Partnership with Forte

#1

Found this Deca announcement on Reddit, from a month ago (Mar 24th) so is quite old news, but hadn’t been copied onto here yet, and it’s about the game, so here it is anyway:

#2

I remembered reading about this, and I also remembered that my brain’s a little too small to comprehend how exactly this potential partnership and integration with Forte will affect Realm’s experience, cuz frankly I have no idea what is a “transformative blockchain platform for games that unlocks breakthrough community economics, creating new economic and creative opportunities”. Like, what are these potential new opportunites that would be unlocked if Realm’s actually integrated with Forte?

So, I suppose if anyone has a better understanding of these benefits (or negative, if any), do enlighten me haha;;

#3

Ok now someone translate that to real talk please?

EDIT: oops sorry Phantom, posted exactly at the same time.

So I just looked the definition of blockchain and…

yeah that still looks kinda suspicious.

#4

No problem, glad to know I’m not the only one puzzled by what this actually means~

Ah, so a blockchain is…to put it simply and if I’m not understanding this wrongly… some sort of digital tool that records transaction data (in this case between Realm and the player base) and keeps it secure, open, and permanent. Which means in other words, it’s just another way of recording things

…which still makes me wonder how on earth that culminates to “creating new economic and creative opportunites” . _.

#5

Blockchain is something that allows cryptocurrencies to be so secured, but like the rest of you, I don’t see how it could realistically help RotMG unless it makes transactions safer or something.

#6

blockchain is one of those things people like to say they’re doing to make them seem smarter and more competent than they really are, which is the perfect description of deca’s behavior in general. most people don’t really have a clue what it means and it’s not actually very useful in the vast majority of cases people want to be using it for. this entire announcement is fluff material and buzzwords with no real meaning behind them other than “we’re doing something with Forte and we’re not telling you what it is.”

so the translation of this post into “real talk” would be:

hey guys we’re partnering up with Forte for poorly explained reasons and we definitely know what we’re doing so don’t you worry your precious little head since we’re very smart because our mom said so

#7

:unamused:

Real answer, this was primarily announced because Forte themselves was announcing a list of partners, and we felt it would be a bigger source of confusion if Forte listed us and we said nothing about it ourselves. There’s no immediate impact on the game itself, we just wanted to be transparent about the partnership.

#8

Will it affect RotMG at all, or will the partnership end up effecting DECA’s other projects to a greater extent?

#9

As I noted in that thread, this is all just a scam, Really, that’s all this can be. I posted a link to a handy explainer which goes into great detail: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

If that is tl;dr then the basics are

  • someone invented BitCoin
  • it took off, as many people thought it was the future of money
  • but when people tried using it as money it failed, spectacularly
  • many people lost out due to fraud + amateurism
  • now it’s only used by crooks

After the failure of cryptocurrencies. some people looked at the technology, Blockchain, thought it neat, and tried to use it in other ways. But it was designed for currencies. It makes even less sense for other things. Attempts to use it elsewhere have all gone nowhere as it is not a solution to any problem. What Forte are doing is bound to fail too.

Why is it happening? As they have $100m and need to do something with it. They’ve raised that presumably from gullible investors, with a promise of transforming gaming. They’ve done a number of deals since last year but nothing practical has been announced. Nothing will be as it makes no sense for games.

#10

this answer doesn’t explain anything either. it doesn’t explain why or how deca ended up on the partner’s list to begin with, what deca expects to get out of the arrangement (if anything at all), what exactly you meant by “no immediate impact”, and why anyone thinks a blockchain of anything belongs anywhere near rotmg at all. “buzzword abuse” is genuinely the only explanation I can come up with when this is all we’re given to work with.

#11

I have the strongest feeling that it might mean offerwalls for realm gold.

#12

What the initial announcement said is exactly what was meant.

Currently each game at DECA is evaluating if and when they would integrate with the Forte platform. This goes for Realm as well. Our first priority is your experience, so we are looking at all that Forte has to offer and if it makes sense to integrate it into Realm. If and when we decide to integrate into Realm we will make sure to notify the community of our reasons and what you can expect to change.

