So basically you will now be allowing in-game items to be sold for real world currencies using Jewels as an intermediary step.
How is that not competing with you own revenues?
Because we do not sell items for real life cash. The items we sell are things like VIP tokens, exclusive garments, RNG packs, etc. Players will always try to circumvent any system we have to sell their gears for cash. By using jewels we have the ability to introduce new systems such as a jewels auction house or at the very least the ability to enforce these trades. Less scams. more transparent for players not to mention those who will play simply because they view it as a way to earn money. We already have plenty of people who play for the purpose of paying bills in their country. We've banned large numbers of them but by securing and legitimizing these trades you actually grow your player base and reduce their complaints.
How do you avoid botting? There are already bots for Conquer Online. How do you prevent users adapting them to farm items and in-game currency on Apex, making the price of in-game item drop and sparking massive inflation of the in-game currency?
I can't go into the full details of our protection systems but here's a quick rundown of the measures we have in place.
-Anti injection/spoofing measures to check for memory based bots and packet based bots
-Process list tracking to scan for un-authorized programs running while the game is open
-Custom authorization and game encryption keys
-Server side sanity checks so if our client protection is removed/altered it will be detected
-Client file verification to check key files for edits
-Player report system so if they see suspicious behavior they can let us know. An invisible mod/gm will then investigate, scan their running processes and take the neccesary actions.
No anti bot system can claim to be un-crackable or anything like that but ours has proven very successful in the last year and a half. Any players we've found who've 'cheated' in our game have relied on simple click based macros or other such tools which are easily detected through player reports and their effects limited by safe system design (making systems less abusable by repetitive actions)
If you allow players to sell items that give an advantage in-game, like weapons, you are basically allowing Pay2Win. It's not Pay2Win between the players and you, but Pay2Win between players. A new player can basically come and buy $100 worth of Jewels, buy XP boosts and equip himself with topnotch equipment, and outperform players who have been playing for a while. I'm not saying that's necessarily a problem, Diablo 3 has been doing that for a while with the Real Money Auction House, but let's call a spade a spade.
There are many, many different ways people define what pay2win means to them. Having grown up playing games like conquer, I define pay 2 win as the gap between paying players and non paying players as being
insurmountable. You spending 100 dollars being equal to 1,000 hours of gameplay for me would of course be pay2win. I'm aware that's a quite loose definition but I'm using the benchmark of the official versions of conquer online and other predatory MMOs with similar tactics.
If you came into heroes on day 1 and spent a large amount of money, it wouldn't mean you could all of a sudden be 'finished' the game. Sure you would have a very large amount of jewels on your account but that does not equate to instant items. You would have to find a player who wants your jewels (or an item you purchased with jewels) and trade it with them for an item they've actually obtained. This peer2peer system of trading and marketing strongly encourages players to interact with each other in a sort of symbiotic relationship between those who spend money and those who don't. Those who spend money purchase items others want (such as VIP tokens or shiny looking cosmetics others want) and then other spend their time completing quests, farming monsters, competing in events, etc to earn items to trade to that paying player.
Gambling
Have you checked what are the regulations regarding gambling in your country?
If your country has gambling regulations, it wouldn't be a good idea to host the gambling aspect of the game on servers under your company's responsibility.
There is an easy way around though: Ethereum smart contracts. If you have the gambling process run as a smart contract on Ethereum, it's not anymore under your responsibility but that of the network at large that is to say everyone and no one, but you can still get a cut from "the house"'s proceeds as a "shareholder" of the smart contract. For that to work best, I would recommend to implement Jewels as an Ethereum based tokens. You could also sell "The House" tokens if you want to share the costs, risks and rewards of running the gambling smart contracts.
The gambling/jewels projects will be contained separately from the server projects. This is both for legal reasons regarding gambling and also to keep the jewels project insulated if there were ever any issues with the private servers coming under fire. The company that created conquer online has not done anything to private servers in a decade but it's better to be safe than sorry.
On-chain game assetsIf you are really motivated to make a kick-ass game economy, motivate other game developers to join, and get a lot of attention in the crypto community, you could allow game items to be stored on-chain and exchanged as crypto tokens. Maybe not every item, but at least legendary items. You could create new "collector" items once in a while, give away half of them at random in the game, and sell the rest for Jewels. Makes another nice source of income. That's exactly what
Spells of Genesis is doing. They are using Counterparty tokens to represent each type of tradable card, and they are exchanged for their currency called BitCrystals on the Couterparty decentralized exchange. Of course if you are using Ethereum for gambling, it would make more sense to implement that using Ethereum tokens. In that case, you could simply fork the EtherEx exchange contract and make an in-game asset exchanges you control (in which case you can also charge trading fees, which would be another revenue source).
We have actually brought up a few proposed ideas regarding this and mentioned them to bitcrytals. The idea we had was to do a sort of partnership where cards could be transferred into Heroes to receive in-game items that looked like the card (a weapon, an armor, etc) and could be traded back out. To implement tokenized items wouldn't make sense for most standard in-game items (they are combined and deleted and shifted so often it would be a mess!) but for things like importing cards from spells of genesis and any other similar cosmetic items, I do like that idea and it's something we've discussed some.
Personally my focus has been on the gambling side of things but I am not opposed to doing on-chain assets in the future, it just requires the right circumstances or partnership for it to make sense.
