[Galactic Milieu] Big Picture overview of a Play-To-Earn (PTE)

[markm]

As my take on "play to earn" evidently differs from what seem to be the "norms", I'll try in this post to give at least some glimpses into my own thinking on the genre.

For starters, a big part of my original thinking on the matter had to do with discouraging "griefing" in games by trying to ensure players have "skin in the game", something to lose, something hopefully sufficiently valuable or important to them that the risk of losing it could potentially serve as an effective discouragement of "griefing".

Thus my first thoughts were along the lines of requiring at least an initial fee to play even if not an ongoing fee such as a subscription, with the bulk of those fees going into some kind of earning or interest-bearing mechanism so that the longer the player kept playing the larger the eventual payment they could be refunded if or when they "honourably-discharged" themselves, a refund they would not be eligible for were they "dishonourably discharged" and that thanks to the earning or interest-bearing mechanism could well be larger than the original fee, ideally of course significantly larger.

The big "catch" I ran into with that of course lay in finding a suitable and reliable "earning or interest-bearing mechanism" to plug into that model.

It did not take a whole lot of empirical testing to determine that so-called "HYIPs" (High Yield Interest Programs) were not dependable for such a purpose.

Thus the challenge ever since has been to find or construct suitable plug-in "earning or interest-bearing" mechanisms.

Eventually of course, bitcoin was invented, wherein "mining" is an absolutely literal "money making" mechanism.

Aha, thought I, maybe at last this play-to-earn idea might be do-able!

Suffice to say that with the advent and proliferation of crypto, "earning mechanisms" aplenty are nowadays readily available.

This of course led to a new challenge: why bother to play games to earn rather than directly accessing the underlying earning mechanism(s)?

Anyone who might upon occasion have wondered why the Galactic Milieu has thus far not followed the crypto "fashion" of publishing a "whitepaper" might possibly give some thought to that challenge themselves, maybe they can provide some useful thoughts upon the matter.

The overall model is basically to have games intervene between earning-mechanisms and end-users (players), so ultimately play to earn games constructed according to such a model fundamentally amount to yet another form of "middleware" coming between the spigots and the wannabe-guzzlers.

Presumably the general tendency here in the bitcointalk forum would be to disintermediate the middleware and go directly to the faucets/spigots.

Thus arises the possibility that providing "whitepapers" detailing the spigots/faucets might be counterproductive...


-MarkM-

[markm]

Because many of the Galactic Milieu's assets are traded on the Stellar platform, an increasingly important, and obvious, input is direct trading of XLM against BiTCoin.

This of course is likely to slow down as its scale increases, since as with any asset pair the larger the buy and sell offers the larger "volume" of trade it takes to move the price aka to fully consume all the offers at a given price so that the next price can start being consumed.

But until the scale becomes large enough that its offers become one of the largest scale players on that particular pair of order-books hopefully it will continue to perform well and to increase in scale.

One problem players should be alert to though in trading assets against XLM is the historically rather large swings in value of XLM itself.

A whole lot of the time it used to be in the 9 to 10 cents USD range, yet as I write it just recently climbed rapidly to over 50 USD cents and is now back below 40 USD cents.

Unless you have the time and attention to be very "agile", responding to such swings in XLM value, it might well be best when attempting to use the Latest Rates include-file to compute your offers to calculate using the low end of your expected or observed range of XLM value when calculating sell offers and the high end of the range for calculating buy offers.

That is for example using a 9 USD cents low and a 55 USD cents high expected / estimated value of XLM itself you would design your offers to buy things with XLM as if XLM were worth up near the 55 cents end while in calculating your offers to sell stuff for XLM you'd calculate using a value down near the 9 USD cents low end.

This will help XLM's own swings in value from undermining your calculations as much as it potentially could.


-MarkM-

[nutildah]

I have heard about this project for a long time now and its great to see you making such progress on it! Interesting to see that you've settled on XLM as your currency of choice. This comment is mainly a bookmark so I can remember to check it out more thoroughly tomorrow.

Cheers & best

[markm]

Actually the primary platform for the game's assets is HORIZON, whose native currency is HZ.

However HORIZON is based on running your own node in your own home, it does have a web interface, see for example http://lfm.knotwork.com:7776 but we deliberately have not even attempted to set up an https (secure http) port for that because accessing someone else's instance is inherently insecure in that they could log all your browser's queries to their instance and thus discover you private passphrases.

Thus it seems better to have that example instance be conspiciously insecure, to discourage you from imagining it is in any way a good idea to use it for your actual accounts; it is useful though for simply looking at other accounts and at blockchain history transaction history and so on since you can log in with any arbitrary made-up passphrase, including just using a single space-character as a "passphrase" to log in as the example account we provided whose passphrase is a single "space" character (what you get by pressing the spacebar on keyboard).

