Obvious Disclaimer

None of what is said here is guaranteed to happen as they are my own thoughts and concepts(Roy Khan) and while a key member of the Jewels Project I cannot make promises on behalf of the Jewels Team.

The other disclaimer is I am only human, I have limited knowledge. If I say something stupid, I apologize, please reach out and correct me ([email protected]) and I will see that it gets fixed and you are credited!

Calling it now, I say something silly about smart contracts, but with that said…

Jewels and the future of Blockchain-Gaming

An informal collection of thoughts by Roy Khan

Relevant Links

http://www.JewelsProject.com
http://www.ApexConquer.com
http://www.ConquerHeroes.com
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1545327

Part I - The Value of an Account

So when you play a game, the first thing you have to consider is “what makes my account valuable?” and that depends on the type of gaming you’re playing. For example, let’s consider the following examples

League of Legends

• What rank is my account (Bronze, Silver, etc)
• What level is my account (typically assumed to be 30)
• Which champions do I own?
• What runes do I own?
• What is the name of my account? (sometimes names are even sold!)
• What skins do I own
• How much IP (earned by playing) and RP (premium currency) is left on the account?

So the key thing to point out here is since most of what RP is spent on is skins the two most important things that will govern what an account is worth is the rank of the account (contingent on skill of the player) and what skins do they own (as this has a direct correlation to monetary value which is how much RP has been spent on the account).

Conquer Online (patch 5017)

• What is your characters Rebirth path? (Class)
• What level is your character?
• What items does your character own?

And honestly, that’s it. Most people will assume all your skills are maxed and even if they are it doesn’t greatly affect value. For the record, I state patch 5017 because it eliminates a lot of the redundant systems they added later on and lets me give a concise tl;dr of worth of an account.

By far the most important thing on this patch is what items do you own? There are also rare items that exist in the game that can only be earned through special events that don’t happen frequently (i.e. “Gold Cup” via “Super Guild War”). Typically, the items on your account was directly correlated to how much money had been spent on the account as Conquer Online was notoriously known to be a pay-to-win game (for the record I define a “p2w” game as a game where you can dump in so much cash that how skillful you are at the game becomes irrelevant and you’re able to easily crush players that are far more skillful at the game than yourself but lack expensive gear).

Part II - Decentralized Items and Marketplace

So Conquer Online being a closer example to what we’re looking to do since we’re creating an MMORPG it’s evident to see one of the most important things of the items of your character. While spending money on a game can influence the quality of your items, on fairer games the amount of time you put into the game (farming equipment, doing dungeons, raids, etc) greatly affects your items as well.

With that said one of the most crucial things about a game then is having a decentralized marketplace for items is one of the most important things. Paraphrasing what EversoftDream (creators of Spells of Genesis) said “[I] feel it’s important that players be able to actually own their [items].”

Smart contracts open the door to specialized assets. The problem with traditional assets is they don’t represent items that well. Take for examples with the NXT blockchain, you cannot add on specialized data data to an asset. For Spells of Genesis, their cards don’t have any specialized data asides from being a specific type of card therefore issuing a specific type of asset works perfectly for this. However, using an item on Conquer for example requires the following information

struct conquer_item
{
    int32 type_id;
    int8 composition;
    int8 bless;
    int8 enchant;
    int8 gem1;
    int8 gem2;
    uint32 attribute_flags;
};

If you consider certain items (weapon skins) these could easily be represented by a NXT asset (or a XCP asset like SoG) because they only contain one piece of information which is the “type_id” component.

Therefore, by representing items using a specialized asset within a smart contract, we can then give rise to the ability to represent items on the blockchain. But should all items be represented on the blockchain?

The answer to this may not be obvious but it is absolutely not. Items are constantly changing owners, being created from monster drops, quest rewards, etc. With the number of micro-transactions involved it’s almost absurd to think it would be a smart idea to use a blockchain or “decentralized database” for this sort of information given the latency.

