Something unusual happened in May, and the Dev Team wants to fill everyone in now that the chapter has closed. A recruitment company called Micro1 posted a job position on the Eterna Discord looking for players to train their client’s AI on how to solve Eterna puzzles. Jonathan immediately took down the post and asked for more information. Jonathan and I met with Micro1 and put parameters in place for allowing their proposal development to proceed. Jonathan also updated Eterna’s Terms of Service to make clear that for-profit companies cannot use our game platform for commercial purposes without licensing. Players probably remember that Terms of Service box popping up.
We never heard anything further. I assume the client decided not to proceed. We also met with Toptal recruiters putting together a proposal for a similar project. We signed an NDA to meet the client, then never heard anything further.
I hope everyone considers our course of action to have been appropriate. Our immediate fear was that it all could be a scam to steal player identities, and we feel the platform has a duty to protect the community from bad actors. Once it became clear this was not an outright scam, we still had a duty to vet the proposal and put guardrails in place. I personally did not want to get players’ hopes up and then have the project not come to fruition.
For future reference, how many players would have wanted to participate in such a project? You can DM me if you don’t want to respond publicly.