Splinterlands Town Hall Minutes May 9, 2022

NOTE: Sorry about last week. I lost power half way into the show, due to one of our famous Kansas thunderstorms here. All is well, and I'm happy to write the minutes for today.

Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Summary for May 9, 2022

*Please note: I cover as much as I can of the summary as a record of the conversation. I do not provide my opinion but actual conversation that occurs during the Town Hall/AMA. This summary will have questions provided from the Discord and the answers given by the various Splinterlands' team will be typed by me. Please forgive any typos or errors; some may be from Discord or some may be my own.

Founders Begin the Town Hall (formerly AMA)
Today's Town Hall included: @aggroed, @yabapmatt and @hardpoint

If you wish to contact the team, here's some of the personnel:

Aggroed @aggroed Founder and (C.E.O)
Matt @yabapmatt Founder and (C.P.O.)
Hardpoint @hardpoint (C.T.O.) (Chief Technical Officer)
KBux @kbux (VP of Engineering)
Nate @nateaguila (Creative Director)
Cryptomancer @cryptomancer (Splinterlands Developer)
Chatter (Director of Marketing)
Homestead @homesteadhacker (Business Analyst)

Director of Marketing/Director of Growth Chatter (Liam) and Aggroed Update

• Chatter is sick today, so he needed to go first

• Some awesome updates coming that I'll let WeirdBeard share.

• We are looking at a couple partnerships RadAI helps us to discover our personas around with the gaming. That's going well. We'll be ready to take up some micro transactions soon. Potion, an app that helps rewards users for doing the daily quests. It's all mobile and we're really excited to get that going. That will be a great way of crossing. The casting and molding is done.

• Nifty Arcade going well for Guilds.

• Google and UT ads kicking up.

• Conferences booked almost every single month for the rest of the year

• Splinterfest we don't have the exact date but looking at September of this year but we'll probably have that set up at HyperX Arena at Las Vegas and we'll have it official in the next week.

Weird Beard and Aggroed

• We're still a couple weeks out for full announcement day but we're so excited about the announcements coming up.
• We've been in maintenance mode, a lot of clean up for the tournaments. We changed the name noob to beginner for tournaments.
• We've got a big back log that's looked at at what we can do, going through that.
• It's coming soon, and I'm excited. This is a lot like birthing a baby, we hope it comes soon but it will come when it comes. We're getting closer.

Introduction of 16bit (aka John) on Guild Stuff

• I do sales (He is the VP of Sales) and mainly sales means guild. Any sort of scholarship model and come in that would be me.
• We're working to set up collaborations for guilds, helping other guilds along as they come join.
• There are a couple of guilds that came into Splinterlands
• Discord Bot that is meant to go into a guild's discord server and will allow you to quickly see a variety of stats of the guild members. It's a slick little tool that will help out.
• Matt wrote a script a couple weeks back that will allow for an automation in a scholar wallet that will be moved over into a guild wallet.
• Third one is an idea: We have a wonderful community of gamers and players in Splinterlands. Many of you know. We would like to increase the guild presence in the game. We would like to include play AND earn so we would like to build up the guilds. The tool is meant to build out a portion of the community that is specific to the community. Guilds all have really-well aligned incentives with Splinterlands and with each other. Typically guilds want to help each other out so we're talking about having channels for the guilds, making maybe another Discord server even just for the guilds. We would like to hear from the guilds and let us know what you think of the idea, to fine tune the idea and if we do launch the idea it will be helpful to most guilds.
• There's 2 buckets/ ways to view it: Playing TO EARN. A lot of us think of that traditional play to earn, and that's fine but you can't just have that or you get the economy off balance for guilds. They view it more as an asset appreciation play. There's a mindset of viewing this asset appreciation play that is very attractive and fits in with Splinterlands.
• John was referring to the external guilds that is formally getting together to play and earn across many games and they have their own structure. John was not referring to the in-game guilds.

Nate, Creative Director

• Chocked a shark with his bare hands! :) He got to go on his first cruise and he got to wrestle sharks. Then unfortunately COVID struck so he has been gone for a couple weeks.

• Over the past two weeks, I've been very proud of the creative side. They are like this train that's just not stopping. I'm very proud of every single one of them, whether it's the animation, UI, etc. It's a beautiful thing to hear because a lot of you are wanting to know "when's this? when's that" and the whole process has really been to clone the core team and get things elevated more than ever before, but it's been a process and I'm seeing the in-team communications between groups and it's working! I'm pretty excited about where things are headed.

