The blockchain-powered strategy game Taurion will undergo a so-called hard fork, while the Taurion Treasure Hunt is still on-going. The team at Xaya is doing this game update as a part of the alpha test. They want to test the impact of the hard fork and introduce some updates for the strategy game.
The hard fork will happen when block 2.159.000 is mined on the Xaya blockchain. This is likely to happen sometime on Tuesday. It’s important to note that this hard fork is only for Taurion and not for the entire Xaya blockchain. This hard fork will activate automatically for anyone using 0.5.3 or later version of the Taurion installer.
When it comes down to gameplay, other vehicles will no longer be seen as obstacles. Instead vehicles can move through each other, but their movement speed will drop by 80 percent. Updating is important if players joined into the Treasure Hunt, because that’s the only way players will be able to claim their prizes.
Why this Taurion hard fork?
Taurion is a completely decentralized game. This game is not running on a centralized server in the racks of a major Amazon service center. Instead Taurion is running completely on the Xaya blockchain, and this blockchain is maintained by the players, the community and the developers. This also means that significant changes to the game require a serious hard fork. Some of those changes can be introduced through the game client, while others are blockchain-based.
In the future it might very well be that a part of the community keeps playing an older version of the game, while Xaya Tech moved on to a newer version. Using this technology it would be possible for an original version of an MMO to live on forever.
Anyway, by forking the current version of Taurion, the developers get to test their community. How fast will players move over to the new version? How many will have difficulty with the fork? Technically another group of developers could pick up the development of Taurion based on the older version, rename the project and create their own game.
