For clarity purposes: Korber0 is a member of the Jewels community who has volunteered to help make sure updates get posted to the community in a more timely manner.


Previews, timelines and updates from me will be posted to our trello board which he will then make sure gets posted properly throughout social media and to ensure issues and questions get filtered back to me.

The purpose of this is so that I can focus on finishing features. Right now we have a lot of stuff "mostly finished" and it gets constantly delayed due to having so many things requiring my attention. The goal is to focus in so we can cross one thing off my list at a time and make sure that the community is kept in the loop at the same time.


Posts coming from the pro4never account have been and will continue to be directly from myself where the Jewels account will be Korber0 or myself depending on the situation.

That is primarily correct. Another important aspect is being able to modify how the coin is used in the future as needed. We're looking into many possibilities for storing tokenized entire characters on the blockchain, provably limited edition items, decentralized smart contract style marketplaces and much more. There's a lot of things that can be done to more closely integrate the coin and its blockchain into the project and that's a major goal of rebirth, making sure we do that smoothly and in a way that's in the best interest of both ourselves and our investors.

As promised, here is the initial whitepaper discussing jewels and its integration in project rebirth. This is a brief document detailing ways we want the currency to be incorporated into the MMO project as well as introducing burn mechanisms and buyback mechanisms for the coin.

http://apexconquer.com/ProjectRebirthsJewelsEconomy.pdf


Keep in mind this is a living document and we highly encourage community questions and feedback. As revisions are made to the document, we will make sure to notify people through our slack, trello and this thread.




The jewels shop inside of heroes places coins spent into the PayPal fund (which is used to process fiat purchases of the coin from our website and from inside the game). The whitepaper actually details how we plan to handle that fund as it grows.

Approximately 200,000 Jewels have been used in the in-game shop so far. We are looking to introduce the burning mechanism mentioned in the whitepaper above in the next week and will be posting more details on that at that time.

For those who do not wish to read through the whitepaper or want quick and easy stats. Here's the short version of the burn mechanism.

Paypal fiat purchases: 50% burned, 50% used to buy coins at cheapest price off exchanges
In-game purchases made with jewels: 50% burned, 50% added to paypal fund



Apex is a tricky question. The shortest way to cover why Jewels has not been used there is that the in-game shop used on heroes does not fit nearly as well with the gameplay of that project. Instead we've found that the conversion rate in regards to monetizing players is more successful by convincing apex players to move to play heroes instead. With the first expansion pack for heroes on the horizon, our goal has become more about making the new server more attractive to those who used to play apex and moving them to the new ecosystem as smoothly as we can.

The twitter post from a couple of weeks ago was about a number of updates for the community rather than one single release. One of the things it was in reference to should be posted later tonight.

Apologies for silence the past few weeks. We've been primarily working internally and not nearly as much has been released publicly to our community as we would like. We will do our best moving forward to make sure that things are more clearly communicated. As part of that priority we've decided to make a trello board publicly visible for members of the community to keep an eye on what it is we're working on and our overall progress.

https://trello.com/b/FUKn6T3T/jewels-dev


Please keep in mind this is not an in-depth explanation of everything we work on in a day to day basis but more of a checklist for us to use to keep track of the project status so we always know what we are working on next. We will do our best to make sure to keep the board up to date in addition to content posts on BCT and Slack. We have a part of our whitepaper concerning how jewels will be integrated into rebirth being reviewed at the moment and we would expect to have that posted in the coming days.



For those who prefer quick snippet style updates and pictures, here is a few of the cosmetics we've released in the past couple of weeks.

The gambling games will be available inside our servers, through our website and through the jewels project website. You will not need an in-game account or the game client to play them.


Here's a second sneak peek. This is the 'in-engine' demo which currently supports the majority of the game functionality. What we're working on next will be linking it up to our gambling API we wrote and making changes to make the game itself more interesting. Then there will be a round of internal testing looking for any glitches or bugs followed by a beta release to the public.

Unless they are withdrawn to your wallet they will not stake.