At this time there are no certainties on if this ever will have any kind of integration with Realm whatsoever. Should anything ever come of it (likely in the much longer term if at all), relevant announcements will be made, but the announcement thread already provided all the information that there is.

#13

Look Toast nobody’s asking you to predict the future. All you have to do is explain what Forte does. There’s no point in telling us you’re “looking into integrating with their platform” when most of us have no idea what their “platform” is and what “integrating” with it entails.

#14

Maybe that’s cause we don’t need to know if it’s unsure whether Deca’ll even work together with Forte in the first place.

I don’t get why anyone would need to get worked up over a tiny bit of transparency.

#15

If it was that unsure they wouldn’t be officially announcing their partnership.

It’s not transparency if nobody understands what they’re saying.

And if they don’t explain things then people will look for information elsewhere and then they’ve lost control of the conversation. Basic PR mistake. Now anyone reading the thread only has Skandling’s explanation and it’s a negative one.

#16

“Integrating” is being used vaguely because there’s really nothing more descriptive to say about it at this time. Forte is a blockchain company that Deca as a whole (not just the Realm team) has partnered with, and each game is being evaluated separately for whether or not Forte has the potential for any kind of application in it.

Given how new and up-in-the-air the field of cryptocurrency as a whole is, much less Forte’s particular focus on the gaming sphere, trying to say anything more than that would be speculation at best and likely just appear misleading if anything does someday come of it.

The most that can be offered for further clarification would be Forte’s own statements, namely the statement of partnership we wanted to be ahead of and their announcement regarding the Blockchain Association. I understand that this still likely doesn’t offer as much clarity as you’re looking for, but it’s the full extent of details currently available for something that may or may not be relevant to Realm at all.

As stated previously, the only reason we announced it preemptively in the first place was to avoid worse confusion from a community member seeing Deca on their list of partnerships without any word from us beforehand. Should Forte ever become relevant to Realm specifically, we will be able to offer much greater detail based on what is decided.

#17

based on the verbage in those links, reading the wikipedia page rmg found on blockchain earlier, reading a bunch of associated links that stemmed from that page, and this page I found on CryptoKitties, it seems that Forte’s mission is to find applications for the blockchain structure in video games, in whatever fashion that that application may take. so the point of deca’s partnership with them must be to find out if the blockchain structure could benefit one of their various games in some way. this is the information we were wanting to know that apparently neither deca nor forte could be bothered to explain outside of buzzword-speak. was that so hard?

sure the two explanations seem to say the same thing just in different ways, but one is understandable (I hope anyway) to someone who doesn’t already know what’s going on, and the other requires all the digging I just had to do in order to understand because of all the buzzword-speak. and now I know way more about blockchain than I ever wanted to and now feel a profound sense of disappointment in humanity as a result.

#18

Thanks for the links, I think they might shed a light on this.

“the unique benefits blockchain technology brings to games, e.g., asset ownership, item provenance, the ability to integrate peripheral markets.”

“The technology’s unique properties map perfectly to the digital nature of games and enable the secure ownership of in-game digital assets, thereby laying the foundation for groundbreaking blockchain- and crypto-native marketplaces and services for the games industry.”

In other words, it’s just RWT 2.0 except the companies would have more control over it.

#19

I was thinking/hoping that the economic opportunities would be some sort of update to the trading system. I’ve been wishing for a while for a system where you can post an offer on “the market”, log off, and come back later to find that someone bought what you had posted. This would make it so that you wouldn’t have to be logged on in order to do a trade, and (I think) it would make it easier to play the market. I’ve played a couple games with systems like this (Trove and Neverwinter), and I’ve had good experiences with it in both circumstances.

I’m less inclined to think that this is “just RWT 2.0” because the initial reddit quote stated that the partnership

I also agree with @Toastrz that, given how little information we have right now, worrying won’t do us much good. As long as Deca is being transparent, we may as well wait to see how the partnership develops with relation to Rotmg.

#20

Completely unrelated but…toastrz is a deca games official? Congrats man! (Whenever that went down.)