For quite some time, concerns about the direction Splinterlands is heading have been growing in my mind.
When I joined, this was an amazing game with cool mechanics and a deep complexity to gameplay that appealed to me on a fundamental level.
Earnings were awesome, but secondary; I was more excited about building my deck and becoming a better player.
SPS hadn't been issued yet, Chaos Legion wasn't even a rumor, and the team still seemed to be doing great work.
Looking back, I see the first red flag was actually in those early days, but I didn't recognize it until this post, literally as I'm writing this.
As much as the team acts like asset ownership is the highest priority they want to instill in players, that hasn't actually been the incentivized practice.
The SPS airdrop was a perfect example. With every win, I was earning DEC, which I naturally used to buy more cards to fill out my deck to earn more DEC.
This seems like a perfect setup, but the SPS airdrop was absolutely skewed away from card ownership in favor of those hoarding DEC, to reward the whales and those who were in on the secret at the expense of the actual player base.
Because of this (oversight? error? mistake in code? intentional misrepresentation for the purposes of personal enrichment at the expense of others? market manipulation? pump and dump? I cannot say for sure), DEC was completely and irresponsibly overprinted to oblivion, an outcome for which the community has been continuously paying in the well over a year which has followed the end of the airdrop.
I started streaming Splinterlands and shortly thereafter joined Splinterlands TV, which resulted in a great many hours of fun and a connection to the community which I would never have imagined before beginning.
Then came Chaos Legion, which was again overprinted into oblivion, as the player base shriveled.
Then came the DAO, which was supremely exciting, as I believed we as players would be able to control the future of the game we love and help to shape it's future. I was, as evidenced by the votes that followed, entirely wrong in this assumption.
All the while, the team has continued to fail to deliver on promises made to the community and paid for years ago. Land is still nowhere in sight, and we have seen numerous "releases" of extremely basic interactions which amount to little more than DeFi instead of the robust addition to the existing game provided by items and spells, not to mention the entirely new game surrounding the production thereof, which we were promised.
When questions about this lack of delivery were raised by members of the community such as @darupt during town halls and squares, they were met with derision and condescension from @aggroed such as literal comparisons to the children in the back of his vehicle asking "are we there yet?"
As decisions continued to be both made by the team and put forth from the team to the DAO for voting, which were plainly and demonstrably anti-player, interspersed with those which required the player base to pay financially for the mistakes made by the team, I became vocal about my questions, objections, and concerns for new players entering the community.
This voice, which at first was welcomed by the team, was inevitably shut down when I started to voice those concerns. After a lot of thought on this issue, I realize that Splinterlands was entirely within their right to remove me from their platform. And due to the manner in which that right was exercised, I have chosen to extend their censorship to the fullest extent possible. This post will be my last mention of Splinterlands, in whole or in part; my twitch username is fixed for two months, and I regret changing it- not due to the ban from SPLtv chat, nor because there is zero chance that Aggy will read my hard-earned shoutouts on the air, but because it makes my own channel more difficult to find for those who wish to.
TL;DR: Splinterlands is a sinking ship, which I have abandoned completely. All of my assets have been sold, listed, or unstaked and my only interactions with any part of the game will be to remove and liquidate such assets as they become available to me. To state plainly, I love the vast majority of the community surrounding this game, but I no longer trust the vision of the creators and I have chosen to take profits now rather than trust in a bull run which may or may not come before the team drives the already decimated playerbase further away.
!PIZZA
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@carrythezer0(2/5) tipped @onthemountain (x2)
!PIZZA