We already offer bounties of USD or JWL for anyone willing to create new weapons and armors for the game. Unfortunately because of how restrictive creating new items are, it's not something most artists are interested in doing so the work falls to me. It's something that will be designed as a core system in rebirth though as we want users to be able to add their own items to the game which they can then sell to other players through our market place (with us getting a cut of course!)



Buying on an exchange will always be cheaper than buying in game as we have to replenish our paypal fund from exchanges. For those who do not want to deal with turning USD>BTC>JWL through exchanges, they are welcome to use our paypal processor built into the game to do a 'one click purchase' of jewels. You receive much less for your dollar but it is exceptionally convenient.


PS: We felt there needed to be a full set to go with those weapons... so it's time for a new garment! Thankfully we had this one mostly finished already.

Thank you for re-posting the newsletter here for those who may not have seen it. Appreciated!

Just a heads up that in the next couple of days I will have quite a bit more to share about the first gambling game mentioned in the newsletter including screenshots of the updated interface and a small document detailing how it all will function. Hoping to have a full video of the system in action in the next week but that may be delayed with all the holiday events and advertisement on heroes, it can take up a lot of our time.

Quick update! I'm no artist but I have a few more weapons I've put together. Quite happy with how they turned out.

Anyone who has an account for apex, jewels or heroes are included in the newsletter unless they have unsubscribed. If you have no interest in the game you can still make an account at www.JewelsProject.com to be included in future newsletters.


Development of rebirth will start Q1 2017. Right now we are working on finalizing the systems discussed in our newsletter (referral systems, player mail, provably fair gambling) so that we can get all our ducks in a row before diving deep into rebirth.

If you are looking for general news and discussion about rebirth and what it will contain, I strongly recommend watching our jewels hangouts as we have discussed in some depth how rebirth will function from a tech, gameplay and financial standpoint.

The newsletter has gone live to everyone in our mailing list. Keep in mind this email is focused on those who signed up for either of our games who may be unaware of new features that have been added since the launch of heroes or whom were unaware of its launch.

We feel that following the revamp of the referral system and the beta launch of the first gambling game it would be a great time to send a second newsletter specifically to investors and those who have purchased/deposited jewels into the game so that they are aware of how those systems work from a non player standpoint.

Unfortunately not. Even if the game could run (it cant to the best of my knowledge), our client protection has quite a number of windows dependencies that would not work on linux.

<Newsletter Update>

Formatting is done. Updating the mailing lists, doing spam filter tests and then a final proofread before it gets sent out. Thanks for your patience!

Just a quick update. Our newsletter is still planned for tonight but was delayed because there is a couple new things we're adding which need to be finished and documented in the newsletter before it is sent.


1: Our first holiday was popular in ways we didnt expec't... our past experience made us assume players wouldn't care much about decorating the cities for the holidays but it seems they really enjoy it so we're changing up our second holiday event to involve growing christmas trees which you can use to decorate even more! We'll be including screenshots and details in the newsletter so players know about the new event (this is in addition to the existing advent calendar event and the upcoming winter raid boss)

2: Our mail system is almost done! We've finished all the core functionality of an in-game mail system. We're just re-structuring some of the elements so that we can include the preview in the newsletter. Once thats done we will send it to an artist to have them create a non bootstrap based theme that will better suit the game.

We run advertisements constantly. As I mentioned in my posts, we don't care about top100 but it is a good way to reach certain groups of people who are interested in conquer. It's a niche game and reaching certain users (especially those who don't speak english) can be difficult. Due to the reset I mentioned it was a way investors could help push the success of the heroes server with essentially 0 time invested on their part.

The reason we're not doing bounties for voting is for the following reasons.

1: Their site overs no reliable way to see if a vote counted (they offer a postback system but it triggers even if the vote didnt count...)
2: Their site is nearly useless to us. We only list on it because being in the first page boosts SEO results and brings a trickle of players we wouldn't otherwise have.


We do newsletters, facebook ads, google ads, are active on various forums as well as partnering with a number of other projects to help advertise things. Top100 is not something we prioritize nor care much about. I simply offered it as a quick link in case people felt like using it because it's at least something (every bit counts when it comes to marketing).