Items should be represented on the blockchain if a user requests it to be so. Let’s suppose I have a “Super Buried Blade” (an item from Conquer) with a composition of 5. I should be able to request from the system, “Hey, because I own this item, destroy this item temporarily, and give me an asset in your smart contract representing this item.”

From this, I am given an asset that I can now put in the decentralized market place on the blockchain and another user can then buy the item and then send the asset back to the system saying, “Hey, I have this asset here, can I get the item associated with it in-game?” and at that point they receive the item in game and the asset is “burned.” If it is not obvious, the primary currency of this decentralized marketplace is Jewels.With that said for all of this to work JWL would exist as an asset on another blockchain supporting smart contracts and we would have performed an asset swap (JWL coins for the JWL asset).

Part III - Fiat Gateways

Fiat is important to the our schema as outlined above. This is because quite often for example, say I want to purchase a character valued at $10,000.00 USD odds are I have that in cash, but I (as a typical player) don’t own $10,000.00 USD worth of JWL.

With the current way things are, this process is very cumbersome. I would first have the buy $10,000.00 USD worth of BTC (at current market value of $630.00/BTC this is 15.87 BTC) and then purchase JWLs from an exchange. In other words, it’s a pain in the ass. It’d be much easier if there was a method to go directly from USD → JWL.

Likewise, unless the player selling the item wants to spend that JWL on other goods, they will need an easy method of USD ← JWL rather than the cumbersome process of dumping their JWL on the market for BTC, and then dumping their BTC for fiat.

This process needs to somehow be simplified and probably can only be solved via partnerships with well established organizations.

Part IV - Other things on the Blockchain

The obvious question at this point is can the other aspects of a character be traded on the blockchain as well? The answer is yes and more surprisingly once the system for items is designed, it’s actually not that hard to trade other things!

The key concept here is the “server” (the central authority) mints an asset representing the good. The asset should contain all the information required to reproduce the item allowing all the information to be stored in a decentralized manner rather than the central authority simply issuing an identity-number and then relying on its own internal databases to restore the item. Whoever then ends up owning the asset then has the option of having the server reclaim and burn the asset and provide them the in-game associated item with. This also introduces the concept of being able to trade things being two entirely different games.

Pretty much anything can be sold using this mechanism, suppose it was possible to “trade experience” this could be easily represented within the smart contract using another structure.

enum experience_type : int
{
    level = 0,
    spell = 1,
    weapon_proficiency = 2,
};

struct conquer_experience
{
    Int id; // used for spell/proficiency
    experience_type type;
    int64 exp_amount;
};

And then everything pretty much follows identical to the decentralized marketplace described for items.

Part V - Community Involvement

One of the nice things about a skin system is it opens the doors for community involvement. Many game communities (using League of Legends as an example) have a ton of players who love to edit visuals of characters and provide very aesthetic designs.

The unfortunate part is many games discourage players from using skins that they don’t directly sell. Now it’s obvious to understand why they do this, because by installing a 3rd party skin to your client you’re effectively “tampering with your client” and who knows the odd tech illiterate person might end up downloading a virus or something malicious so it’s safest to only buy things directly from the game creators.

However, with the tech discussed in previous sections, we can see here an obvious opportunity to capitalize on the community's love of editing. Let them do the work! It is possible to design a system such that a player submits their model to us and if approved we add it to our game (the files associated with it) and then issue an asset on their behalf to them which then they are able to sell on the market place at their own prices! I think it is obvious for this model to succeed there are two things that have to happen which are

• A player has to pay a fee to have their asset added to the game
• There is a tax on the initial sale of the freshly minted assets

With this, the game is truly community driven in terms of its cosmetics and in terms of visuals sky's the limit so long as you are proficient with 3d modeling software. Some games such as DOTA 2 and Second Life have done similar systems with great success but by having the initial player pay to mint a limited run of assets which are represented as blockchain tokens creates a much more interesting secondary market for designers to profit from the game.

Honorable Mentions

Dominik S. (Iota)
Ethereum has standardized interfaces for token contracts (parts removed from Part II)
Chris C. (Jewels)
The suggestion for community involvement (Part V)