This is a tough choice for me cause while I believe the network should be less omogeneous and offer more flexibility to suit everyone’s specific needs, I don’t think it should be tailored for specific projects in a “hardcoded” way, especially if these changes come with protocol modifications that Dfinity has to work on with their limited manpower and the project asking for it hasn’t proved the effort will be justified, so if the title of the proposal were “Create subnets with lower replication” it would have been less troubling for me.
Personally I think moving from subnets to a per canister/canister group consensus model would benefit everyone way more than creating specific subnets and have talked about this in the past but the discussion didn’t catch on: Question about ICP's subnet design
Furthermore I don’t believe your specific use case is currently worth asking Dfinity to shift their internal priorities, I’ve been gaming for over 15 years and modding is what got me into coding so I take this stuff to heart.
I’ve seen you mentioned some big franchises like Half Life, ArmA and Warcraft as examples of what modding is capable of and why this is a worth endeavour, thing is those games are on their own without any user made content already amazing games, on top of it they facilitate content creation by offering dev tools, tons of assets, built in functionalities, etc…
So I ask where is all of that with Plethora? Cause I’ve seen some pretty big claims like fully on chain games 10xing how humanity creates value and interact, but when I look at what you’ve actually built it’s nothing to write home about, it is very underwhelming as in “I played games made for Ludum Dare that were more entertaining” level of underwhelming, so when I read about this grand plan to improve gaming that has never been done before and possibly can’t even be done cause a 3 node subnet will have considerable latency too and your product doesn’t even come close to what the industry offered us 20 years ago I can’t help being skeptical.
I know it may sound harsh but I deeply care about this stuff and have grown a bit impatient about web3 games selling grandiose ideas when 99% of them are less fun than flash games from 2012, all I see is NFT this and onchain that, buzzwords that investors like or at least used to like but actual gamers despise, meanwhile big players in the industry like Epic are actively and silently working towards a goal similar to what you envision without encumbering themselves by getting caught in the “everything must be onchain meme”, which for this specific use case brings more issues than benefits, instead they chose to focus on the stuff that is really needed: easy access to code, game logic and assets, very flexible tools anyone can use, a brand new programming language to write extensible and easily scalable game logic, frameworks to spread simulations on different servers and way way more.
I highly suggest to watch this year’s Epic GDC presentations as Tim Sweeney goes deep into what he envisions the future of the Metaverse will be and one key aspect of it is the fact it isn’t owned by anyone, but not cause it is decentralized or run by a DAO, but because (in his opinion) it will be an aggregate of content built using open standards, just like the web, and therefore the engine/clients used will be mere implementations of those standards.