Land Schmand
I haven't posted on HIVE for a while, but @azircon inspired me to get my thoughts written out. Please forgive me in advance, but I'm just here to rant and vent about land a bit. I'm looking at the white paper for land 2.0 and thinking to myself, what an esoteric convoluted mess this is. I don't have a problem with expanding land per se, but who does it benefit? Will it increase adoption, will it expand the player base?
Let me give you a hint.
NO NO NO.
Land 2.0 is a red herring, it is something shiny, it's some red meat to throw at people who are already vested that probably wouldn't leave if it was delayed in lieu of actual echosystem growth.
Meanwhile, I'm watching Splinterlands the company literally burning up two thirds of their potential runway.
Yes, packs that don't get sold get burned, and almost twice the packs have been burned than have actually been opened.
That's Pathetic.
Meanwhile we continue to bleed all but the most vested players. Chaos Legion card and pack values have continued to plummet. If we were actually onboarding new players these would be a cheap way of getting competitive in modern without even buying Rebellion-- but that just isn't happening. I'm seeing legendary cards that were $50/BCX a year ago selling for $1. If we actually had any new player demand these cards would be soaked up.
The relatively high price of individual Rebellion cards is not a result of demand for the cards themselves, but lack of demand for packs. People would rather pay more for the cards they need to complete their decks than roll the dice on packs. That is not a healthy sign for a card game. Conflicts has also created artificial demand for cards and packs that is not at all indicative of player demand.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm perfectly satisified with land 1.5 for the forseeable future. I'm more than happy with tuning my plots for the purpose of earning SPS. I am after all getting the SPS rewards I was promised for holding land. Am I wrong in assuming that most heavily vested people would feel the same. Do we really care more about farming lumber and elemental foods over new player demand? I mean seriously, I could give two shits about farming 'desalinization crystals' in a game that is unlikely to survive. I'd take a functioning Tower Defense game over fucking desalinization crystals (again WTF?)
What exactly are we optimizing for? Slow Death?
Morale sucks right now, you go into Mavs chat and it is like a bunch of bickering carrion feeders fighting over scraps.
It's Pathetic.
What exactly is splinterlands the company optimizing for? This makes no sense? Yes your Splinterlands assets will always be there on the Hive blockchain, but what good will that be if the company maintaining the game is zombifying itself.
I hope that I'm wrong on this. I continue to put money into this game in hopes that I am, but definitely not as much as I would if I actually thought it was thriving. I suspect that many feel the same way, there's only so much juice to squeeze out of your loyal fanbase. This is why I've had zero interest in Soccer and Mooncarts after getting bit in the ass by Tower Defense.
How about we shift gears a bit and actually generate some real demand? The people here keeping the lights on are starting to get exhausted both emotionally and financially, that much is clear. Chasing supplementary goals at the expense of real growth is a recipe for a slow agonizing death. Land 2.0, stop, just stop...
Who is farming who here?!
/rant
Posted using Splintertalk
Thanks for sharing! - @azircon
This is the summary. The game (the investment game) is played mostly in people's mind. They are struggling and afraid. We did have a small run of SPS, but with this community with no strong capital, the best force is to describe the force inside a crab bucket, where we are trying to climb over each other and falling into the bucket.
You forgot the over printing and subsequent gveaway of CL packs. It was offered to us during the Fest to get us into TD, which we politely refused. I am glad I did.
Aggy was fired due to (potentially) this financial minmanagement by the SL board. This is public information.
Here we stand. I am a large land holder. I am not looking forward to any additional cost, I do not think anyone else is. Without people like Vugtis and Bravetofu, both relatively recent investors, game will be in life support now.
Agreed, but is pursuing a project such a land 2.0 to completion at the expense of new player growth just a different form of mismanagement?
