Quick Note About Splinterlands Survey Potions

So right now there is a proposal that is right on the bubble of pass/fail regarding creating and selling survey "potions."

I've been reading in the mavs chat discord as people talk about why they are against this proposal.

Here are some of my thoughts.

1, for those who are just against spending more on their plots, well, I understand the desire to be cheap. But this not anything new. Upgrades and maintenance are going to have costs. It's going to cost a lot to keep your production ahead of your competition. This has been talked about repeatedly over the last 2+ years.

I've talked a lot about my plan to reinvest 50% of all land revenues back into infrastructure and maintenance.

Whether you spend 10k DEC now or total costs on other buildings increase by 10k DEC is sort of irrelevant. More on this in a second.

2, some are saying we should wait until we know the full schedule of costs before doing anything. That'd be nice, but waiting until everything is done before making a decision is not actually helpful. The future is uncertain so by the time you know everything the decision you make is based on the past, which never happens as there is always a future at a given point in time. Such is life.

3, some are saying that the mechanic itself is not the best fit with the lore. I agree with this one. I think a better mechanic would be claiming your deed and then sending out your surveyor each day to look for new stuff on your land. It would function similar to the old mystery potions. You'd spend a fee each day (or whichever days you choose) with a chance of discovering additional resources. Maybe it's a permanent increase to your plot, maybe it's a temporary one, probably your surveyor doesn't find anything that particular day. To me, this would be better lore, but I don't think it's happening.

So if you're going to spend 10k now or 10k later, what does any of this matter at all?

And the answer is: sooner is better.

This whole ecosystem only works if it grows and attracts new people. Otherwise we are just trading amongst ourselves in a negative-sum game. Every system has churn as people leave over time. Ideally we want more than enough people coming in the front door to make up for those that leave plus a bunch more. That's what creates higher demand for all the things against a somewhat limited supply (varies depending on which asset you are talking about).

So, how do we attract those people? There are many ways. One of the ways to have increasing token prices by engaging the SPS flywheel with DEC getting to par. So creating demand events to buy and burn DEC sooner rather than later helps get us to that state sooner rather than later. And I don't know about you, but I'd rather have more new people sooner rather than later.

At the same time, it is important to not engage in magic thinking. This one proposal is not enough to do all of this by itself. It's one building block among many that are needed.

Yes, new player experience needs to be a gamified tutorial to get people to understand gameplay, buy/sell market, rental market, discord community, guilds, etc.

Yes, this isn't going to burn enough DEC to get all the way to par.

Those aren't arguments against the proposal. They are simply other things to do.

Anyways, those are my thoughts for now. I voted in favor of the proposal.

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