standardizing the currency on an exchange, it removes the need for gold sellers altogether. How many people are selling cryptocurrencies outside of exchanges on the "down low" ?
2 - This isn't an issue, really. If the game world is busy, then it's busy. If it's dead then it's dead. It's the same with every other game on the market, especially single or mega server games. It's too early to even call this a problem, because, we don't know how large each nation is really. Just trying to think on it rationally, if you look at a video, they say that one plot is equal to 1 screen size? Basing this off the info on the website. So if 1 plot is the size of one screen, then you're looking at 40K screens per nation. Each screen could comfortably house, lets pretend 10 players? 400k players per nation? Multiplied by 4? If the game only ends up with 100k players it might seem dead in some areas, if it ends up with 3 million players it might seem crowded.
3 - I don't think this really matters. Some people play games like jobs right now. How does it really compare? In one game they make money on their time in game, in the other they don't. It doesn't mean you're the one that has to buy what ever they sell. I have never bought a blanko on the blankos market, and I haven't sold any either. I buy them to have them, if I like them. If the game is good enough it's okay just to play it for fun without money being the main reason you're there.
4 - It just depends on what we're talking about. If you mean that someone is going to hack your account and sell all your stuff and there's nothing you can do.. that is a difficult question to answer.
If you're saying that games don't allow you to recover your account, mostly these cryptocurrency games, I don't really know how to answer that. If you lose your account information to a cryptocurrency wallet, that is difficult to recover, but if you lose your game account to something like ember sword, I don't think they're going to lock you out and not allow you to get into the game. I've never seen or heard of that happening.