• Eye Candy: First time official creative vote. You can decide which one of these characters can look like.

• Countess Sinesh - What should she look like? Going to show 3 different versions. Share your choice and we'll go back over the social media to see what the votes are and total them up and eventually we'd like to have some little tool where we can have SPS weighted votes and that day will come but in the meantime this is what we're doing

• Background: Her mother is a vampire, her father a demon. She is capable of generating these magma type ammo (Range character), she is a countess.

Here are the choices:

Vote on social media

Ricardo (Ellemnian)

• Works in the creative department with Nate. Nate speaks quite highly of him.
• Ricardo is from Portugal originally, and Nate got into contact with me and pitched me the wonderful idea of Splinterlands and got me hooked on the idea.
• Nate head-hunted Ricardo personally, looking for the top creatives out there in the world and I felt very fortunate that he gave us a shot and he's still with us.
• He's been working on the chests that you'll see in the Ranked Rewards.

• He created other versions of the chests which you'll see with the gold glow coming out like "WOAH what's in there!"
• I start from the face and build from there, because so much comes from the face.
• Aggroed "It's a whole sausage-making operation and it's been funky to see."
• I started four months ago and I can see everyone getting used to everyone and getting into the vibe and it's coming across nicely.
• Aggroed asked what made you want to come here? What were you doing before this?
  • I was working on mobile games before, and I came to Splinterlands because there's a creativity on Splinterlands that I found very attractive

Introduction of Dan HR Director (h4liax)

• I was working 10 years in HR for non-profits and medical area as well. It's been a fun ride coming over here.
• How did you find out about Splinterlands?
  • I've been paying attention to blockchain on and off since 2018 and I heard about Splinterlands from my wife who is friends with Alicia who is VP of product design.
  • I'm a book worm and a gamer worm which is where the h4liax name came from. So for me, making that transition, I don't like to view myself with the typical HR background that you have but for me the more I learn about Splinterlands, I just love everything about it and being able to align that with my own personal passion, I love gaming, it just really speaks to me.
• What's different than doing HR in a Web3 Company?
  • Something that I've really learned over the course of consulting, there really isn't a one size fits all. I think something that finding with the territory, especially with the gaming background, there are people that are wary of HR coming in, but it's really about growing with the organization. Something that sets Splinterlands apart is that they came from the community and so we do have a special make up and you can't find that in organizations so I want to be here to help provide that support to them, coming up with training programs. I want to make sure to also take care of that work life balance. It's definitely been some learning but it's been a great ride so far. If you look at the make up of the employees we have 29 different states and 26 different countries. We really are a melting pot and that's something to see in an organization.
• It's a lot of research. I'm an expert in US law and I think the biggest thing is the cultural differences and that's the big part of defining success. It's really just learning how the other person works and how to communicating and that's the biggest part of finding success.

RoyalEagle (Splinterlands Support)

• I've been battling 11,000 battles in Splinterlands since 2018. I built a guild before guilds were a thing. Team Possible Hackers Guild
• As far as Splinterlands, I got here on accident. I volunteered to help on Discord to help answer questions. One thing I learned early on is to help answer questions to give them knowledge. We've been doing a lot of documentation as well. We had an increase in tickets so I ended up helping with our ticketing system.
• We had no one with ZenDesk experience so we had to learn all the system and develop it and I work with a team now to work with ZenDesk.
• We work with our guide and knowledge center to map out a better user experience.
• We try to help out with end of season and we just try to make sure our customers' problems are being handled.
• Aggroed: You want to talk about general sentiment, both the folks doing support and the folks coming for support. I hope this story is a bit crazed and frazzled to calm and serene but give me a sense of where we're at
  • We're in a much better place than we were last August/September. Now everyone has been trained and ready to help. We're more ready now to help them with their problems.
  • How does that translate to customer sentiment: It's all over the map, as investors and players everyone gets upset when you don't get what you want right away but most people are calm and accepting as we get answers for them. Our percentages are 93% rating in customer satisfaction which is higher than the rest of the industry!
  • When people compare our response time, we have a fast response time and a quick turn over to resolutions. We're doing well.
  • Next future project is filling out our knowledge centers so you find more than just tech support there. We're dealing with anyone from your kid to your grandmother so they all have different knowledge sets so we are going to build up more content to help with the game and the user experience.

