Why we leave Waves Platform and moving to Ethereum?

Hi, all it’s Rosa again ^^

As you know we have had some major changes on GameX lately and I hope to answer most of your questions with this article. I’ll write it in a question and answer format and hope to cover most of the things you may wonder about.

Let’s start with some history…

Why did we choose Waves Platform in the first place?

Because it was (and still is) very user-friendly and easy. Creating a token in a few minutes or maybe seconds via a UI is really appealing.

Also, Waves has it’s default exchange for its tokens, so we didn’t really need to bother to find one at that time. Transaction speed and its cheap/flat cost is also another major advantage.

If Waves has such advantages, what’s wrong then?

If you are an old follower, you probably know our first weeks. Being a small and inexperienced team, we made some mistakes on the road. Like our lack of whitepaper and team member details etc.

When we created our website and released it on Bitcointalk.org, we had some initial interest from the community. Most of the people found our website look a very appealing as design and while we didn’t promise a game-changer feature to the world, still gamer-oriented community showed their interests.

The biggest criticism was about our choice of platform, Waves. Still, you can find such comments on Bitcointalk.org that people didn’t even bother to check our platform just because we are based as a Waves token. They claimed that Waves never have had a successful project and GameX’s fate would be the same.

What was our response to such criticism about platform choice?

Well, we didn’t really think about it and thought that it’s just a prejudice. We hoped that it would change with time and it did actually, to some point.

Our hope was to get the assistance of Waves Platform directly about different matters since they are a rival of Ethereum and Waves was in the top 10 currencies at that time. They were trying to increase the recognizability of their platform and was trying to get the interest of new token creators.

What kind of support did we expect from Waves Platform?

When we started our token sale, we did it as a minor action. I mean we didn’t promote it, we just had our thread on Bitcointalk.org which is closed 3 times due to user spam messages. We didn’t get a funding except for a few individuals and our team.

At that time, we found a program of Waves Platform that is called Waves Lab. A curator program that assists or even funds promising projects. While our token sale is active, we have sent an email to the lab. That was our first bad experience with Waves actually.

Waves Lab and lack of communication

We sent our first email to Waves Lab when we started our token sale. To get more attention for our token sale, we asked the support of Lab to promote us or at least give us some advice on marketing purposes.

Evgeny Zaykov from the lab replied to our email and asked some questions about GameX and we provided them with details.

We have waited for an answer for 2 weeks and our token sale was active at that moment. We even send some emails to remind them of ourselves but Lab replied to us after 4 days of the end of our token sale. We lost every chance of marketing assistance via their social media channels. If they would say that “We don’t really like your project and we can’t assist you”, we would be ok with that but asking questions, details and making us wait for weeks. That’s really not a good move.

Their reply was also like their own marketing, email started with “ Waves Lab has helped the first participant of the program — the Simdaq Trading Platform — to successfully raise the $5M hard cap for 28 hours during the recently conducted token sale.”. Then once again, Lab asked us to wait for the final decision and we did.

8 days passed for that decision and Lab said that they can’t provide any assistance at the moment. They suggested us to improve our platform and re-apply in 2 months. Well, to get a “No”, we have waited for 1 month.

Did we re-apply for Waves Lab? Well…

Yes, we did and we did it on our peak times. In February 2018, we have released our new promotional program, GX Alliance. It skyrocketed our popularity and with that motivation, we did great improvements until April 2018.

Here some of our highlights for that 2 months;

• GameX listed on CryptoCompare.com with paying GX tokens as the fee.
• GX Alliance released to the public. Members were able to earn GX while promoting GameX via traffic sourcing, referral hunting, daily visits, and unlocking achievements.
• Never Ending Bounty Program announced. All time limits have been removed and Bitcointalk.org bounties become permanent.
• Due to high traffic, GameX server stopped responding so we upgraded it to a VPS and changed our old host.
• Our first sweepstake, Mafia 2 Digital Deluxe Edition is completed with 400+ participant. 12.5k GX accumulated.
• GameX assisted RewardMob ICO campaign with directing its members to their platform and reward them with certain actions. Around 3.5k GameX members have been participated in the program. Due to being a referral, GameX accumulated around 47k RMOB tokens.
• GameX is listed on Exrates.me exchange with paying GX tokens as the fee.
• GameX started leasing Waves to support the platform’s nodes. 190 Waves has been leased to Wavesnode.net.
• GX Raffle Store is released to the public with 20 Steam games. Users were able to win Steam games via this program with buying tickets.
• GameX started to discuss some partnership deals with Kinguin, RewardMob, Jalapeno Inventive, and Inno Games.
• GameX’s announcement thread has been translated to 12 different languages.
• A designer is being hired to create new GameX signatures. Fee paid as GX tokens.
• GameX’s unique visitors at the beginning of February 2018 was 71k and with new changes and GX Alliance program, it jumped to 980k in March 2018.
• GameX had 69k registered users in that period and we sent around 1.5k payouts to the participants of the program.

