Splinterlands Makes Three Very Smart Moves

This is a repost because none of my tags worked the first time 🙄

Rewards for playing the game are going up!

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The ramp we saw in July and August was all about rewards. Splinterlands set the stage for the DEC price to ramp higher and that sent their weird algorithm into a fit of dumping out fistfuls of cash. The slot machine was stuck on jackpot and the masses ran in ready to fill their buckets.

The more DEC came out, the higher the price went. That's counterintuitive to most people. It's even counterintuitive to the way the algorithm was created. More supply should send prices down. That's the whole point in the algorithm existing. But that's not how it worked with Splinterlands.

More supply created more demand. People came in with dreams of high returns on their investments that just got better over time and they bought everything which pulled future demand forward. It could have gone on for months or even years longer but the team stomped it out by screwing with the rewards and then trying to fill the demand themselves with new inventory.

They basically removed the rewards that attracted people and then crushed the prices of the assets those people already spent their money on and everyone is convinced it fizzled "because crypto". Y'all crazy.

Anyway today, the team made the first step toward correcting the mistake with this post about removing the 100 million annual DEC rewards from the Uniswap liquidity pools.

If you're doing the math that means they've been giving out about 274k DEC per day of about $900 per day at todays DEC price since 2020.

Why is pulling this back great news for the game?

Because they are redirecting it to ranked battle rewards pools.

This means when they transition on March 17th, the game should get about 10% more profitable to play. As long as they don't do something stupid like add most or all of it to Diamond and Champion leagues, this will increase the active accounts which will exponentially increase the value of the game, its various currencies, and all of its assets.

And while this is all amazing, the real value in this announcement is that the devs now find it more important to support players than financiers and liquidity providers.

I give Splinterlands a lot of flak for how they run the financial side of the economy but I fully understand that all this financial infrastructure they built in the background is what created the launchpad for this game to become big. What they've done is brilliant.

My criticism has always been that they haven't pulled back from it as the game as grown and they've continued to reward finance and investment above game play when it was becoming clear the economy was becoming big enough to support itself if the managed gameplay and rewards properly.

This announcement shows that they may finally be seeing this. They could have done the favorite crypto thing and gotten rid of the inflationary 100 million token creation or they could have added it to another more active pool but they chose to give it to players.

A recent rental market change worth noting

While we're talking about smart moves the dev have made recently, here's one with the rental market.

For a couple weeks there was a change that said id I used my card, I couldn't then put it on the rental market for 24 hours. While this change seems annoying and weird, it was really a smart structural move for the game.

I just did a post on how the rental market unlocked the utility of dormant cards which lowered the need for more cards. I talked about the dangers that presents as the team released 15 million Chaos Legion packs into this new environment and I talked abotu how they need ways to pull back that utility to save the value of the assets.

This change does just that. It's small but it does move the needle. I need to treat my cards with more scarcity because any move I make is a commitment. Using the card one time means I lose the ability to gain rental income for 24 hours. Also, any cards I've used cannot be placed on the rental market so now there is just less inventory on the market at all and that is a very positive thing that will drive value into the whole game.

Well, last week I noticed they expanded this.

Last week I noticed if I take a card off the rental market and its been used by the renter within the past 24 hours, I can't relist it until the 24 hour window from its last use runs out.

This is big. While its very annoying to me, it does two things. First it discourages card owners from cancelling rentals when a price pops (like in end of season play) since they may not be able to relist it.

Second, any inventory that is sitting in cooldown is inventory that is not bogging down the market. Once again lowering available card utility and bringing back some scarcity.

Final Thoughts...

I have a lot of criticisms about how this game is handled but I'm still invested because I believe in what Splinterlands could be.

While small shifts in rewards and rental market restrictions most people won't notice aren't big and exciting, it's these things that can push this game back to boom times.

I'm happy to finally be able to write a positive post about Splinterlands :)