You should not use this sample site though for anything real; for real use you should download it for yourself, for example from my LFM.Knotwork.com membership site or from anywhere else that still has the most recent archive on file after all these years. My LFM Knotwork membership site also has some help on how to get it up and running. You will most likely need either to find out how to have your modem route the approrpate port(s) to whichever machine on your local network you run it on, so likely will need to have your modem assign that machine a "fixed IP address" on your in-house network, since the config file likes to know what its instance is known as on the internet to communicate with other nodes effectively. Thus you might also need or want a dynamic-IP service sch as no-ip etc to provide whatever IP address your internet provided assigns to you from time to time with a name on the internet that the dynamic-IP service will, via a daemon aka "service" (a program) it gives you to run on your machine that reports to it periodically what your current IP address actually is. Some modems include support for such services in the modem.

Thus as you might be able to imagine HORIZON is not something the mass market users always find totally convenient to use.

You could set up an instance yourself for your own clan or nation or guild or society, association etc (generically "group") to access if they trust you enough tom think you won't go stealing their passphrases, but if you do so you might want to either figure out how to make it use https (secure http) or just run if for them over Tor or suchlike "dark net" which will get rid of the need for a "dynamic IP" service and the need to configure your modem and the need for a way to make it use https, but, will require your users to use Tor or whatever "darknet" you choose to run it over.

Basically it is intended for distributed use by the individuals involved, setting up a node for others to use is a form of centralisation with all the risks centralision incurs including the possibility that who-ever hosts the instance might in effect be turning it into a "custodial wallet" of sorts by having the technology to access other people's accounts aka having their pass-phrases, their "secret keys".

This you can likely understand why we also offer the use of Stellar.

Stellar also has the ability to trade any asset directly against any other, whereas in HORIZON everything trades against its native currency HZ.

Stellar also has build in "automatic market maker" ability aka liquidity farming, and a free open source bot, "Kelp", which can be very useful.

It is also trivial and trivially cheap to create and use tokens on Stellar.

All our assets we represent on Stellar though do exist first on HORIZON, the "Stellar Holdings" account on HORIZON contains the assets that have thence been tokenised onto the Stellar platform.

The assets that in Open Transactions were catagorised as "shares", which are those prefixed with a lowercase "s" in the Latest Rates include-file, are not tokenised onto Stellar, they exist only on HORIZON to help players always keep in mind they are not planet Earth "securities" just game assets; since HORIZON nowadays is basically purely a game platform for use in the Galactic Milieu (meta)game.


-MarkM-

[nutildah]

I remember Horizon when it launched in 2014; at the time it was more-or-less a clone of NXT, although last I heard it had evolved somewhat. Stellar would definitely be more ideal I'm sure. Keep in mind that most crypto people these days are lazy and are going to be put off if the game setup is too complicated.

This game definitely has a lot of history behind it. For others who may be interested, markm is a Certified OG in this space, and here are some of the threads that have been made about the game over the years:

[RFC] Underwriter (Galactic Milieu) (2012)
Cryptocurrency-driven game(s) (2012)
Possible platforms discussion for Galactic Milieu (2015)
Galactic Milieu (2017)
Devcoin Foundation investment agreement on the Galactic Milieu (2020)

I would be interested in seeing some screenshots of historical gameplay if you know of a place that might have them.

[markm]

I would be interested in seeing some screenshots of historical gameplay if you know of a place that might have them.

The #galactic-milieu topic on the HIVE blockchain has some screen-grabs: https://peakd.com/created/galactic-milieu

Battle for Wesnoth is a free open-source game that operates kind of like the ancient education programs or read-your-own-adventure novels in which your choices determine what you are shown next, with set piece battles or adventures as one of the forms of decision choices as in did you win or not basically; a game in which you re-play history but if you fail at any step to accomplish what the historical protagonists did you usually just lose the game; that has been used to make sort of historical docu-dramas about some of the "temporal nexi" in the game even though BfW didn't end up actually adding yet the kind of features that had been discussed for it that would have led to its being useful for actually deciding what actually happened.

The plan in saving each FreeCiv-turn's savegame files is that someday if Wesnoth adds the features that don't seem anymore even maybe to be in its roadmap it might be possible to use it as one of the methods Time Cadets could use to re-visit a temporal nexus (read: FreeCiv savegame) and branch an alternate history off of it.

The Between the Worlds campaign is a portmanteau with a few different threads in it which include a Time Cadet storyline as well as a Space Cadet storyline. The Devtome wiki has pages about some other campaigns also.

The idea is that the Milieu agents introduced the Battle for Wesnoth software to Earth as part of its preparing the planet to join the Milieu, as a software tool allowing Earth to begin early stages of training Holodocudrama developers well ahead of introducing actual holodecks / holobarracks which are of course a too advanced technology for such a backward planet at this time. But like a holodrama Wesnoth software lets one set up educational storyboards / storylines which include interactive elements.

The campaigns do typically include some screengrabs from for example FreeCiv and Crossfire-RPG.

It is possible the Milieu stuff on Quora might have some screengrabs too.


-MarkM-