Splinterlands | Freewrite About The State Of The Game (#2)

in LeoFinancelast year


The Crypto Space continues to be in a bear market and Splinterlands is not escaping this. I did a Freewrite on some aspects of the game and the general state a couple of months ago (Link) and making a follow-up post today...

SPS & Voucher Prices Continue to Tank

The lack of actual use case in the game and a really high print rate of both makes it so that they continue to tank. There has been a whopping -99.7% Drop since the top around 0.90$ which honestly isn't a fair comparison as the price was crazy influenced by the farming rewards at the start which gave crazy returns. A similar scenario is playing out for GLX now.

The GLX Airdope these past 50 days however has been pretty good, 100k Staked SPS, when sold daily, gave around 1280 Hive (~376$) which equals 10% based on the SPS value at the starting date (4100$) this value however came down to 2759$ right now. This return would have been higher when just selling the hive for dollars daily.

One of the main issues of a low SPS price is that it gets the game in a downward spiral as it is the main reward token giving players lower earnings. Lower earnings mean there is less demand and prices go down, this creates more selling pressure and the complete opposite of what happened during the crazy hype Cycle.

While things might continue to go down, I'm not selling and just continue to play and accumulate right now. The total circulating supply market cap of SPS is only 22.5 Million while the full supply now is around 78 Million.


Demotivated Players are Capitulating

We've seen multiple players leave our guild and the game all together while others aren't particularly motivated to play brawls and such. Personally, I still see another adoption wave at some point where the entire spiral mechanism reverses again. I also think that the next adoption cycle might be the last one as it gets increasingly hard to top the previous one as exponentially more players need to come in each time.


Splinterland Company & SPS Dao Conflict of Interest

Once of the things I really don't like is the fact that there is the company of Splinterlands and the SPS Dao as this just brings a huge conflict of interest. Basically right now, the company makes profit in order to run the business and it throws some bones to the SPS holders where it can. It's no coincidence that things started going down once this notion was put in place that part of the profit was supposed to go the SPS holders. I also don't like how the proposal votes are very selective.

Creating a Chaos Legion End-Year promo at dumping prices and another promo card which further dilutes the total cards in circulation doesn't require a community vote, same for the entire release of Runis. It's also classic that these cards are pretty overpowered just to give enough incentive to bring money in for the company.

This makes me wonder if the idea of having Soulbound Reward cards will be a community vote or if it just will be brute-forced into the game by the company.

The way is should be optimally is if the company also just was an SPS holder instead of having these double standards. If would be normal for Splinterlands to have the majority of SPS and the community in a way being small shareholders in the company.


Rebellion Expansion Buy Incentives & Chaos Legion Prices

With Chaos Legion packs now going for as low as 1.5$ and cards that are included on average being worth less, it's hard to see why old and new players would buy Rebellion packs since it will be cheaper just to get the older cards and play. There will always be a core audience of players that want to get in just for the fun it provides. I can see a situation where they introduce a crazy power creep just to boost sales.

MAX Level Decks Should Not Be The Norm

Right now at current prices, it feels realistic to have a Max Level Deck as the norm in the game while this is not supposed to be the case. The price that this costs to get from opening packs at shop prices without much of a discount is just insanely high and only obtainable for the whales. This pretty much is the complete opposite compared to the peak of the hype cycle where it was nearly unaffordable to get most of the cards at level 1. Personally, I'm not letting this influence me to get my summoners and cards at higher levels.

Possibilus The Wise is Fun!

I really like this card and have had a lot of fun with it so far. I do really like how these Legendary Summoners are being introduced to the game one by one as this keeps things fresh. It gives new strategies to try out while other cards get more powerful or a bit weaker. Waiting for the stats of the next card to realease and instantly buying some cards that synergize well with it is something I'm always too late on. These cards also should turn out to hold their value pretty well even if the market continues to go down quite a bit. The fact remains that these likely will be the pay2win go-to cards once Untamed is cycled out of the Modern format. In most battles they can be used with a 6 mana cost and in higher mana battles they give a clear advantage. I also like the fact that there is some kind of accumulation window on them and I aim to get all of them at level 3 at the end.

Soulbound Reward Cards

At this point it feels like it's already set in stone that reward cards will be soulbound going forward without any vote or so attached to it. Personally, I would use new reward cards as a way to give SPS or Vouchers an actual use case one way or another. It would also be nice if reward cards were added to the game one at a time instead of just all together. The problem with soulbound cards is that they likely will disincentivize players more making the negative spiral stronger.

Out Of The Box Ideas

This is more thinking out loud about ways to possibly give SPS more use cases and value in the game. What if it was possible to delegate SPS and lease it (similar to how Hive is leased on dlease.io) and allow players to mint starter cards based on their relative value on the market. So the SPS you have staked or delegated to you gives a certain amount of points that can be used to get these cards to complete your deck leveling the playing field without using these cards earning you reward points. Also a system where Reward Cards when opened have a certain chance to turn from soulbound into real reward cards based on the SPS staked or delegated could work. Those looking to invest in SPS without playing the game will have a way to get a return this way while players have more reasons to stake SPS or lease it in an affordable way.


Land Expansion


I have not claimed my 12 land deeds yet and honestly still have no strategy for it. My main suspicion is that the land plots themselves are supposed to the smallest cost in the process of minting Items & Spells. From what I have heard, the devs feel they already gave back the value of the land purchases with the SPS airdrop and now the SPS Rewards. Most likely The cost in DEC / SPS / Vouchers combined with the cards needed to put to work on your land is going to be heavy making it take a while to earn this back from the spells & Items quickly.

