Splinterlands Saturday: CL Airdrop & Controversy, Proposal, Rental Changes, & Ranked Battle/League Rating Changes
Hey Everyone, back with another Splinterlands weekly roundup. As always, plenty going on to talk about. First things first...
Final Chaos Legion Airdrop
The final airdrop for the Chaos Legion pack sales has finally arrived. As of this writing, there are less than 20k packs left to sell before it hits 14M, which means that with the 25k burn happening every day, the number will be crossed tonight at the latest. Not sure when it will drop but with the season ending in two days, it seems likely they'd do it in conjunction with the start of the next one.
For those who haven't seen it:
Lily Shieldpaw is a Legendary Dragon Summoner with +1 Health, Camouflage, and Triage. It seems like it could be a very useful card to have in the arsenal. The Camo forces your opponent to hit your first monster only so there could be some massive front-loaded teams used with this one. That said, the Scattershot trait has been changed to where it now includes Camouflaged monsters in it's potential targets. So this is an obvious counter right out of the gate. At first glance it seems a little OP to me but...I thought the same thing about Waka on first glance and it was definitely not. We'll see.
NFTy Controversy
Sticking with CL, there is a fairly major kerfuffle going on right now with the 250k CL packs delegated to NFTy Arcade for the purpose of building full decks to rent to bring in new players. Apparently after some fairly rudimentary research by a community member, it was discovered that these decks were being rented by older accounts with many of them being bots. This is not what they were intended for at all and at best, it's very poor optics. At worst, there are bots basically farming the new SB reward cards while the human players have to earn them manually. They are working on correcting the problem but there are another 250k packs slated to go their way and the community is not happy. As I said, they are working on banning these accounts but there needs to be more accountability as to how these packs are rented out. You can read more about it in Discord as it is the main topic of conversation right now.
Proposal
With the recent FUD in the headlines about Binance and BUSD, there is a proposal for the DAO to switch out of it's BUSD holding and into a DEC/DAI LP. Proponents feel that this will do two things: eliminate the risk associated with holding BUSD, and give DEC a boost since approximately $50k of BUSD would have to be converted into DEC which would provide a good chunk of buying. Right now the proposal isn't looking good as far as passing as it's only at 30% for and 70% against, but its only been open for a day so...we'll see. Personally, I'm not buying into the FUD and feel it's better to maintain that LP on Binance but that's just me. The DEC/DAI already holds over $400k in liquidity and there's no guarantee DAI is any safer than BUSD. Better to diversify that risk in my opinion.
Changes coming to the Rental Market
The team announced this week that they will be making some changes to the rental market by adding a 1 DEC or 1 CREDIT fee to all new listings and price changes. They will also add a 30 day expiration to all new and existing listings. These changes are meant to:
...help reduce our internal server costs and to ensure that our services can continue to run smoothly without lagging or falling behind (many players may have noticed that this has been an issue lately, especially with the rental market). These changes are just one part of a much larger overall project to reduce costs and ensure that our services can continue to scale up far into the future and handle the anticipated growth.
For some context, the Splinterlands servers have to process millions of market listings and updates every day and they need to index, cache, and update the data in near real-time to support not only our internal market on the Splinterlands website, but also all of the other third-party markets and services that are part of the ecosystem.
By adding this relatively small fee and having listings that are not sold or rented expire, we can very significantly reduce the amount of data that needs to be indexed and made available as well as reduce the volume of transactions that need to be processed, which can drastically reduce our operating costs and allow the system to scale up to support a much larger player base in the future.
This will obviously have a major impact on the rental markets as cards that list for fractions of a DEC will need to be rented out multiple times just to make up for the 1 DEC fee. That said, these charges will only apply to new listings and listings that change price. Once a card is rented out, the 30 day timer resets so...as long as the card gets rented at least once every 30 days, there will only be the one-time 1 DEC fee upon the initial listing.
I'm not sure how this will affect things going forward but there will definitely be a major impact and new strategies will have to devised for renting out your cards.
Mana Cap Tweaks and League Rating Changes
Finally, the team is tweaking the Mana Caps for the different Leagues. The minimum will stay at 12 for all leagues but the maximum for Novice/Bronze will move up to 40, Silver will move down to 50, and Gold and above will stay at 60, although they did say that the probability of higher mana battles would increase in the upper leagues. They are also reducing the likelihood of getting a 99 mana battle down from 4% to 2%.
They will also be making some changes to the rating system by tweaking the rating players drop to after a season. They are also eliminating drops for players who don't play at all during a full season. This is to allow players that take a break from the game to not have to claw their way back up again from 0 inflicting their damage on new players along the way. There are too many to list so I've copied the chart below.
That's it for the news this week. For my part, I'm still trying to claw my way back to Champion League with only two days left. It's getting harder and harder each season. We'll see.
In the meantime, I've added a few more cards in preparation for Land staking.
Rare Fire Splinter from the Beta deck. Maxed.
Another Rare Beta card, this one from the Water Splinter. Maxed.
This is actually a Common Untamed card from Neutral and its a GoldFoil. With the impending airdrop of Lily and her Camouflage trait, I thought this might come in handy in front sometimes. In looking at the prices, it actually cost almost the same thing to max it in the regular foil as it did in Gold so I just went ahead and bought the GoldFoil one. Who knows if that was a good move or not but if the game continues to develop and grow, then I don't think owning GF cards will be a bad thing. We'll see.
That's it for the week. Thanks for reading and Happy Battling!