The ICO has ended and we are not accepting further investment currently. If you are interested in the coin, now is a great time to do your research and possibly buy in due to the fact that there's already a consistent and proven use case launched and the gambling games are being released in the near future. If you're looking to hold for a longer period then the potential for future growth is very large given we're working on a number of large projects. Heroes is the first use case only and should be viewed as a proof of concept. The gambling games are in development now and are discussed in this thread + on our hangout sessions. Rebirth is our own custom game being developed for the long term build from the ground up with a jewels based economy.


In the next 2-3 months you have the launch of the gambling games, the launch of our in-game marketplace (auction house allowing people a safe way to escrow their in-game items for jewels or vice versa), the initial design document for rebirth and hints towards the networking prototype. Those are all great things to drive the price of a coin if speculating is your interest.



We've had a very busy week getting things ready for the first batch of December events. Those went live yesterday + today so here's what's coming up in the (VERY) near future.

#1: Newsletter for players and investors detailing what has been added to the game and explaining all the new features. That can be expected no later than Monday.
#2: The next hangout will be recorded in the next 2 days at most to discuss the status of the first batch of provably fair gambling games. That can be expected to be uploaded no later than Tuesday (although most likely Monday as well)
#3: The current events are being turned into a series of advertisement campaigns and will be going live throughout the next week (staggered release of various adverts)
#4: The second round of December events will be launching in just over a week which will include a new batch of advertisements going live.
#5: We are deep in development of a custom mail system for heroes which will serve as a core part of the auction house. Once completed we will be overhauling our referral system offering jewels to players who recruit new players to the game and initiating players to the jewels ecosystem by giving a small 'faucet' of jewels from certain ingame events. I would estimate we're about 2 weeks out from that overhaul being made public.

Their site is very, very bad but is still used by large groups of non english speaking players who can be hard to reach out to with our traditional advertisement methods. They reset the first of the month so having people vote on the 1st-5th of the month can make sure that the listing is visible (at least on the first page) for the remainder of the month. After that we dont bother with it because its so filled with fake votes and false advertisements.

It is also quite useful from a SEO perspective but you are correct that their site is bad in terms of reliability and functionality.

The drawback is the top100 site is... very unreliable and poorly designed. They've finally updated their postback system to allow custom parameters so we're testing it to make sure it wont provide more frustration than benefit. In the past we've found that the majority of votes were incorrectly ignored causing lots of player frustration. Sadly there's still a large group of people who rely on sites like that to find our game so it's a necessary evil.

It's the first of the month so all of the top100 style sites have reset themselves. If your'e looking for a way to help heroes and jewels grow, voting is a very easy way to do that! They limit votes to once per 12 hours per ip.

http://www.xtremetop100.com/in.php?site=1132355001


We are looking into possibly setting up a jewels 'faucet' where your account is credited a small amount of jewels for each successfully validated vote.

The next Jewels hangout will be discussing them more in depth but here's a teaser of the concept art

Please note, this is NOT the ingame interface, it's the concept our artist drew as reference for the interface and in-game elements.




<edit> Seems this computer mangled the fonts when I loaded the preview... Still gives you a rough idea of layout but worth mentioning those fonts are most definitely not correct.




Quick version of progress.

-Heroes launched, full jewels integration
-Tradable Jewels token added so players can trade in-game items for jewels
-Cash tournaments added where players can win jewels through in-game weekly events
-Recruitment systems and moderation systems created to allow players to be rewarded for advertising the game
-Lots of new in-game custom features such as those posted above added
-Multiple hangouts discussing the direction we're looking at taking the project with rebirth and the style of game it will be
-LOTS of updates and improvements to heroes to make sure it's fully fleshed out and any reported issues get squashed



Right now we're putting the finishing touches on our December events so we can start a new wave of advertising and recruitment to help push the game growth now that there's so much more content available to players and any annoying bugs that have been reported have been taken care of.

Once we have that pushed out in the coming days we will be re-focusing our efforts on making sure the first set of gambling games is available for testing and working on building hype for their launch.

Here's some materials relating to the new artifact systems added to heroes! This system is live in game now and players are able to use it without limitations.

Break down unwanted artifacts into points



Use those points to extend the duration of artifacts you've applied to your equipment (they change the looks and give bonus stats but are temporary)