Re: [ANN] JEWELS- Currency backed by an existent MMORPG. ICO starts soon. PLAY NOW
We do not normally allow people to sell their in-game items for real world currencies (because it competes with our own revenues) but with a jewel system you would simply sell your in-game items for packs of jewels which you could then sell on any exchange to cash out to fiat currency.
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 of this, the game will attract a much larger sub-audience of those who are trying to farm in-game items for cash. While at first glance this may sound like a bad thing, it's really not.
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?This creates a higher demand for the jewels because not only can they be used on non pay2win elements (cosmetics) but now they can be used to purchase actual in game items and bonuses but it is done as peer2peer and therefor does not reflect poorly on the servers balance.
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.It's hard to enforce this. Look at any game and there is a black market for in game items and currency, WoW gold, Runescape gold, etc. you name it. This is competitive with our own revenues, but regardless of whether we allow it or not people will do it.
With Jewels (a currency that essentially has a cash value because it can be traded BTC to fiat) we can encourage players that if they want to sell their items for real world "value" they do this through Jewels on our platform and let us escrow the trades for them. This greatly reduces the risk of both parties as we act as an automated escrow service between the two parties as well as allows us to profit from these sorts of trades as we can take an escrow fee.
Will some players still try to circumvent this purpose by still selling directly for USD? Yes probably and we can discourage this, but most players we expect would rather not take that risk if they don't have to. NCSoft's Blade and Soul recently takes a similar approach where you can purchase Hongmoon coins (their cash currency) and sell them to other players for gold the same way you would sell say BTC/USD. Of course there are still players who go the route of buying gold directly from gold farmers rather then supporting the actual game itself but those who do so greatly put themselves at risk for bans and scamming
I'm not the right person to answer the question about botting and cheat so I'll leave that for Chris to tackle.
Regardless of whether you consider direct trading between users to be "Pay2Win" there's no way of stopping it or preventing it. Take your pick at any MMO you can name that allows trading between players items that have stat based values, do you consider them p2w because there exist black markets where if a player wanted and intended to dump cash into the game and get immediate benefits? This is another topic that I feel Chris can expand upon much better than myself.
Edit: On a personal note, I don't think the idea of being able to spend cash on a game is bad thing. Where it becomes a bad thing is when you can spend so much cash on a game that a player who is "skillful" at the game has no chance of ever beating someone who is unskillful because they've dumped a lot of cash into their character/equipment. This is most evident giving the current state of the official Conquer Online. We know it is important to recognize players who are skillful which is why we offer plenty of PvP events that do not factor in a players gear/stats but rather strictly focus on their PvP mechanics.