Splinterlands Town Hall Summary - February 29th, 2024!
Splinterlands Town Hall Summary - February 29th, 2024!
Town Hall Summary
- Team Members:
- Yabapmatt (Co-Founder & CEO)
- Investygator (OPS Product Owner / Software Developer)
- Nate (Creative)
- Grapthar (Support)
- Recordings:
Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/live/HTjGuwwhtN0?si=LRM2ZvoqEThd3YDf
Timestamps:
- 00:35 - Yabapmatt
- 2:25 -Investygator
- 12:30 - Grapthar
- 16:15 - Nate
- 30:55 - Yabapmatt
Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/live/BlsIErbeNPk?si=-HlQUfnoKQs4MD98
Timestamps:
- 00:50 - Yabapmatt
- 09:40 - Q&A
💥 Key Points 💥
Tuesday Release Notes
Ranked Gameplay Rework
The ranked system has been reworked! You can read more details in this post, but the high points are:
Summoner level caps by League have been removed.
The ability to decline advancing Leagues has been removed.
Matchmaking no longer takes League into consideration, only rating.
The rating system has been simplified to give 20 on a win, and lose 20 on a loss. The win streak bonus still applied in Leagues prior to Champion.
The leaderboards have been collapsed down to a single one, with the former Champion prizes.
SPS rewards are have been collapsed back to a single pool, rather than ones separated by League.
The reward penalty for using under-leveled cards has been removed. The penalty for using Starter Cards still applies.
The Mana Cap for Novice and Bronze has been increased to 50.
The reward shares calculation is now capped at 5,000 rating.
The rating resets for leagues have been adjusted to be divisible by 20, and Bronze III now starts at 260 rating.
Purchasing Energy Updates
The Dark Energy Crystal (DEC) cost for purchasing additional energy has been adjusted, and now increases in cost per tier of a league.
Vouchers may now be burnt for energy at a value of 200 DEC value per Voucher.
Gameplay Updates
A new rule set, FabFour, has been added. When this rule set is in play, at most four Units can be selected.
A new rule set, FiveAlive, has been added. When this rule is in play, at most five Units can be selected.
Fixed an issue where Dispel and Halving were incorrectly adding new attack types to Weapon’s Trained monsters. :man_facepalming:
Land Updates
Fixed an issue with multi-color cards, mainly Zyriel, not consistently getting the proper bonus when used on land that had both Life and Death bonuses/penalties.
Tech Modernization
The Spellbook purchasing series of pages has been moved over to the new client. This should make a much smoother experience for new players, and address an issue of users being logged out following their purchase and missing informational displays.
If the Hive keychain extension is installed, pages will now default to using that for posting blockchain operations, rather than asking for users to try to manually enter keys.
If Hive keychain extension is not installed, key prompts will no longer display the key text as it is entered. The entry will now be hidden, as a password-style field.
General Updates
Added notifications when a card is delegated, a delegation is cancelled, or a rental expires.
Fixed an issue with not being able to watch battles when not logged into the game.
We have added the Aqualis Market to the Market display of third party markets.
Fixed issues with using the WAX Anchor Wallet to make Credit payments.
Several images on the About or Gameplay pages were updated to better quality images, or more recent screenshots.
Extended the transaction history results to go out to about 32 days, instead of 30.
We will no longer be recording sm_battle entries as part of transaction history results. These were only being recorded when a battle went to the timeout handling, due to some old code from when battles were being submitted on directly on Hive to try to handle when they didn’t resolve from a team reveal block chain operation. Long story short, the existing battle results APIs should be used to pull battles.
Both /players/unclaimed_balance_history and /players/exchange_history will now be using an offset of the last record ID, instead of taking an amount to offset by. Players should see better performance in the sections of Currency Activity that use these calls.
Support
- Support now has a Youtube channel:
- https://www.youtube.com/@support.splinterlands
- New player experience videos
- Currently doing updates on docs.splinterlands.com
Roadmap from Matt
Ranked Gameplay Rework
- We will be looking for player feedback regarding the new Ranked Gameplay Rework
Ranked Reward System changes
- Plan is to release in the next couple of months
- Plan is to give players the option of what they want for rewards by earning points to spend in the shop
- Over time plan is to offer more in the reward shop
- Exclusive titles
- Plan is for Soulbound reward cards to be burnable for more reward points
New Player Experience
- One click set rentals will be a better experience for new players
- Will help the card rental market as well
- New onboarding experience
Tech Modernization
- Still working on upgrading the rest of the site
- New version of the mobile app in the future
Marketing
- Once we have all of the above completed then we will focus on our marketing efforts
Land
- The current DRAFT of the land phase 2 whitepaper is published and available at the link below. Certain pieces are still marked as "TODO" and many other pieces will still likely change significantly over time as we work on building out the system, but we prefer to publish what we have and allow the community provide input and feedback as part of the design process. For those of you who kept up on the reveal posts, there won't be much new here, but it should at least be convenient to have it all in one place.