Probably. Time will tell. Right now all the evidence point towards that direction, Major investors are still patient but their patience will eventually run out
I think a large part of it is the mistakes of Chaos and we simply continue to pay for it now because there's a much smaller player base and people interested in the game. Chaos was extremely damaging. Not only did we have DEC unpeg but somehow the company burned through legit billions and had nothing to show for it which just boggles my mind. All I can say is things are better than what they were and at least corrections were made before everything came crashing to zero. It's going to take a ton of hard work, better player experience and so forth to try and get back up on top again. Idk if that will ever happen but I'm going to remain hopeful.
I'd also agree that land has been a let down. There is no reason why land 1.6 or even 2.0 shouldn't be out now. If they would have kept up tempo it would have created at least some hype and kept people interested in it. But we are now TWO months into simply gathering grain, sps and research and being clueless as to when we will get anything new. We were told land 1.5 was the hard part and everything else would come faster after that. That hasn't been the case.
Land is a game within a game. The encompassing game needs be sustainable first. The main problem is that the audience for land is small, and a captive audience to boot. No brand new player is going to discover land and want to get involved in it until much later in their journey if at all. I'd much rather land be subordinate to onboarding, marketing, and NPE. The build it and they will come mentality never works, with something as specialized as land in particular.
That is very true, in terms of growing the game land really wont do that. It might help in terms of prices because there would be more market action but it would be for assets in which a majority would never touch. The barrier for entry into land is only going to get larger so I agree with you.
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I have No Idea what is going to happen at this Point, as Long as I am ahead of @Goldmatters on the Leader Board in the Wild Northeast........
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He wanted something *meteor*.
Credit: reddit
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the main problem is the costs attached to land. It's easy to do the math and see that there is no reason why one would want to invest 1 cent into it. It's a much better idea to simply go all in on SPS. LAND 2.0 is like you said going to be mostly for a very small and affluent group of people. In fact, I already pointed out that there will some sort of grain shortage problem with only few plots being able to produce grain. But the paradox is that grain would have to become less valuable than most other ressources for it to even work (otherwise why would I produce e.g. stone if I'd have to buy grain that is more expensive to keep to production?)
Anyway, at least I think that the DEC/SPS idea has been largely confirmed to work. DEC has stabilized and SPS is still up almost 100%. This can only continue to work, however, if we have an income of new players... will that happen? I feel we'd have better chances with SOULKEEP releasing. Is that still coming?
Without land SPS would not have such an appeal. The smartest thing for the long term health of the game and our investment is to do both in my opinion. SPS and Land investment.
In a sense we are the caretakers of the games health.
Please elaborate on what you mean by SPS investment? Do you mean investment into the game itself in order to drive demand for SPS?
well that's a side effect. I am just saying that why stake assets on LAND and get around 20% APR (rough estimate), when one can just sell those assets and instantly get SPS. In that way I don't have to wait years (!) to get that return
wagmi
Well said, you are NOT the only one who's pissed off.
did you miss a NOT, deliberately!?:)
I didn't, that's typing too fast for you, fixed now.
Mostly we are pissed of with speed, priority, and they way team doesn't react to fundamental things even after we pointed out that its wrong and will hurt the game economy.
Bots, mismanagement of resources the previous bull market, moving too much value to a few original card owners at the expense of new players....the list is very long.
I'm looking at things outside HIVE now. There's a lot going on, and my view has been far too insular for the past several years.
You want things to work so believe they will
With SPL, I will hang in there like the rest of us.
After a while it becomes a personal fight. Like your own small business. You never want to quit. That's most of us oldtimers in this ecosystem
Well, I kind of get what youre saying but it all depends really on how big of a cost Land 2.0 incurs for players. Setting up land initially was pretty costly. Im more excited for land generating card game items than the other stuff but we will see how it goes.
What players? We aren't doing a good job attracting new ones or keeping old ones. Everyone left has a healthy case of survivor bias.
There is no one to attract right now. Most of crypto is a wasteland and those that will come to splinterlands are those with excess money after the first part of the bull run once Bitcoin does its thing. All considering we are doing pretty good.
This exactly, they created a play2earn model that actually works but instead of focusing on the Main game which is actually fun with a lot of potential, they just copy-past the model creating new tokens and 'games' that are nowhere near the quality of Splinterlands to milk more money.
