New Player Journey - Splinterlands - Episode 01
Hi all,
so this week I just started with Splinterlands. I had already create an account a few years ago, but the gameplay wasnt appealing for me. So after a few years I gave Splinterlands another chance.
In this type of series I want to describe my experience as a new player with the game, but also document some goals I want to achieve.
I always try to structue the journey in the following chapters:
- what I did in the past week
- challenges
- next steps
- lessons learned
I already had some card game experience from the past, so the principles of attack/magic power/ranged attack/armor and so on are not new to me.
What I did in the past week:
So I just started as a f2p account and havent bought the spellbook. The first thing I did was playing the campaign and I think they did a great job in explaining the basic game mechanics. After that I jumped straight into playing Frontier mode. I was mostly playing earth and death archons. My goal was to reach the daily rewards cap and I also was motivated, because after 100 games I would be able to play the modern mode.
After the 100 games I was at Bronze 1 and was quiet happy with the result.
I then play my first modern matches. I was pretty fast out of wood and reached bronze 3. But I also realized I cant redeem daily rewards as f2p, because I need a spellbook.
So I then decided to buy a spellbook, as the gameplay is appealing to me and I also like the art style of the cards. After I have bought the spellbook I still couldn't redeem my daily rewards for the wins, because I need SPS. In short term I also bought SPS and DEC.
Challenges:
The biggest challenge the last week was understanding the different type of currencies, like credits, dec and sps. For me it was unclear how to optain these as a f2p player (only investing the 10$). I also then researched for a whole week on which crypto plattform I can buy crypto and convert them to DEC or SPS. I then used a crypto plattform, to buy for example DOGE and then send the DOGE to the hive-engine. From there it was converted to hive.swap. I then converted hive.swap to DEC and SPS and they were directly available in my account. This whole process took really a long time and I really dont know if there is a more efficient way for time and money wise.
The 2nd biggest challenge was, that I was hitting a wall in the modern mode. As I can't derank to wood and I was 90% loosing my matches in bronze 3. So I decided to take a look for renting cards, but I only found sets, which were created 3 years ago, so I dont know if they are still valid to use and in the current meta.
Next steps:
I will try to do the following actions the next weeks:
- reach the daily rewards for frontier mode
- join a guild to participate in brawls
- try to rent a few sets which are meta and affordeable for me
Lessons leanerd:
So since the game is already a few years out, the playerbase is mostly having leveled cards and even as a beginner its difficult to reach high leagues. You need to level up your units. So either you play consistent every day or you invest heavily into buying/renting cards. I will probably prefer the way of grinding, but I also invested som money here, so if there is a good starter deck I am also willing to buy cards.
Another lesson was how complicated the whole crypto currency exchange is and that the exchanges for the 3 different currencies are really hard to understand for a new person to these systems.
Please leave some comments if you have some advices or tips!