I am going to add what I've learned from @crownrend, and what I think it should become in its new iteration.
One of the things that must be cut is the PvP at least if it is affecting someone's game balance in anyway. This causes major strife in the player base and rather than creating a fun environment for players, it makes it devolve into toxicity. It could later be introduced in a less toxic way without making players sour on each other.
I now think best way to go is a PvE campaign where user's can trade resources or things among themselves and making it a more cooperative environment and in-game resources should not tie in to the play to earn. Rather a different metric should be used to reward the players. (For new iteration of crownrend that I have in mind this would be Prestige Points. After sometime in your campaign you will prestige lose all your in-game resources but get a prestige point. That prestige point will pay you from a reward pool of all prestige point holders as long as you actively play the game.)
I believe this will create a better more sustainable community around the game. But for this to happen there needs to be a change to the core of the game from the start.
PS: When I say new iteration, I am not saying we are currently working on it. I just want to work on crownrend and do it justice and those thoughts about crownrend just comes to me unbidden.
Good ideas but how will the prestige reward the player? The biggest problem with games is pay to win. So in my opinion, any rewards given should be in some other form. Tokens used to pay for convenience like increasing energy storage or something but no direct power. The tokens can be used to enable trading of things. As a developer I understand that you need to make money and selling NFTs is a way to do that but I would caution against pay to win.
You will receive a prestige point and there would be a reward pool. Reward pool here means rewards outside of the game in form of HBD. The pool will distribute rewards (once a week/once a month) these are ballpark ideas. And you will receive a share from that pool depending on your share of the prestige points and activity status.
Things like you said that increases convenience will partly fund the devs directly and fund the savings pool. (Like let's say we as a game have 300 dollars as a reward pool sitting in HBD savings, we get 15% APR. We can distribute 5% of the APR as rewards, 5% to the devs and 5% to compound the reward pool.)
As the pie grows, it will benefit everyone playing the game. There will be no tokens that will be tradeable. All the Play2Earn stuff will happen with HBD. So people would not overly focus on the token prices or anything.
Game overall will focus more on the cooperation of players, so if someone pays to win in some sense it will not be detrimental to other players.
This is smart gaming. Use the sign up costs and stuff to grow the pool. If it's a Pokémon style game, having the ability to buy extra slots or limited time skins etc. Would boost the rewards. If a game the size of splinterlands did that, the reward pool would be nice and evenly distributed.