NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8601069" data-attributes="member: 5948">I get that.  And for one thing, I'm very glad to hear that conditions, pay etc are good over there.  There should be more of that in the RPG industry (though I'm very much preaching to the choir there i expect...).  I suppose that's one of the side-effects of working in a tech company - if you're an employer who treats techies the way that RPG creatives are routinely treated in the workplace, you'll very soon have no techies left...But this thread is about NFTs and how they're being implemented and used.  That's fundamentally all we can talk about regarding GRIPNR's offering because as far as I can tell there's very little info about the actual game material out there at all.  If we had a setting preview or something of the Glimmering, then we'd at least be able to talk about that (though there's loooooots and lots of settings out there and without the NFT stuff, you'd need to do something pretty special to stand out from the crowd).  And frankly, that lack of gaming detail is not a good sign to me, as an indicator of the company's priorities.  The announcements have been 'NFTS!!! oh, and probably some cool D&D stuff too' rather than the new original game material being the selling point, and then explaining how NFTs, as an add-on to the game, will make it better.  As a gamer, I'm not sure how this makes life any better for me.  It just sounds like a way of using fancy new tech to do what the RPGA has been doing quite happily for 20 years, ever since Living Greyhawk.  Organised play has never been my thing, but still, i can see a number of ways in which this might make the experience actively worse, particularly by providing a financial incentive to minmax, powergame, play selfishly, etc etc.  As a tech guy in my day job, where i work with data, data integrity, financial transactions, security, anti-fraud etc all the time, I see no reason why NFTs, the blockchain, or any such technology is remotely necessary to do what is being described.  The only thing i can think of is that it's easier to get publicity for, and coax investors to put money into, a startup that plasters buzzwords like 'NFTs' all over its prospectus as opposed to one that ... wants to create a rather routine SQL database with a web front end.  And a lot of stuff makes a whole lot of no sense whatsoever.  The selling point of crypto is its decentralised nature and lack of dependence on a central authority, yet this looks to be centralised to an amazing degree, where there's actually talk of having people literally watch video of entire game sessions so GRIPNR can verify there's no cheating or scamming going on.  How that is ever going to work, how it is going to scale up to a larger userbase, and how GRIPNR are going to find/pay all these people with nothing better to do than audit other peoples' D&D sessions I find completely bewildering.And perhaps finally and most importantly, I've also been involved in environmental volunteering and climate causes for ~15 years.  From an environmental point of view NFTs (and crypto in all its forms) are radioactive gangrenous puppy cancer.  GRIPNR may be a great place to work, everyone there may be entirely sincere and well-intentioned and honest - but the tech they're basing the whole sales pitch on is, at this crisis point in history, one of the single most cynical, destructive, decadent, and irresponsible artifacts of human civilisation's slow suicide that I could possibly imagine.  Evaluating the offering of something like GRIPNR without discussing that is like ignoring the elephant in the room while it is actually in the process of goring you to death.</blockquote>

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