So, for a small team and platform, do you think these are good improvements in such a short period? Do you guys think that GameX has potential? Well, Waves Lab thinks not…

The second application on Waves Lab and a funny outcome

We have created a report as a pdf file with 37 pages. We have detailed about everything we did so far with numbers and statistics. Our main expectation was funding or at least be connected to the platform directly so we can shape our direction, roadmap.

The reason for funding was obvious. After seeing such potential and interest, we thought that we can really make great things if we can focus on GameX without thinking about our other freelance or full-time jobs. Costs were rising and we didn’t want to put advertisements to the platform.

So, while we are at our greatest time and while we were motivated, we reached out Waves Lab again by presenting our report.

It’s been almost 2 weeks until we get a simple reply. To get that reply, we also tried to reach Waves Lab via Telegram but somehow while those members were active on their own Waves Lab Telegram channel, they weren’t really even reading our direct messages for days and when they read, they didn’t really reply anything back.

After that 2 weeks, the first question of the Lab was “Have you completed your ICO?”. And we replied. Then one more week has been passed and a second question came, “How much did you raised on your ICO?”.

Guys, we send a report that has 37 pages on it which includes everything, it’s so obvious that they didn’t even open the goddamn file. Replies are just like a game or something. We patiently answered such questions and the outcome?

“You can try to fill in the following form to participate in our upcoming article, there is a possibility, that we will include your project. Thanks” :))

Just an article and “there is a possibility” even for it. A platform that has 200m USD market value can’t even assist a small group of individuals that show promise, how you can take these guys serious?

Webinar of Sasha Ivanov and GameX question

Sasha Ivanov, CEO of Waves Platform was going to join a channel to answer some questions of the community. Questions have been added to a poll and most voted questions would be asked by the moderator.

GameX was around 4. or 5. place on that list due to users’ votes and the question of the user was “Do you plan to cooperate with GameX for upcoming gaming projects?”.

So that time has come and the moderator asked the question, Sasha replied as “Ah yes I’ve heard that they had a successful ICO…”, “we may cooperate with anyone”.

We had a successful ICO? Hmm, I think you don’t really know about us Sasha but you acted like you know :(. His reply was also a generic one, nothing specific so, while the community is aware and interested in GameX, Waves management didn’t really care.

Reaching out to Sasha

Our founder Orkun, has tried to reach Sasha to tell his plans directly to him as a last resort. Because we were on the brink of a major decision. There were a few possible choices, we could migrate to ERC20, we could put ads on the website for additional income or we could lose our motivation and close GameX. Being ignored by Waves as general was really forced us to spam these guys with messages. All we wanted was a direct answer, “Yes, we are with you” or “No, take care of yourselves”.

Sasha just replied like “where can I see your project?” and then never replied back again. We thought that it’s time to move on, it seemed that we are not welcome here.

Support of Waves Platform CMO

While we were planning our next move, Philipp Eryushev, Chief Marketing Officer of Waves Platform was asking about GameX on Waves Platform Telegram channel. He was aware of GameX’s 1 million unique visitors in March 2018 and was curious about it.

He and Orkun have contacted with that way. Philipp was optimistic and helpful and always tried to improve the relations of GameX and Waves Platform even though it was hard to get a reply from him too. But it’s logical since he is the CMO of a large platform and doesn’t have time for such chit-chat.

Philipp pushed the Waves Lab to cooperate with GameX and spoke with Vitaly Cigulev, Waves Lab COO about GameX and it’s role on Waves Platform. With his help, Vitaliy contacted us and said that GameX will be added “Accerelation Program” which involves marketing, business activities and reaching Waves Community. When asked that who will be our contact for that, he told that he will be involved directly and he will ask us some question soon to start to process.

When he said that, it was May 2018, it’s been 4 months, we still didn’t get any messages :)

We didn’t push for it since we knew that working with the Lab is almost impossible. At least, for us. What was important that the act of Philipp and his helpful nature to address our concerns. We finally felt that we have a connection that we can share ideas and make both of our platforms better.

Becoming a Consul / Ambassador of Waves Platform

At that time after our second application to Waves Lab, Waves Platform started its ambassadorship program. Philipp contacted with the program’s manager Vera Beliavska to add Orkun to the program as an ambassador.

After their chat and with the position of GameX on Waves Platform, Vera decided to add Orkun and us, as a team to the all of the ambassadorship programs which are local ambassadors (region specific), social media ambassadors, developers group and consuls.

Consuls and local ambassadors are required to take an active role on local meetups, conferences etc but we have told them that we may not be that active on such activities. Since we have a special position on GameX, they accepted that to keep us in all of the programs and a new journey started.