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
This post has been manually curated by @bhattg from Indiaunited community. Join us on our Discord Server.
Do you know that you can earn a passive income by delegating to @indiaunited. We share more than 100 % of the curation rewards with the delegators in the form of IUC tokens. HP delegators and IUC token holders also get upto 20% additional vote weight.
Here are some handy links for delegations: 100HP, 250HP, 500HP, 1000HP.
100% of the rewards from this comment goes to the curator for their manual curation efforts. Please encourage the curator @bhattg by upvoting this comment and support the community by voting the posts made by @indiaunited..
This post received an extra 11.50% vote for delegating HP / holding IUC tokens.
I have never played this game so I don't understand much about this post, but I see two to three posts of this game every day. Some days I also manage to play this game. I also want to play a game to see how it is and why everyone always always praising this.
!PGM
!LOLZ
!MEME
Credit: cmmemes
Earn Crypto for your Memes @ HiveMe.me!
25k burn daily its very huge amount. The way they have the reward system now, if they are playing bots, they won't be able to get the reward, which is a very good thing, because of this alot of users join this game. And those who have reward cards will not be tradable for a year which is also a good thing as it will control the supply of cards. Thanks for sharing informative Knowledge about sprinterland.
The league rating changes are great idea. That means a 100 or 200 pts increase. It does make a difference, as it means you don't need to rush the game when the new season starts. As usually it's more competitive where all the players, are trying to get the ratings up to earn more pts quicker !
I didn't realize that there was controversy over the packs left to Nefty. I guess it would make sense for the bots to try to get in on the cheap decks because they are in it for the profit.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Selling and burning of Chaos Legion are packs are quite very fast, I'm amazed how quickly they got sold in the market. I like your purposle, but isn't it better to convert all the BUSD to HBD?
It's not my proposal. It's a proposal put up by one of the services. While I agree putting things in HBD might be a good idea, at this point that is not on the table. Maybe down the road...
Hope they will do what is best for economy and community ;)
Me, too. The hard part is figuring out exactly what that is. :-)
and you can figure out by taking the feedback from the community.
II got an email from NFTy telling me my account was banned for using archmage even though my account isn't using one of their decks. Good times.
I started writing a post on the new fee but it might not get finished. I was a fan of the idea until I saw that part where the listing stays active indefinitely if it gets rented once every 30 days. That part basically ensures a race to the bottom.
Even more cards will now be pinned to .1 or you risk not getting your card rented and having to pay to relist it lower anyway. Once people figure that out, the floor of .1 dec cards will get even thicker and there will be no chance to get many of these cards rented any higher than that.
Really hoping to be wrong here.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Yeah, I hope you're wrong too. lol Unfortunately, what you say makes sense. The giant cardholders will lowball everything and the regular humans will end up either not being able to rent or having to match them and make virtually nothing. I still don't know why they can't make a minimum of 1 DEC but...whatever. The only good news is that the team did stress that they will be monitoring the markets and will make changes as necessary. Hopefully that means that if what you fear does happen, there will be other measures that can be taken to fix it again. Who knows?
The idea is that with all these fees, it would become more economical for people to combine some cards and rent out 1 Level 2 and pay 1 DEC vs 5 Level 1's and pay 5 DEC. Or even better, one Level 4 Rare vs 25 Level 1's or 5 Level 2's. In that regard, it makes sense. But as you say, if everyone races to .01, then what will you gain by combining. Maybe what they should do is only charge the fee on cards listed for less than 1 DEC. Then you could keep your rentals at 1 and not have to pay. Anyone who wants to participate in your race would get dinged for the fee. Or maybe only charge the fee on one BCX cards and don't charge it on any combined cards. You could then keep your level 1's and rent them for whatever you want but you'd be reverse incentivized to combine.
Like I said, who knows? We'll find out how it works soon enough and then it's back to the drawing board. You always have to consider the "unintended consequences" of these actions and I don't think whoever is making these decisions is thinking them through very well. As much as this is a "community", the fact is there are people/businesses that are literally just in it for the money. Period. They will literally pack up and leave if it becomes unprofitable. Those are the people you have to focus on when you make these decisions. They add transactions and they buy and sell things, but they have absolutely no loyalty whatsoever to the game itself. It's just a means to an end: namely, making money.
Unfortunately this team has never really understood unintended consequences. But I will say, they eventually find their way. Or at least it seems like they are about to and then they detour into another pit like this one lol
I've been arguing for the 1 dec minimum for over a year and they always said that's price fixing. It's an argument that never made sense to me because until recently, .1 dec was the technical floor so how were they not already price fixing?
So many of these cards it doesn't even matter if you combine them. The CL rewards cards are the extreme example here. They will often have hundreds of unrented maxed level cards for 2-3 dec. They have no purpose because if you have a diamond/champion deck, you almost certain have those cards since they are the cheapest.
But even if a bunch of people rent their way to diamond/champion, they'd run out of other cards to make a viable deck and there would still be hundreds of copies of those reward cards on the market. No one is going to make it to diamond with just those cards so they are useless. Combining them at this point just further lowers the value on of those already maxed and doesn't make a dent in the bottom of the market.
Imbalances are catching up. Hopefully land is the sink for those cards they are saying it will be. I have my doubts about that too. We'll see.
I hope all the changes and tweaks will be good for the game..
That red panda on the first card is so CUTE! :)
Don't let her looks fool you. She's a beast in battles so far. lol
I bet 💪😉