Discussion with Nate and Chatter about teams

• Are we still on the right track on the way we're doing development?
  • Chatter: From the marketing side what we're seeing a lot more clean pipeline of cross communications going on, before everything was happening in their own little silo but everything has changed now.
  • Communication is super stream-lined now. I'm super happy with where it's at. I'm happy with the progress we've gotten to in the last couple months.
  • Nate: Nate has a team of teams, how's it going for you Nate? (Aggroed) I would say this is something we've touched upon in the past a little bit, let me recap. We've grown tremendously and that takes a lot of time but at the end of the day we now have multiple product teams working in parallel and they're all moving forward, but you haven't seen anything yet. The reason I say that is because the biggest pain point right now that keeps us from hitting a sprint-level stride and there's a huge backlog of items we're working on and what I hear from the developer typically is "where is the creative side, we're waiting on the graphics" but the sound of music, I don't talk about it a lot but I'm going to be sharing that more soon. If you haven't been listening to the weekly YouTube lore from Zane and he's creating this amazing music and cool sound effects and this epic music score you guys have no idea. You'll be feeling emotion. It will be engaging and full in depth.
  • But having said of that there's not enough UX/UI designers. We have a need for more of those designers. We have a recruiting agency looking for us and hopefully we can find that so we can reach our full potential and I don't feel like we have that yet, and that's my fault because I'm in charge and we're doing that little by little and we're doing the hires to make that happen but you haven't seen what we're fully capable of doing and that's what we're working on now.
  • How many teams do you have for Creative
    • Design UX/UI, things that create the layouts and all the dev codes can copy and past
    • Art Department - concept art, the animations, all the eye candy stuff
    • Multi-media - consist of video editing, music, motion graphics and they're just ramping up, these guys are really ramping up and their working on a cool little trailer that we hope to co-inside with the Ranked Rewards coming up.
    • Content - where the narrative team lives, they are character team concepts, world building so we create a background and depth, script-writing
    • Coordination - creative coordinators that help coordinate and track to make sure they all have what they need to work on all of this, what's being uploaded to the cloud, making sure it's all organized in the right size, dimensions, etc.

Doogie (Andrew) VP of Project Management

• We're working on the roadmap and constantly has changes and we need to offer an update on the public roadmap
• The big area coming is the Ranked Rewards Release. That's going to have some REALLY significant changes. After that, things will start cascading very quick.
• Release date right now for Ranked Rewards will be first season of next month. So we'll implement the changes prior, and once that season starts we release it there (early June)
• Validator Node sales will be at the end of this month.
• After that it will be a pretty big waterfall. We have Modern vs. Wild, the Tech Modernization, the Riftwatchers, etc. There's a lot of moving parts and pieces and it will be huge getting Ranked Rewards out and all the different parts of code getting merged together.
• Sounds like we're in a little bit of the calm before the storm but the end of this month and rolling into June and into July.
• The first week of February was the Orlando get together, we lost KBux of VP of engineering shortly after that, and not having a VP of engineering and I'm doing the best to support all the devs but with PJ coming on board that dedicated background of engineering now we have that trifecta again with Chicklet as product manager, me and PJ we have that really good unity with all the dominos falling the right way.

Guilds

• Guilds are still sandbagging to dominate lower tiers. Are there any more changes being considered to get or even force guilds to push up to higher tiers?
  • Weird Beard: YES! It's going, because it has economy implications it takes longer but we have a pretty solid path forward to what we're doing. That might go live June/July.
• How often will new Gladiator cards be released?
  • Gladiators is not even on the docket. We should think about introducing a couple more just to shift the meta a bit.
  • People want Gladiator-only tournaments so they can use those Gladiator cards more, so we're considering it all.

Economy

• Is it possible for the APR % of the various liquidity pools to be shown on TribalDEX? It's a question that is coming up more as interest grows.

  • If you guys don't know I"m managing director for Tribaldex and Hive Engine. I don't think it would be too too hard. It is a number that changes often but I'll look into it.

• With SPS slowly taking over a lot of the utility of DEC, what is the point of having 2 currencies? Why not only have SPS?

  • When you list your NFTS for currencies that move quite a bit you end up risking a lot of the value so if something tanks in a given day then you're not getting the same value out of it that you thought, So we would prefer something that's stable and steady that's at the back end of the market but then we get into the governance token and there's risk in all of that. So we want something that can move and something that can't and that way you can get the values of both that hopefully makes sense.