Are we a family now? I’m not sure…

After really a long time, we finally felt that we are working together with Waves as a part of their family, even though our connection is limited to Philipp, Vera and a great friend of Orkun, Yams Fordena (Social Media Ambassadorship Manager of Waves).

With being a Consul on Waves Platform and using our position as GameX, we have made a few important connections, especially on Social Media to improve the mass-adoption of Waves.

We have completed many offers as a representative of Waves Platform which we can’t detail them here. We may not get along with Waves anymore but we also don’t want to share such company-specific details. Just know that we have had our impact, more or less.

Lately, also, we have started to translate Waves Client in ambassadorship program. It was already translated by someone else actually but it wasn’t better than a google-translate so we suggested to make it from scratch and started doing it.

In the meantime, we have proposed a new local payment gateway to Philipp and was waiting for his review and thoughts about it to start building connections. Unfortunately, since a month or two, it was getting harder to stay connected with Philipp too.

Some things never change…

While we were making our future plans and making changes on our total supply limit, design etc, we have realized that all of a sudden, we have been kicked out of Local Ambassadorship and Consul programs without a notice.

When we asked about it, they accepted that we have been removed from these programs due to inactivity. It seems that they forgot that we already said that we won’t be active and we just want to be in the program to know the news and updates beforehand. It was our deal. Also, we were conducting our deals as a “Consul of Waves Platform”, with removing us from it, they undermined our position and every connection we have conducted on behalf of them is jeopardized. It was really disturbing.

At the same time, some of you may be heard, we found out that Waves Platform made a “key” partnership with a Singaporean gaming platform.

We are on this road together for 10 months, we never been declared anywhere as a partner or anything. We were just in an article with another 20–30 projects which were just about “projects ride on waves” content.

For a while, Sasha Ivanov and others mention their “gaming projects” and their special “game-related projects department” on Waves. As the “only” major gaming-based token on Waves, you would expect us to know a thing or two about it right? No, nothing. We just see it like you guys, on Twitter. They just sent another form with the same questions we answered 10 months ago and said that we may be added to an article again.

Aint that so funny? You are a major gaming-based token on Waves, you get around 600k unique visits each month, you have 83k registered members, you 5k unique registered Waves wallet who has 2.5million GX on them and your platform made around 8k transactions on Waves blockchain until now BUT you are not considered as a partner or something.

These latest events were the limit for us. We are on Waves since January 2018. Waves’ price was around $17 back then and now it’s around $2. We have lost at least 10 exchange listing opportunities just because of being a Waves-based token. Some of them directly told us that they don’t support Waves and some of them tried to do it technically but they couldn’t found a good way. Therefore, contracts canceled.

One last try…

We have reached out to Philipp and told him about what happened. We were expecting for his reply to our latest payment gateway proposal and it’s been a week since we wrote to him. If also Philipp is not reachable anymore, so who do we have here?

Finally, he replied and tried to help again but every solution was a temporary act to cool down things. Orkun asked of him to make a serious move to make the GameX feel like a member of the Waves Platform, a real team player or a partner OR GameX will leave Waves and move to ERC20.

Philipp understood us and our concerns and told us that “let’s talk about it and decide the next step”. We left it to him to decide to what to do, we didn’t make any requests and such.

It was September 5, when we last spoke about it. It’s been 2 weeks and he didn’t even read our messages while he is online on Telegram almost 24/7.

Even now, before releasing our article, Orkun wrote him about our decision and what are we doing. But if you are ignored, you are ignored. There is no communication between us and Waves anymore.

Final words

So, yes. It’s time to move on. We have tried our best and remained patient as much as we can. Waves Platform seems to be a really centralized platform that they would work with the groups only if they want to work with, without considering the community.

They seem to be not capable of assisting a promising but small platform in any way. No marketing, no consulting, no funding or temporary financial assistance, no ideas or even suggestions. They don’t even communicate with you. They don’t tell you to “F… off!”, they just keeping you around with sweet but empty promises.

If you check Waves Lab channels, you would see that the most of the projects don’t get any reply to their application, unless, you bring a few hundred thousand dollars with you. Chat there is constantly about “what about the outcome of our application?”.

If you think to create a token and hope to get the assistance of Waves Platform, we suggest you go elsewhere. Ethereum, TRON, NEO or something else, you won’t get what you are after here. All you get would probably be a single tweet on Waves Platform’s twitter channel (we didn’t even get that).

For the sake of our past and their helpful nature, kind and cooperative characters, we thank Philipp Eryushev and Yams Fordena for everything they have done for us.

What’s next?

We are preparing our next article about the latest token burn, the process of moving to ERC20, the thing you will need to do to swap tokens and many other topics will be covered there.

Keep following us!

Rosa

Project and Account Manager of GameX