The public game chain Ronin and the ecological game ROMW are in a fight between Rashomon, and users "pay" for the break

Author: Zen, PANew

Recently, the development team of "Ragnarok: Monster World" (ROMW) 0x& was the first to launch the "multi-chain architecture" server on CROSS Protocol, announcing that the game process and token system will be completely independent of Ronin. For this, the community immediately burst into trouble, criticizing its "soft rug"-style moving and worrying about player rights and ecological prospects.

Just two days after the matter was announced, Sky Mavis co-founder and COO Aleksander Larsen publicly accused ROMW of "ignoring advice, secretly signing a contract with another chain, seriously violating the cooperation agreement" on X on April 26, and announced the termination of its professional partnership with 0x&. This series of events has pushed the original in-depth cooperation into a crisis of trust. While the Ronin ecosystem is slightly damaged, ROMW's future has become even more worrying.

Rashomon: Ronin and ROMW each have their own opinions

"The game team ignored our advice and lost the support of the community ever since. Worse, they secretly signed an agreement with another blockchain, violating our agreement. Given the support we have been supporting them all the time, it was a natural surprise. Trust has broken down to such a level that we decided to terminate our professional partnership with the development team of Ragnarok: Monster World 0x&."

Recently, Aleksander Larsen, co-founder and chief operating officer of Ronin's parent company Sky Mavis, issued a statement condemning the ROMW development team for "betraying" Ronin and announced a break with him. The two sides maintained a honeymoon period of only one year and came to an end.

"Ragnarok Online" (Chinese translation: Legend of Wonderland) is an MMORPG launched by South Korean developer Gravity in 2002. This classic online game has attracted more than 100 million players worldwide and generated more than 2 billion in revenue. Using the classic IP of Legend of Wonderland, 0x& launched the tower defense game "Ragnarok: Monster World" after obtaining Gravity's authorization, and announced it will debut on the Ronin blockchain in April 2024. According to a press release released by the time, 0x& not only established a partnership with Ronin, but also received investment from Sky Mavis.

In response to Ronin's accusations, ROMW denied in response to any secret agreement, fulfilled all contractual obligations, and had transparent communication with Sky Mavis as early as February 2024, including a direct meeting with Aleksander Larsen. ROMW also said that no matter what challenges it faces in the future, it will continue to operate the game on Ronin, further saying: "We believe that decisions made regardless of the interests of the community will ultimately undermine Ronin's uniqueness."

Both sides have different opinions, and the community cannot tell which one is true and which one is false. However, in this Rashomon incident, both Ronin and ROMW's behavior and attitude disappointed the players and the community.

From love to hate: Little Sweet turns into a cow lady

In fact, the day before Aleksander Larsen officially announced his breakup with ROMW , some community players had discovered that there was a clear rift between the two sides. In a post about the recently hyped fishing game "Fishing Frenzy" by Ronin Eco, Ronin co-founder Jihoz made no secret of criticizing ROMW, bluntly saying that the game is nothing more than a "bad copycat version of "Royal War". Jihoz said ROMW wanted to make money on other platforms and directly pulled the ball, saying that he was only focusing on "Ragnarok Landverse: Genesis".

"Ragnarok Landverse: Genesis" is also based on the Legend of Wonderland IP, and the game design is closer to the classic original work. It can basically be regarded as the Web3 version of "Ragnarok Online". Genesis was developed by Zentry (formerly GuildFi), a developer of the metagame ecosystem, and was launched on Ronin at the end of March this year. Prior to this, after obtaining IP authorization cooperation, Zentry's flagship game studio Maxion initially launched the "Ragnarok Landverse" soft launch on BNB Chain in September 2023, and the Genesis series released by Ronin can also be regarded as the latest adaptation and continuation of this version.

Jihoz's fierce criticism made some community users think that his words are a bit too sharp, and many players find it difficult to understand the differences. After all, they were the ones who praised ROMW in the early days, and they were the ones who stomped on it now. In addition, Larsen, who issued a statement to break up, also mentioned in his statement that because ROMW violated the trust regulations, they had to take "punishment" - remove the game and its assets from the Sky Mavis product, including removing the relevant NFTs of ROMW from the Ronin market.

This decision has also brought it to the community's doubts, with some users calling it over-centralization a "typical manifestation of centralization" and an open blockchain should not do this. There are also Ronin supporters of non-ROMW players who advise: "You should not remove their NFTs from your market. This is not the fault of the end user, which mainly damages the trading capabilities of Ronin users." I hope that the credibility of the Ronin ecosystem will not continue to be damaged.

Later, Larsen issued a statement saying that they had listened to community feedback and would not completely remove Ragmon's assets from the Ronin market, but would remove the check mark, indicating that the official does not have any recognition and support for the game. However, it has become much more difficult to search for ROMW-related NFT collections in the Ronin market now. And after ROMW's official announcement of "finding a new home" and after a confrontation between the two sides, the prices of related NFTs have fallen sharply across the board. Among this inconsistency, the only ones who were most hurt were gamers who believed in Ronin's official endorsement and ROMW quality.

Can ROMW and new love CROSS have a future?

ROMW's "new love" CROSS Protocol is a dedicated side chain based on Ethereum, supporting on-chain games and NFT ownership verification. It is developed by multi-platform game provider NEXUS, and the governance rights are left to the Swiss-registered non-profit Opengame Foundation. In March this year, CROSS Protocol announced the completion of a $10 million private token sale.

On April 23 , the ROMW development team 0x& published a series of posts discussing the fourth season, updates and other contents, and one of them was titled "ROMW on CROSS Beginner's Guide to Beginners" surprised players. According to the introduction, the "multi-chain architecture" adopted by ROMW means that the games running on CROSS are completely independent of the existing Ronin server, including independent game processes, token economics and rankings.

This means that developers are publishing the same game on other networks, and there is almost no economic relationship between the two. For example, xZeny tokens are its in-game tokens in CROSS. Players need to purchase a battle pass to obtain it. This has nothing to do with the eZeny tokens in Ronin that also needed to purchase vouchers to obtain, and cannot be redeemed. If a player wants to play games on both servers using a single gaming account and wallet, he or she needs to use the network filter in stock to manage the assets he or she owns on each network.

ROMW's operation caused great anger to the community. Players strongly criticized it as a soft rug. After cutting off the leeks of Ronin community players, they found another way to continue to defraud players' assets.

It is reported that in previous seasons, players will receive the season-end ranking reward in the form of eZeny tokens and redeem it as a temporary practical $RUPI, which can be traded on the decentralized exchange of the Ronin network. Affected by recent series of events, the price of $RUPI plummeted, and the price of NFT also dropped to its lowest point. Therefore, those players who invest time and money in the original game will basically be wasted.

Players generally expressed anger and difficulty in understanding the behavior of ROMW's transfer to CROSS, and satirized that CROSS was just a fake ecosystem that was all robots. Some developers also said that ROMW's move only needs to continuously obtain resources and financial support for game development, and Ronin, which has many top Web3 games and is open and unlicensed, obviously cannot provide the support ROMW wants.

But no matter what, for ROMW, which has overdrawn its reputation and harms the interests of players, there is already little hope to rebuild an active player community.