• Will we ever see in game advertisements to bring outside money into Splinterlands? This was mentioned years ago but seems to have been forgotten.

  • Weird Beard what about partnerships? I don't think Matt will allow ads directly on the site. Weird Beard: Right now though we can work on partnerships but you only get one crack at that first impression who have never experienced blockchain gaming, Web3, etc. so as far as getting internally marketing it's the same for companies as well so just bringing in external money isn't the win that you think it would be so I think that we need to make sure our house is in order so let's get through a lot of these cool releases that we're doing.

• How many vouchers have been burned from CL pre-sale, main sale and Waka sale in total?

  • We will get those numbers for you

• Where does the DEC go for the market fees Splinterlands receives?

  • We had to do a fair amount of DEC purchases that helps with fair market trades so it lives in the Splinterlands wallet then goes out to help with the market.

Reward Update

• Will the team reduce the print rate for the 12 reward cards coming this month?
  • Probably not

• How will quest potions work with the rewards update?
  • That is yet to be determined or maybe not. The whole notion of the quest is changing so we'll have to see. The vision here is that as you go up in the leagues and you saw those chests earlier you want the higher level chests the idea is the higher as you go, hopefully you have a higher chance at one of the cooler things in that chest.

• Now that "Ghost cards" won't produce DEC or SPS from wins in ranked battles is it time to make use of those ghost cards so players can play the "Standard" game with no investment but with no rewards either? Just a non-NFT side of splinterlands for traditional gamers that don't want to invest a lot of money into the cards/assets. This could bring more players into the Splinterlands as it won't target only players interested in crypto.
  • It just sort of does that automatically. There isn't really any coding that has to be done there.

Tournaments

• Are there specific plans for using vouchers in official tournaments now that the option is available? Using vouchers for entry fees instead of requiring staked SPS would be a great way to reward those who stake SPS without completely blocking everyone else from participating.
  • Yes and I will say no more at the moment.

• I’m concerned about tournaments adding KYC. This goes against a core principle of blockchain. What assurances do we have that Splinterlands is going to stay true to those principles?
  • We will always offer non-KYC tournaments however having KYC tournaments does not negate either one so if you don't want to enter KYC tournaments, don't do it. They need to be able to feel confident that it's not botted. You need to have that competitive integrity. Having that option doesn't mean the other is going away.

Land

• What happens on the map to land that was burned?
  • I don't think we burned much land, a couple plots here and there. I guess they won't get built. That's an interesting thing for internal discussion. You know out there somewhere that maybe purchased land and lost their keys or became inactive or passed away to where when the dust settles with land claims so what about those plots. Do we have an absolute resolution with that? Not yet, we're still sorting out the variables and we'll hopefully come up with something that makes sense.

Bots

• Did you see the recent videos criticizing bots and win trading? If so, do you have a response to what the team is doing to monitor/address these issues?

  • I didn't see a specific one criticizing bots and win trading. Doogie - Jeff from tales of the Crypt Mancer series. (You can see the video here:

I got the data that he put together. So this is one of those tough things to answer because we want to be open and share what we're doing but we've also played the cat and mouse that as soon as we say this is how we're doing something then someone codes around that so we have a couple smart people that are finding a way to identify these things quickly and best address them. Ranked Rewards will change a lot and I think we'll be doing some assessments as we go forward and seeing how we need to adjust from there.

-Can you explain what the team does behind the scenes to track/analyze/handle win trading?
- We have teams of people looking into this to find out the best solutions. There's people managing database servers and tracking accounts and we try to use data to come up with solutions.

• Aggroed: How do you deal with Red Days in Crypto?

  • Nate: Back in the day when I first entered the space, Red Days are terrifying. Since then a lot of the OGs can speak to this, a lot of OGs see this as Christmas morning -- everything is on sale! Everything's on Clearance. Because it boils down to if you really believe in the project then that's all that matters. Everyone knows the Markets go up and down and usually when they go up they go higher than before. You've gotta zoom out and remember everything's gonna be fine.

  • Weird Beard: Taking it from the zoomed out view but making sure that you prepare. This is kind of Lion King circle of life. On the days when it's good be preparing for days like today and so if you know that you're sort of ready for that. The ones that think dooms day and don't plan for this, then they are the ones that struggle most. The big thing is understanding it's not just today, the sun will come up tomorrow and everything will still be there afterwards and be ready.

