Thanks for taking the time to write this post Dave. I think if you asked any splinterlands player we would all agree that attracting new players to our game is by far the most important goal the team should be focused on and time is of the essence...
It's deeply concerning to me that we're paying CM to develop land... a passive income / staking platform for Legacy players... Wild is almost entirely played by bots and legacy accounts... and now we're spending even more dev time and resources on yet another passive earning place that BOTS and Legacy collections will have a massive advantage over humans / new players in.
When I look at where the team is spending their money and dev time it's clear the focus isn't on new players, it's giving the legacy players a pay day / subsidy.
As a fervent anti-bot player of the game... at some point I just have to realize this game isn't meant for me. I have to stop hoping the game becomes X while clearly they want the game to be Y.
It's their product, they can do with it what they wish so it's on me as the customer to stop buying it if I'm unhappy with it's state / direction.
I have stuck around because I believed the team had learned from their mistakes and fully understood the severity of bringing new PLAYERS to the game but it seems we have quite different ideas of what is going to be appealing to new players.
I have some decisions to make...
That's a decision I made quite a while ago, but I still follow the discussions around Splinterlands (and still sit on quite some assets).
I can only speak for myself but for me the main condition for enjoying a game is - apart from being challenging and fun - to make sure that the BEST and most skillful players should win (and also earn most).
In Splinterlands there are two reasons why that is not the case:
There is such a huge (inflationary) amount of (partly very expensive) cards on the market that only these players who spend a lot of money have a chance to dominate the rankings and tournaments. That has always been the case but is getting more and more extreme (of course owning certain cards should still be beneficial in many ways but in my opinion the decisive element for being successful have to be skills!).
In the only mode (wild) where one can use all one's cards one will mainly fight against 'players' who are using any kind of software which has nothing to do with skill in the game (and most of them are not even using self-made programs).
In my eyes a 'player' who doesn't play is a contradiction in itself.
The idea of "idle games" (passive earning) never attracted me at all. If I want to have a passive income I stake any crypto currencies and don't need a complicated game with many requirements at all.
(I personally also don't like the strategy at all to focus on the (temporary) value of new cards while neglecting old ones - these new cards will be 'old' sooner or later, too, and everybody who observes and understands that mechanism will abstain from buying new cards for exactly that reason - but that is another topic.)
Concerning the bot discussion:
A real human maybe, but not a real player.
If I let my chess software beat chess grandmasters that doesn't make me a chess player (maybe a good programmer, but in case I use the chess software of anybody else, I might not even be a programmer).
But fortunately, in every successful game software is strictly separated from human competition.
agree 100%
@mondroid I'm sorry to hear you are thinking this way, and sadly I've heard it from other players over the last few days as well.
While I still have hope that the team will figure it out (or I wouldn't be wasting my breath), I can understand that everyone has their own patience threshold.
I made the post to highlight the issues I see, and try to help @yabapmatt see what others are relaying to me. Hopefully it will be heard and the communication on the topic much more focused in the coming days and weeks. I do think its important to discuss as many people are reading it the way you are reading it.
I know we've lost so many people over the years on these issues and each time it breaks my heart to know that it could've been stopped with better communication. I'm glad you are communicating, and hopefully you don't make any decisions until more details are fleshed out and revisions to handle issues are made.
Thanks for the comment @mondroid and thank you for being a highly-respected and big player in the game for a very long time!!!
I'm hearing this exact same sentiment from a LOT of long term andvery invested PLAYERS at this time. The amount actually surprises me. This mode has the potential to push a considerable amount of loyal platyers out of the game. This would not only be devastating to our remaining, dwindling community, but have the opposite effect on card value that Matt hopes for by launching this mode. You are right that communication is VITAL at this point, and we can only hope that this need is heeded from the team. All too often we hear crickets at times like these between THs.