Land should have just been an easy stake cards and be able to mint spells/items mechanism instead of wanting to make it into something as complicated and confusing as it is now.
I still hope they get everything right with Splinterlands as the potential surely is there.
My thoughts too, and been vocal about them for quite some time. It's impossible to get new players if you can simply spam soulbound summoners + gladiators in lower leagues, that any newcomer CAN'T obtain by any means. And I'm not even starting about bots. New players (and regular one!) experience should be the absolute priority since ages ago, and for reasons I'm probably unaware, it keeps getting delayed. The shots in the foot keep on coming, even with reducing gameplay enticement such as removing packs from the possible rewards, while probably more than hald of the daily rebellion packs are getting burned. Do hope to be surprised with an announcement from the team, but it's getting harder and harder to keep the faith.
I'm with you one hundred and twenty percent. I didn't buy into land because I had already seen the decreasing demand for the game. Adding more land makes no sense, they need to be recruiting players to keep themselves alive rather than trying to get bigger investments from current players. It's sure death to model the game like that. I'm not putting much more into the game at this point until they the outlook improves.
Glad to see you back even if it is just for one post!
!
Just saw this and yes, this has been a growing concern - my voice has echoed about Gameplay issues, not just Gladiators ;)
Without a fantastic game, there is no point... Magic The Gathering, YuGiOh and others didn't create a bunch of subgames... they made ONE fantastic product... until that product could support the next and the next... and the next...
I do believe @yabapmatt has the vision to right the ship... so I shall stay and continue to invest weekly. Like many have said however, I would be comfortable investing so much more if things looked like they were headed in the "best" direction.
NPE > Everything Else including Land 2.0
The problem that I saw with Land 2.0 is the same as you pointed out:
WTF am I even looking at... it's so COMPLICATED... SIMPLE = BEST in "games" like this...
Anyways, here's to the BULL and may we all see SPL prosper under the full guidance of Matt's leadership!
Great comment. The game is niche enough already and the big push is to make it more so. Fast forward to land 2.0 being done and does it drive an influx of new players? I think that's an easy no.
I haven't even read the article yet, but I sure do love this title!
I'm more of a land whenever kinda guy, but this works too!
I never gave a F or S about land tbh. I bought 5 plots for each of my three playing accounts since I was interested in the prefix titles that would provide an rShare bonus for my ranked rewards. I even aped into RUNI around the start of 2023 when ETH was near its cycle low and the price was close to the presale price. The fact that we are nearly 5 months after land 1.5 and we still don't even have the rShare bonus is quite frustrating. I didn't think that it would take that much programming power to make this happen.
I couldn't care less about all the technical nonsense. I didn't even bother with the Land 2.0 paper. I never cared much about the earning potential tial of the lands, I just bought the cheapest plots possible to be in the same region as my guildmates. When the time comes (eventually), I'll just watch a few content creators to figure out wtf is going on with land anyways.
Exactly why my sentiment has always been "land whenever." It's not doing anything to help expand the player base or draw in new investors which are desperately needed. The company has squandered countless work hours developing land when the player experience should have been first priority regardless of how long ago the land sale was.
I try to look at things half full. I try to keep my negative opinions to myself which is why I thought land whenever was dismissive without pissing off the land holders who had been waiting quite some time for this development. But thanks for voicing how I feel about land!
It is some hugely elaborate grand design for the pretty basic problem of having too many cards in the system. I think the much better solution would be to GET MORE PLAYERS to use the cards in battle than to stake them away on land.
I continue to DCA into Rebellion buy buying packs with credits when DEC is at peg, or buy buying cheap DEC when it is discounted. I keep the Gold Foils for myself and sell through the Regular Foils into the market, mostly filling bids since I lack the patience to help at market or stack cards for rent.
I'm still trying to do what I can to support the company since pack sales are where it's at. I've really enjoyed the modern rotation and exploring new strategies. I think the new ranked updates for rating system is good, but will take some time for players to adjust. I think Matt has a good plan and good ideas for how to grow the game, and we're both in agreement -- LAND IS NOT IT!
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