The question also remains how fun the actual spells & Items will be once they are implemented into the game and how much demand there will be since this yet introduces another cost for players that want to get into the game. The problem also is that the devs already got their money from the sale which is the main reason why it took so long. If this releases around a similar time as Rebellion, there will be another conflict of interest. I'm thinking of taking some profit on 2 land plots also because I likely am not going to be willing to put a lot of extra funds in to level up buildings and such.


Conclusion

Right now, it feels like we are getting in the complete opposite zone compared to the peak of the hype cycle. The supply is just way too big for the demand creating dumping prices and a situation where max level deck are becoming the norm. There also is almost no use case whatsoever for SPS and Vouchers which continues to tank their prices. While all this makes the sentiment quite bad, it also most likely puts the game in a situation where there is plenty of opportunity for those brave enough to jump on it. I'm still quite confident that the game will survive the bear market and start thriving again somewhere in the future when the spiral mechanics reverse again. In the end, it always comes down to more new players coming into the ecosystem in order to sustain the economy and possibly make it boom again.


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Good points all around. I have so much to say about this game right now but just don't have the time to say it all.

I would like cards to be rare enough that getting them past level 2 or 3 is hard to do and getting maxed level decks is impossible. Champion league players would have 2-5 strategically maxed cards that they would struggle to buy the BCX for over months. I think we need to go back to releases the size of untamed just at much higher prices per pack. The game would be far more fun than everyone having the same deck.

I'm not mad at soulbound reward card but I think they need to do something they mentioned as a possibility two townhalls ago and make it possible to burn vouchers or DEC to convert them into NFTs. I would even go far enough to say that each time they hit a new account they lock to the account until someone burns a voucher. I would put the price to unlock the card at 1 voucher or 500 DEC. The dec would need to be burned. ANd this would work for any card no matter how much BCX it had. So it would be more beneficial to combine a few before unlocking them and the market wouldn't be flooded with level 1 cards.

ANother thing I've been thinking about is land. I think I wrote a post on this about 6 months ago but land should get serious bonuses based on the amount of CP staked on it in comparison to all other plots. There should be a cap on the bonus for staking but not on the amount of CP you can stake. The plot with the highest stake gets the maximum bonus possible. Everyone elses gets proportionately lower based on their CP staked ranking.

This way if cards are too cheap, there's an immediate self regulating sink for them. Another thing this does is it makes it easier for people with fewer plots to becompetitive with their plots. SOmeone with a region needs a whole lot of cards to get max bonuses. Someone with 1 or 10 plots can really push to increase their efficiency.

They could also make it so burned cards give a permanent double staking bonus. Burn a 5 CP card on your land and get a permanent 10 CP staking boost. They could do the same with DEC. Burn DEC and get a 2x permanent boost on your land.

THey could also do something that gives added bonus for how many cards were burned within a certain region. Like a multiplier to what you do on your plot. I think we'd see a mass burn of cards. A cleansing of all this BS the devs have brought onto the market in their constant push to enriched themselves at the expense of the secondary market.

If land is really cool and productivity matters, this could help the whole market self regulate.

Yeah, they need to use the soulbound reward card idea in a way that gives a use case to SPS/Vouchers/DEC so the bots are unable to farm them like crazy while real players still somehow can get them as regular cards. Just making them soulbound without anything more would be pretty bad and crash the market even more.

Land should act as a major supply shock and I guess it will mostly push up the prices of the cheapest cards.

It remains a constant conflict between dev earnings and player rewards. It's quite clear if players do really well on their asset values that the devs have all the tools to make sure that this value flows to them. This is exactly what they did with the Overprinting / SPS / Massive Pack Discounts / Runis / Promo Cards / Soulbound Reward Cards / Likely high requirements to produce items & spells on land... which combined with the bear market got everyone double wrecked. They also overhired like crazy and even after the layoffs likely still have way too many overhead costs.

Creating a Chaos Legion End-Year promo at dumping prices

I cannot tell you how much I regret buying presale chaos packs and buying individual chaos cards off the secondary market early on. I'm sitting on heavy losses from it. I paid like $18 for Grum and he's going for less than $4 now. I'm scared to buy Riftwatchers packs or cards right now because packs might get priced in DEC in the future or maybe there will be a heavily discounted bulk sale later on.

This makes me wonder if the idea of having Soulbound Reward cards will be a community vote or if it just will be brute-forced into the game by the company.

As far as I know there will be no vote at all for soulbound cards. I would love to be wrong about this.

It was just too tempting to buy Chaos Legion Packs as everything was great in crypto at that point and everyone had a lot of funds avaialble. Now it's pretty much the other way around. I guess it's a good lesson in case there is a new adoption cycle. From what I know, Riftwatcher will continued to be priced in SPS as there has been a vote that got rejected for it. Eventually, Riftwatchers will sell out (similar to how the cosmetic skins eventually got sold) which makes it so that a lot of SPS supply will be needed for it which makes the SPS price really low now.

If there is no vote on Soulbound cards, players likely will start seeing how much of a facade the entire proposals are and if there is a vote they really need to make it so that soulbound cards one way or another benefits SPS Holders otherwise everyone would vote against it and the only way for it to pass if they would use their own big stake in SPS to manipulate the outcome.

regardless what happens, interesting times ahead and following the development both good and bad remains quite entertaining.

If there is no vote on Soulbound cards, players likely will start seeing how much of a facade the entire proposals are and if there is a vote they really need to make it so that soulbound cards one way or another benefits SPS Holders otherwise everyone would vote against it and the only way for it to pass if they would use their own big stake in SPS to manipulate the outcome.

If there were a vote, I give it a very low probability of passing.

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