If you paid attention to townhall or just took some time to read the townhall summary, you would be aware that the Splinterlands team shared some details about the numbers for SPS staking to replace collection power. I know I'm a bit late on this but I needed some time to gather my thoughts as well as listen to what others thought of this change. In this post, I will cover my thoughts as well as present an idea that could improve some of the negative reactions to this news.

Firstly, I want you to take a look at the SPSP required for each league before I discuss about it. The first chart is the numbers required to earn 100% rewards and the second chart breaks down different percentage points for amounts of SPS staked.

source

source - taken from discord by my friend not sure the original source but of course credit goes to them

To be honest, I actually like this idea of needing SPS staked to earn rewards. This was also already written on the whitepaper so it's nothing to be super surprised about. This definitely needs to come sooner or later due to big bot farms & many people with no owned assets that are just purely extracting from the game. The team plans to push this out at the end of next quarter which will be around August/September if I'm not wrong.

I think what shocked most people were the numbers. A person needs 413k SPS staked to earn full rewards at Champion 1. At the current price of SPS as of this post, this will cost around 9K USD and this is just to earn full rewards; this is not even including the cost of having a champion level deck which would probably be another 2-3k USD if it's Chaos Legion maxed cards only. These numbers need to be toned down in my opinion. They already messed up before with Chaos Legions supply numbers for sales and then it ended up being burned or I feel even now there would still be Chaos Legion packs for sale from Splinterlands. For me, I'm imaging the future value of SPS. I have faith in the team that they can make Splinterlands successful and bring SPS value to at least 50 cents along with the timing of a bull run. If I'm looking at this future value, it would be way too expensive to play and earn full rewards in the game for anyone that didn't come and play earlier.

In addition to that, I would like to discuss about one point in the townhall summary for this topic.

This gives SPS utility

This is true but they didn't mention one important detail. This utility was actually already for the cards since we needed them for collection power. It gave value to cards but now we are basically shifting the value from the cards to SPS. This to me just seems like a band-aid to solve the falling SPS price. The card market has already taken a hit due to the proposal passing for anti bot measures in modern. We can see this through the rental prices and card prices. Now card owners are taking a double hit with this new SPS staking requirements. There are a fair amount of players that didn't care too much about the SPS but more for the cards. It's a basically kind of a big FU to people that owns cards. Does Splinterlands not want people to upgrade and advance leagues anymore? It's seems like it's going to be a paywall because for the most part nobody would go to a higher league if they are going to earn only 10% of the rewards.

It's clear here there's some winners with this change. The winners are those that have lots of cards and SPS staked or just only SPS staked. I say only SPS staked because they can rent cards which right now don't seem too expensive. They are more than happy with this change and let's say this is probably like 10% of Splinterlands. Then the losers is basically everybody else that don't have cards or SPS or they just have cards but little to no SPS. I can't take credit for this as I kind of got this from @davemccoy when I asked for his thoughts and it did make sense to me.

Let's try to make more winners. Nobody wants to be a loser right. My idea is that card ownership can reduce the amount of staking needed for those charts by a certain number or percentage. I don't have the math and data to come up with this number or percentage. Just for the sake of this post, I want to say up to 50% reduction max is reasonable. At least this way card owners that didn't own much SPS wouldn't feel cheated in a way especially these card owners that have 4, 5 and maybe even 6 digits worth of cards. Of course it can only be reduced if the owner is holding the cards and using them for ranked play. This reduction wouldn't count for delegating, renting in or out. Then these cards would have to also be held on the account for at least a month or so before it can reduce the SPS staking amount needed to earn rewards; this is to avoid exploits by moving the cards around accounts. This way there's a balance between owning SPS and cards instead of just completely shifting the value from one to the other.

Overall, SPS Staking instead of collection power is a good change for the long-term. I am all for this change but I don't agree with the numbers presented. I hope the team can consider my idea of somehow factoring in owned cards to reduced the amount of staking needed to earn rewards.

In addition to that, I also think this change won't be too great for new players. It seems we are getting away from that which I completely understand. Splinterlands still needs to make a stable foundation for the in-game economy and I hope they can solve this as soon as possible so we can start focusing on the game and attracting more and more players to hopefully see 1 million active human users one day at least that's what I would like to see.

Thank you for reading and supporting me. What are your thoughts on all this? Feel free to share in the comments below. If I made any mistakes in what I said, feel free to correct me.

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