If you’ve spent any time playing MMORPGs in the past two decades, you have more than likely experienced firsthand just how much an in-game item can be worth to the right buyer.

Trading of items and in-game resources is at the core of most MMORPGs.

Sometimes, these trades happen in-game for gold, but more often than not, the most valuable items are sold outside of the game itself for USD.

Video Game items have been sold for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When we started building the core economy design for Ember Sword back in 2018, there was one long-lasting issue MMORPG players always face that we knew we wanted to find a solution for. From Ultima Online to World of Warcraft, Runescape, and all the others, it has always been the case that:

Long-time players always want to safely trade their most valuable items outside of the game.

That might not sound like an issue. But it is.

And for 3 separate, yet interconnected, reasons:

1. Trading of game items outside the game is almost always against the Terms of Service of the game developer, which forces players to trade on insecure grey/black markets where there is no trusted middle-man to facilitate the trade. This leads to very high rates of scamming.
2. Those players who are fortunate enough to not get scammed may still get banned if the developer finds that they’ve participated in “real-world” trading of in-game items.
3. Trading valuable items often ruins the experience for other players, as it creates a Pay-to-Win environment where those with the most money can acquire the best items instantly.

Blockchain in Ember Sword

Ember Sword uses blockchain technology, because of the many benefits such as increased security, true ownership, transparent rarity and so on. Let’s dive a bit deeper into this subject, and why you as gamers will reap the benefits.

True ownership

Players will always own their cosmetics without exception; Even the developers of the game are unable to take back cosmetics once they’ve been handed out to someone.

This puts the player in control of what happens to these cosmetics and what they want to do with them. Want to trade the item? Give it to a friend? Sell it for US dollars? All of these things become a reality to the player.

We’re partnered with OpenSea, allowing players to trade directly in-game or on the OpenSea.io website.

Real life example of the benefits true ownership through blockchain

The beloved MadSeasonShow on YouTube is a long time World of Warcraft player. His account was somehow part of a mistake on Blizzard’s end resulting in many of his characters changing levels, and losing valuable items. He shows this in his video “Blizzard destroyed my account”.

MadSeasonShow was unable to prove to Blizzard what items he owned, even though he had screenshots and video footage of many of his characters’ items. As we all know videos and images can be edited quite easily.

In a game with blockchain technology this is not difficult to prove. Even in the very rare case that something like this would happen in Ember Sword, you, as a player, would still own the token on the blockchain, meaning you have literal proof of what cosmetics and land you own in Ember Sword.

True rarity

Ember Sword cosmetics and land plots are truly rare.

The way this works, in simple terms, is that we connect each in-game cosmetic item, and land to a unique “token” (Non-fungible token, also called NFT) on the blockchain. The blockchain itself is essentially a public database, which means everyone and anyone can see all transactions that take place.

It is this little program that ensures the digital scarcity of all cosmetic collectibles. Nobody, not even us as game developers, can ever create more copies of a cosmetic item because the “smart contract” says we can’t.

What this means for you as a gamer is a few really cool things:

1. The underlying tokens behind all cosmetics and land, are truly owned by you, which means you can freely trade it in-game or outside the game without breaking any terms of service.
2. True digitally scarce collectibles; nobody can ever create copies or increase the supply of any cosmetic item — not even by hacking our servers.
3. No more hacking; the smart contract controls all player-to-player trading of cosmetics, and it will not let a transaction go through, unless verified first. And attempting to “hack” a server to falsely verify a transaction is impossibly difficult too, as there’s no single-point-of-failure server to attack. Instead, all transactions are verified by the thousands of computers in the Ethereum blockchain networks. Community websites and portals will have access to lots of interesting unfiltered / uncensored data because all transactions of cosmetics, land etc. are stored on a public database (the blockchain). This opens up lots of opportunities for community projects.
4. Cosmetics are represented as cards. Each card has a unique number and also shows the max number of this given collectible. For example, a card can be the 35th item out of 250. There will never be more than 250 collectibles of this type. So you’re assured that there isn’t a sudden influx in supply plummeting your collectible’s value.

Trading outside of the game

You can trade outside of the game on whitelisted exchanges, such as OpenSea.io. We’re aiming to support multiple exchanges so users can freely choose which platform they prefer to trade on.

Item history

Because of the blockchain, Ember Sword’s cosmetics have a public history record attached to them. This means that if this particular sword was the first in the world to kill a specific end-game boss, it will show on the cosmetic history record.

This means that not only are cosmetics truly unique, scarce, and rare, but in fact, through in-game activities, players can create collectibles. Number 31 of 250 of a specific cosmetic sword, which has a record of being the first to kill a new end-game boss AND has killed the best Ember Sword player in the world 10 times, will most likely become a collectible item worth many times more than number 32 out of 250 of that specific cosmetic sword.

You, as a collector, can buy that very specific cosmetic, and know that it is exactly that cosmetic used during the world’s first kill of an end-game boss. Collect them all, and become the most achieved collector in Ember Sword!

Conclusion

Because Ember Sword uses blockchain technology you are able to:

1. Trade your beloved cosmetic items or land on 3rd party websites without breaking the terms of service.
2. See the item history of any cosmetic item.
3. Have true ownership of your cosmetic items.
4. Know that your number 43 out of 500 of a certain cape is truly unique, scarce, and rare and there will never be any more of this particular cosmetic.
5. Know that no items or land can be duplicated or inflated.
6. Know that hacking / duplicating of cosmetics is impossibly difficult.
7. Know that us as developers do not own your cosmetics or land — you do! Not even we can create more, once a batch of cosmetics have been created.