Splinterlands Weekly Recap | March 2, 2024

What an awesome week in the #splinterlands universe! Here's a recap of the key things that happened this week 🧵

🛖 We had the bi-weekly Town Hall, where @Yabapmatt, @NateAguila, Investygator, and Grapthar (support) took us through several updates. I like @AfterSoundMusic's takeaways so if you want some highlights, check it out:

I'll cover a few of the key items as well below.

🛠️ As planned, the team released an update on Thursday right at the end of season focused primarily on updates to ranked play.

In a nutshell, the changes are as follows:

• No more league caps
• No summoner or monster level caps
• Cannot decline "advancing" a league
• No more "ELO" rating system, now +/-20
• Only one leaderboard, at the top of the ratings
• Reward calc maxes at 5k rating
• Mana cap in Novice/Bronze increased to 50
• $SPS rewards combined to a single pool across leagues

Furthermore, the DEC required to recharge energy was increased per tier of a league, as described in the table in the release notes. Vouchers are now usable for energy refills as well, at a rate of 200 $DEC / voucher, again valuing vouchers at $0.20. This further encourages energy refills.

➡️ Weekly release details: https://docs.splinterlands.com/platform/release-notes#id-2024-02-29
➡️ Ranked battle updates in detail: https://peakd.com/splinterlands/@splinterlands/splinterlands-ranked-battle-overhaul

📰 In addition to the ranked battle updates, a few other updates went into this week's release. In particular, 2 new rulesets were added: "FabFour" and "FiveAlive" which enable the use of at most 4 or 5 cards (in addition to the summoner), respectively.

💁‍♂️ Grapthar was there from the support team to share their new YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@support.splinterlands) which has lots of cool tutorials and help videos. He also shared that numerous updates are being made to support articles (docs.splinterlands.com).

🏝️ Right before the Town Hall, @Yabapmatt shared the updated Land 2.0 whitepaper: https://splinterlands.gitbook.io/phase-2-the-secret-of-praetoria. It is long and detailed, and I haven't yet had a chance to digest it all, so can't comment much at the moment.

🔥 There was some discussion about the recent card burning event proposal, which was rejected by the Community. Matt seemed to agree with the community, and will go back to the drawing board on this one. To me this is a great example of the power of Community governance, where the community was able to give overwhelming feedback to help the company ultimately make what I believe will be a better decision for the future of the game.

In addition to that, @Yabapmatt said he'll be reverting soon for details on an upcoming promo card.

🍬 @NateAguila shared some awesome eye candy as usual, including some soon-to-come improvements to core screens, evolutions of the Land art, teasers for the onboarding experience, as well as art that is planned to be used in Marketing.

❤️‍🔥 Approximately 1M $SPS was burned in the last week, and ~32M $DEC was added to circulation, driven both by SPS burns and by end-of-season rewards.

🏰 A great article was published discussing Soulkeep: https://www.blockchaingamer.biz/features/interviews/25943/double-coconut-david-fox-splinterlands-td-soulkeep/. In it, David Fox (CEO of Double Coconut) talks about some of the history of what's happened so far, Soulkeep lore, integrations with #Splinterlands, DC's experience in building games, and their thoughts on what's to come (they don't specify a release date but it sounds like it's at least 2-3 months away).

🚋 The current Conflict is ~1/3 complete, with Kei coming to you in just over 20 days. Rebellion pack prices are holding strong and hover around $4 on $Hive engine, showcasing the resilience this format is giving to the set.

🤖 As usual, I like to showcase cool #Runi in these updates. Right now you can get this awesome Runi for 0.19 $ETH! https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xd900381f15ca67be1895a3626df210e33c8d7590/2815

🚗 The COLONY "fork" (distribution for GLX/GLUSD holders) happened on Monday. Roughly 194M COLONY was issued, and the price of GLX fell after the fork (which was mostly expected). However, optimism for Arcade Colony and Moonkarts remains very high. As for the airdrop to $SPS stakers it looks like that'll start within the next 1-2 months.