Thread: Nexus Lottery Opens!

The first Nexus Lottery has now opened. It's very easy to enter. Just use the button on the top navigation bar and view the New Year's lottery. There's a 100,000W payout. You can buy up to a hundred tickets and they only cost ten wong each. Use the link on the page to buy the tickets.



What will 100,000 wong get you?

Well, I'm trying to explore more options to make wong useful. A functional use for wong is certain items in the item shop. As explained in the previous thread you can buy the Leyline coordinates with half of that payout.



This item is useful for members who haven't previously donated which granted access to the private Galactic Leyline forum. With the Patreon closed this is a new option if you weren't a donor.

I already talked about the Tao magic spells in the last update so I'll try to keep it brief. At the moment the spells are functional, but only as a means to earn more wong. Eventually there will be spells that allow you to do cool things like set your own custom user title, change your username colour and more. Normally you'd only be able to do these things if you've written a large quantity of posts. If you get that payout and reserve it you'll be ready for the spells.

Up until recently the shop items have only been cosmetic. There will be more cosmetic items, many being items from Outlaw Star. It's a way for me to practice my (admittedly pretty amateur!) pixel art skills and have a bit of fun with it.

I mentioned the Triple Triad card game in the last update. I'm going to work hard on getting a large set of Outlaw Star cards ready within this month. It's something I wanted to finish up a long time ago but it went to the back burner. It's actually a really fun card game that you'll know about if you ever played Final Fantasy VIII. I've been revamping a lot of the graphics I previously created. There's finally an original board:



The card designs have been improved. Here's a new shiny/holo Cub Fighter card from the dark set:



This is an upscale. Unfortunately the card graphics are half the resolution but that's just a limitation of the software and I've worked around that the best I can. There will be many different types of booster packs that you can buy with your wong. That part of it works a bit like your average trading card game. Will you be able to collect them all?

I think that wraps it up. The lottery ends on the 7th. Good luck!

Originally Posted by Mantis

The lottery ends on the 7th. Good luck!

Big oops on my part. I mistook this for the other thread announcing the lottery so I didn't check in until now. Guess I'll play in Round 2! Did anybody win?

Don't worry about it. The entire thing was one big litmus test. I was determining whether there is any value in the wong system that warrants its place on the forum. I decided to hype it up with some new features that could make wong useful to members. I've been thinking of removing wong for years, you see. There's this term in the admin (and marketing) world which I'm sure you're familiar with from your workplace or otherwise: engagement.

If a feature isn't encouraging any engagement it's effectively nothing more than a trinket. Not taking that into account years ago was my mistake. That's not to say I didn't try other means for engagement. I've tried every recommendation in the book. No matter the expense, I wanted to extend Nexus' life support. I've just come to accept that Nexus will never rank reasonably on search engines and that most efforts will be fruitless. That being said, it's still operating and we at least have a handful of members who do post, so I can be comfortable with that modesty.

So, Nexus has been stripped of every feature that had integration with wong. We're now facing a much more pressing issue. The app has disappeared from the Google and Apple app stores and won't be coming back. If the APK will still work that can be hosted here but people will need to know and trust installing the app that way which is a big ask. With so many features thrown out of the window there is less holding me back from moving the forum to XenForo. It might happen by 2022 but I can't say for sure yet. So long as there's a way to give its appearance some charm instead of the generic "clean" XenForo look it's a strong consideration.

Finally, with wong and the Patreon gone perhaps we should reconsider the Galactic Leyline. Should it stay a private forum? Should all projects be moved to Cyberspace? That's something that's more your decision than mine since you are now the one in charge of the scanlation.

A lot of good questions there. Let's discuss through DMs or PMs regarding some of that like manga releases.