- https://splinterlands.gitbook.io/phase-2-the-secret-of-praetoria
Card Burning Event
- Going back to the drawing board on this idea
- Stay tuned for upcoming Promo card events
👀 Eye Candy with Nate 👀
Google drive link for media assets
Check out the lore!
Fill out this Form to be part of our ambassador program!
🔥 Support Tutorial 🔥
How Do I Vote On SPS Governance Proposals?
- Read the Support article above to better understand how to vote on the SPS Governance proposals
- Access proposals on the SPS Proposal Page
Past Town Hall Summaries
Next Town Hall - Thursday, March 14th, 10 AM Eastern
Good job to add utility to vouchers and giving it a current floor in value. However the dec energy prices are ridiculous counterintuitive to any game. You’re actively discouraging people from playing more. Then on top of that you’re taxing them an extra 50% on 25 increments of energy purchased.
So what you’re saying is that at champion you’re paying $0.50 per extra energy. As we can clearly see through historical win/loss and the “significant amount of luck” in the game you’re going to win 60% of the time, at best. Let’s break this down.
You buy 25 energy at $0.50 = $12.5 invested. Of those extra 25 battles you win 60% of the time = 15 wins. If you’re able to make 20 SPS per win that is 300 or a $8.25 at the current value of SPS ($0.0275). Then you need to hope the extra $4 can be recouped in the chests. That’s best case scenario. More than likely you’ll win 50% of the time, get less than 20SPS/win and if you buy more than the 25 energy in 24 hours you’ve got another 50% of expenses to somehow try to recoup.
Why discourage people from playing more? I understand there is a cost for people playing more. But splinterlands is making $1 on each battle (if two people are paying the 500 DEC) and only one of them is winning therefore they’re not only making money on the half that loses but they’re also making money on the difference in value that they paid out to the winner. At the very least Splinterlands should remove the extra 50% penalties on the more that you buy. The 1/hour they’re giving people is at a cost to them that the business needs to recoup. If you get people addicted they’ll pay the extra to keep playing at a reasonable price.
My advice to players at the moment is; don’t buy energy at the current DEC/currency prices. If vouchers stay below $0.05 it is worth it. So buy vouchers if you can below $0.05/voucher to stock up if you can and use those for energy.
I thought the DEC and VOUCHER used get burned instead of going to the pockets of @splinterlands developers. The entire community benefit when Tokens are burned. Correct me if I am wrong on this.
Hmm that's a good point. I'm not 100% sure on all the economics of it but if Splinterlands is "burning" assets I would say this is to their benefit and not the exactly for the wider community. Burning the dec/vouchers just helps them to keep it from getting over diluted if they didn’t burn it. But in the end it is the same value to Splinterlands. They already got your $1 for each 1k DEC. The problem is when the put too much into the economy or take out too much out that causes the price to vary from its intended par value. That can be bad for the community and burning it can be good for the community but at the end of the day Splinterlands still earned the par value of the DEC from you the consumer.
Here is an example.
DEC is trading above $1 so Splinterlands decides to “print” more and sell it to people on the open market. They get the $1 par value they wanted and possibly any excess if they sold over $1. If the DEC value drops below $1 then they stop “printing” DEC. Waiting for people to use it instead of their credits because they get a better value spending/burning DEC that is $0.90 versus spending $1 in credits. Splinterlands burns this DEC to raise its value closer to par. In either scenario it doesn’t matter Splinterlands is making money. That money isn’t going back to you or the community when it is burned at least to my knowledge.
That is not how DEC is created. This is not Web 2! Read the Whitepapers (there are several). Anyone can create DEC by burning SPS. The developers do not pocket anything when DEC is created. They can sell Booster Packs for DEC; but they are not creating DEC to profit from the market.
Oh boy 🙄. What we’re saying is Splinterlands is willfully exchanging assets for free or at a loss. That either means one of two things. The assets you’re getting is completely worthless (SPS, Vouchers, cards, potions - which is true for potions) as they can easily provide them with no cost or this isn’t a sustainable business as they’re giving out more than they’re taking in as they’re giving out assets with value while taking in nothing.
While people have the ability to create DEC I would say that Splinterlands has the ability to print DEC as they did when it was a reward. For example when it is a leaderboard reward or when it was a ranked battle reward. For reference the number of DEC in the open market over the past 120 days has increased 1B. I haven’t reviewed the amount of burned SPS in that time frame but I think the lifetime of SPS burned for dec is ~54M ~1.5B DEC created. About 1.4B DEC has been burned but there is still about 5.5 DEC out there. Sure there is carryover from before but with the amount of DEC created from SPS burn and the amount of DEC burned you would think the supply of DEC remained flat. Yet it increased 1B over 4 months. 🤷
But like I said I’m not 100% sure on the economics or all the ins and outs of Splinterlands. I’m just going with basic logic. If I’m missing something, happy to hear about it.
What about tower defense? - Any news here?
Should've been released since quite a while now, yet there is no sign of life..