Family Jewels Update: Dealing with Fancy Cat Nepotism

We recently launched Family Jewels, but we didn’t fully think through how they interacted with Fancy Cat genetics before we did…

Remember when we launched Family Jewels?

It was awesome. We worked hard, we were excited about it, the community was excited about it. Then it took longer than expected, we were frustrated, the community was frustrated. But! When we launched the feature, Family Jewels were loved and lauded. All was well.

Except — and you know how this goes — not all was well.

Family Jewels reward exploratory users and provide a sense of accomplishment. They are another fun way to assess a Kitty’s rarity and uniqueness, and an immense amount of product, design, and development effort went into their creation.

This weekend, members of our community noticed that Fancy Cats broke the inheritance chain of Family Jewels, which is not what we intended.

You may have noticed that the children of Fancy Cats don’t inherit many of the Family Jewels they deserve, and can even be assigned Mewtations for Cattributes well-established in their lineage. The mistake is somewhat understandable — Fancy Cats themselves don’t have Mewtations, or any kind of visible Cattributes. But all of those hidden genetics should be treated exactly the way we treat recessive genes.

And the worst part? Not only are most Fancy Cat offspring missing the Family Jewels they deserve to inherit, in those cases where they are assigned Mewtation gems, those gems aren’t being assigned to the Kitties that deserve them. (Remember, there is a fixed number of each kind of Mewtation gem.)

We are fixing this.

We’re going to make sure all the CryptoKitties that were supposed to get Family Jewels and Mewtation gems will get them. We’re putting the fix in as soon as we can, probably as you are reading this or even before.

To be clear, there will be a number of Kitties that will have their Family Jewel composition rearranged. No cats should end up with fewer Jewels under this change. Indeed, the vast majority of Kitties will end up with more Jewels, although some Mewtation gems will be correctly replaced with inherited gems (usually of a higher grade).

We screwed this one up. We’re making it right. Sorry.

We are making every effort to make sure nothing like this happens again. Although, to be honest, we don’t have a perfect solution yet. Blockchain is still an emerging technology, and we’re working in uncharted territory. We know that’s not an excuse, but it is a reason for due consideration. Blazing trails on the frontier is fun and exciting, but not without risks!

Lastly, it’s important to make clear that we are fully aware that CryptoKitties lives or dies by the grace of our community. That’s you, the person reading these words. We thank you for joining us on this ride so far, emphasize that we are listening, and apologize once again.

You can always reach us on Twitter, email, or if you need to ping us directly, feel free to reach out to mack @ axiomzen.co.