# CosmRS

**About Runescape**

Runescape is one of the most popular MMORPG video games of all time. The game allows users to make characters in a medieval world, and through questions, fighting, and interacting with the world around them through "skilling" (think mining, fishing, woodcutting, etc.) are able to level up their character and attain in-game wealth and status. Runescape has gone through many iterations and updates over the years, but versions from around the mid-late 2000's are widely considered to be the best, so much so that the company behind the game has released and now maintains OSRS, or, "Old School Runescape" which has since become by far the more popular option relative to the current, newer version.


Despite its age, it’s still incredibly popular, so much so that it almost suffers from its own success in some ways.

**The Flaws & The Potential They Create**

The amount of time (and at times effort,) that goes into accruing wealth and XP ("experience", or, your characters levels) in this game is immense, such that there is a massive "black market" for trading of items and accounts. In addition, its appeal and effectiveness as a virtual online economy goes as far as to pay the living wages for many in impoverished countries, such as Venezuela, where hoards of people "gold farm" for later sale on these markets to maintain a living wage. There are entire companies that live within these black markets, such as https://www.food4rs.com/ and many others.


Additionally, Runescape suffers from antiquated game design in some, easily remediable aspects, such as the inability to have more than one character per account, something our model accounts for.

Because of all this, we believe there is not another game in existence that is more suited to being brought on chain and tokenized, so as to both improve upon this experience (who wants to interact with a sketchy site like food4rs, right?) and capture some of that proven value in a way that is more transparent and constructive for the gamers that make it possible in the first place. Additionally, it being an older game may be a blessing in disguise. The game operates on a 0.6s tick rate, which means that the server updates everything once every 0.6 seconds. This is far slower than most other games, especially modern ones, and is actually within the realm of possibility for blocktimes on a tendermint based chain. Especially ones with a small, concentrated validator set like Joe Chain, where we plan to build and test this idea. If we see success, we would look to migrate to a dedicated, RS Chain in the future.

**How it works**

Your wallet controls your characters and items, so there is no such thing as "black market" as being able to trade these things is by design, and marketplaces to do so can be supported and built by the core team and community efforts alike.

In our proposed model, your wallet would be your “account.” Unlike the real game, from your account in CosmRS, you would be able to make multiple characters, and each would each be an NFT with an integrated smart contract that can hold CosmRS tokens.

Items in game which are fungible with each other within their types, are represented by tokens, that can be held in either your main wallet/account, or in your characters inventories (the NFTs). This would allow for trading of both items (including wealth, which is just represented by gold & platinum piece items in game) and accounts between both individual characters and parent accounts. This model would not work with many games, as items may be unique to one another due to things like durability or similar, but in Runescape, every Iron Longsword is exactly as sh*t as any other.

OSRS Inventory.

The in-game leveling system works off of simple, whole number XP points. There are a number of skills in the game, from woodcutting to magic, and each have their own level and XP behind it. For each of the 20 or so skills in game, there will be a soulbound token that can only be minted from the admin contract for the game. As your character amasses XP, their NFT's have the relevant XP tokens minted to them automatically, which the game then reads to determine your level. This also eliminates any possibilities for cheating outside of major exploits, and XP simply cannot be minted by anyone other than the game itself.

OSRS Skills panel.

**Oldschool Systems, Reimagined**

There are a number of functions in the base game that would play in perfectly to CosmRS, and would retain the benefit of feeling familiar to the user, while reinforcing the entire system.

Runescape is not a single-payment video game. Much like how a chain has continual upkeep costs, the Runescape model is one of players contributing monthly membership payments to cover their own upkeep costs. This is not to say the experience as a whole is paywalled. The game has always worked such that the first part of the game, from quests to areas, is free to access. This allows anyone to try the experience out risk free, and by the time they reach a “Members” area or feature, they have a sense of if it’s something they’d want to pay to continue playing. We could implement a very similar model, and use it to subsidize validator upkeep and development costs in opposition to the traditional model of token emissions.

OSRS Free & Members (in red) areas

There is also already a “DEX” of sorts in Runescape, known as “The Grand Exchange” or “GE.” This is where we could build and implement the flagship DEX for the chain. Users would be able to retain the familiar, in-game experience of using the GE, while reaping the benefits of a true DEX.

The UI for the GE.

This one may come as a surprise, but OSRS players are already used to governance. One of the promises from the developer with OSRS was that they wouldn't make any changes without the community's approval. So, every single potential change to the game is “polled” and players' votes are the sole driving outcome. Unlike tradition, on-chain governance however, this is not a wealth based system, every player is equal to 1 vote, and we would mimic that, but rather than limiting it to one vote per-character, it would be one per-account. Again, we can work on-chain governance right into the game-system, as there are “Polling” booths in tons of popular areas, which could interface with chain governance. Of course, users could still just vote from their wallet.

In-game polling.