  • Aggroed: I like Neil's thought is latch onto good projects. My New Year's Resolution: Sell when things are high and it's not because I want to sell it, but I sell so I can get ready for days like this when it drops. I get attached to my crypto and I don't want to sell it, but in times like this when it's lower, I wish I had more dry powder and so I have to remember to sell when it's high so I can get to this point so I say "everything's on sale" and buy then.

Eye-Candy

• Wall Paper Vamp Out-Narrative came up with an overall theme and concept
  
  • A couple of these characters will have a brand new ability and the only way you have access to that ability will be to play more games, get the chests and leveling them up.
  • The new ability: Right now it's called the reflect shield but it's an ability that allows the character to NOT take damage from reflection abilities (like thorns) Not sure of the name yet, maybe Ward, but right now it's Reflect Shield.

-Animations going from Novice to Bronze

• Nodes

Animations for Nodes

• SUMMONER CARD ORDER:

  • Life, the Fire, then Water, then Earth, then Death then Dragon for the order of release for Summoner cards.

• Here's a sneak peak Grandmaster Rathe

• Sneak peak to Immortalis

• Sneak Peak Astral Entity

Rapid-Fire Questions

• Question: After the Axie DOA hack/misstake is Splinterlands going to "verify" or check any/all DOA transactions that send funds out, to avoid a similiar fate?
  • Answer: We're looking at it. That's a little more centralized

• Question when we gonna see a lambo with a spl wrap on it And if you look at red days in fear you shouldnt be in the crypto space consider today a fire sale also remember we are in what the stock market cause sell in may n walk away
  • Answer: I don't know, when you guys buy land modes.

• QUESTION: What do you think generally to the idea of having a free trial game mode where you can play instantly for free - or what other ideas are being considered to enhance the funneling of raw visitors into entry level players?
  • Answer: That to me isn't what's keeping us away. I don't think it's that free trial that's holding them back.

• QUESTION: Could we produce a ~30 second promo video (Hollywood trailer style), perhaps clipping together some exciting live stream action with some other game elements, inter-spliced with headlines that explain and hype what they are in for here - and then slap this right in the center of the homepage
  • Answer: Nate is working on a promo video. Weird Beard is working on it as well you'll see

• QUESTION, validator node release date, will we have at least a weeks notice.
  • Answer: I think May 24th

• :: QUESTION :: Can we get a community based art submission contests for future cards? Judging could still be done by SL Staff, and still add to the community appeal.
  • If you have cards you're gonna put in, do we have submissions? From a creative standpoint we take a lot of strides it needs to meet very strict style guidelines

• QUESTION: I don't see a role that I want to do on the website: do you need other people? Thinking cyber-security.
  • Answer: Yeah, write to HR. Just because we don't have a position today, we might in the future.

• Question: I want to play more buy it feels significantly punishing when capture ratio falls way low.... is there a solution for this?
  • Answer: The solution is to get an alt-account, get multiple accounts.

• QUESTION: Aggie - can you block 1 hour in your Calendly schedule to watch my last 3 videos and then address the bot win trading question on next week’s Town Hall?
  -Answer: I don't know that I'd be able to address it in one town hall I'm happy to check it out though.

• QUESTION: What is happening with the cryptospace and why is it tanking? How does this affect Splinterlands? When will you guys launch a massive marketing campaign to get new players in the game?
  • Answer: What is happening with the crypto space? I don't know. It seems to be tanking with other parts of the economy. Well, this effects Splinterlands so that means they aren't able to spend as much when that's tanking.

• QUESTION: Does the new ability block backfire? Does it still get 2 damage from backfire?
  -Answer: I don't know.. things like that can change.

• QUESTION: are you looking at other online trading card games (not only Blockchain based) to identify enjoying new game modes or quest story?

  • Answer: Yes, we have boss fights of other things but we've got to get other things out first.

• Question: is it confirmed that new rewards cards will be released with the rewards rework (01/06/2022)

  • Answer: I think he means 06/01 because he's probably not from America. I think the new Ranked Rewards are to coincide with the release.

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Here's the Link to the YouTube video from Splinterlands' Official YouTube Channel if you want to see the Town Hall as well for a reference.

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If you enjoyed my post and want to try Splinterlands, please use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=rosiew

Please remember my post is not meant to be financial advice and is just my opinion.
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Here are some great links to join as well!
Splinterlands Discord: https://discord.gg/Tw7KjNsQGs
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