Recent Rental Market Observations in Splinterlands
Well, the rental market sure is changing fast.
Last week it was bots. This week its just mountains of inventory on top of an absolutely stagnant market.
Every time a rental of mine ends I have to lower the price more. And usually even if you hit the bottom price, there's so much inventory coming in that before it rents you get undercut many times and I have to drop the price several more times to finally get it rented again. I've had cards that regularly rent for 30-40 that's I've had to drop below 5 to get them rented again and this is during what's supposed to be the end of season ramp up.
Speaking of which, there doesn't seem to be much of an end of season ramp going this time. Rentals the last two seasons by this point were up over 50%. This season they are up 10% in volume while they are still locked in around $29k which is where they were 3 weeks ago.
In fact, here's my numbers. That Return on asset number last season at this time was almost 150% while two weeks later it sits at 54% and thats an improvement from where it's been the last few days.
The big cards like Llama, Zaku, and Kron which used to be easy rentals at 400 are now struggling to stay above 150. Even Mylor is starting to teeter.
It's brutal right now. And this is before CL happens.
So I'd like to take this moment and again say, there is far too much inventory in this game right now and I really hope they take that into account when they release CL.
I think they should completely rethink the ricing strategy with these packs and price the all in DEC only. If it's going to be credits, match Untamed in number of packs released and make them $5 each minimum.
Also, they need to do something about the diminishing DEC rewards. A lot of this growth recently has been people with bots opening double digit accounts and running bots on them all day. That's why active accounts and games played have been steady tracking upward but every single other metric is crashing. These aren't real players. Bots don't need a bunch of cards. Just a few winners they can play over and over again. Meanwhile, they split the DEC pool so real people are getting almost nothing for playing.
Once you have the bot it only takes a few cards and a spellbook to create another account for farming. I think that's why spellbooks kept trucking higher for a while although they've since crashed 41% from their highs 3 days ago, going from 13,500 on September 8th down to 8000 on September 11th.
Some people believe Splinterlands is inevitable but there are exactly two things that could kill this game and we are flirting with both of them and the metrics are screaming it.
- Card oversupply killing scarcity and profitability.
- Making it unprofitable to play the game by lowering rewards.
They could do anything else they wanted and Splinterlands would thrive but if you mess up either of these two, it's over.
I have about $50k into this game in recent months. It would be great if they don't kill it.
Indeed, renting out cards can feel like a full-time job always having to adjust prices based on Supply/Demand/DEC Price Fluctuations.
It's going to be interesting to see what they come up with for Chaos Legion. Based on the 20x Reward card prints I fear the worst with the market being flooded with new cards while there is nowhere near enough of Demand. I am quite confident that all the current cards will become very rare over time though.
In the end, it all is a game that will always require new and more players to come in in order to sustain the prices with in-game assets only going up and up in numbers. Something they could do is set a time-lock in the starter cards that someone who gets a summoner's Spellbook buys. It limits what bots that just want to grind rewards with that can get and anyone who hasn't started to build their own collection months into it I would say is not likely to do it going forward. So far the devs have quite a good track record coming up with new things to solve any issue related to the economy which is where all the focus lies. My main fear is that once rewards come down eventually which is bound to happen, nobody is going to be left playing the extreme pay2win gameplay.
Yeah, I think the ECR might need to get cut down a bit more. I like the timelock idea because I'm pretty sure there are about to be mountains of dirt cheap cards and people need some encouragement to buy them.
Ultimately, the devs need to bring people on that are experts on economics. The fact that they are bringing out $2 packs again at all is outrageous to me. Packs should be DEC only. Every pack bought burns DEC, then make the rewards predictable and easy to understand. No more of this, we release a certain amount per day based on this and that. With my whole game pretty much being exactly the same as it was last season in terms of ecr, cards used, league, etc, my reward for a win is dramaticallly lower this season than last already and that doesn't begin to take into account that the dec I do still win is worth 30% less.
Ultimately, if they make the game rewarding to play and don't busy us in inventory, Splinterlands will change gaming and make thousands of people millionaires while helping millions more make ends meet while having fun. If they decide we need 20x more cards and don't make rewards better, it will be a footnote in blockchain gaming.
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I noticed the same this season. My rentals are decreasing with diminishing rewards. However, I never expected the return I was getting to be sustainable.
I imagine a large number of the farming bots are no longer renting cards now they can't get the quest potions and fewer are entering the game.
Overall I think that's a good thing.
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In reality, the rewards you were getting should have not only been sustainable but increased as more people started playing the game and needing to rent cards. I did expect it to level off for a while as the market became bigger and the whales could start putting more inventory in but then I expected it to start moving up again. I figured the expensive cards would stay about the same but all those .1 cards would move up to a few Dec and that would be a huge boost to the overall market.
As far as bots, I think the players running the most bots just peurchased the cards. Most of them are running a mylor team with mushroom seer and wood nymph. Last season all those cards together were under $50 and you could get an easy 60% win rate in Bronze 1 pulling down 25 dec per win for a while. Already having the bot I think they farmed until they could afford to add another team and kept doing that until these past few days where rewards have gotten so thin it's almost not worth it. Most of my losses to these teams now have the winner getting 1-3 dec.
When I look at all the clues in the charts, the card prices, and the stagnant rental marker, that's exactly what I see right now. The rewards system has disinsentivised human players, card buying on any scale, growth in the rental market, and higher dec prices while incentiving bot farming, card selling, smaller players putting their cards up for rent instead of playing, and an unstable and falling dec price.
As far as the quest potions. I think the chests are more of a human player incentive than a bot incentive. For players with bots it was icing on the cake but the rewards for winning a match were the cake. Human players who put time in mostly play for those rewards chests. How many come in and play the daily quest and then leave? Bots don't do that.
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