RE: Splinterlands Development Update - September 2019
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I don't know how to have thoughts based on "the quest rewards for the Silver league tiers and the first two tiers of the Gold league will be reduced" with no specifics.
On average each Reward card is worth about 94 DEC to a Heron account; you can figure out from that how much of a hit it will be once we find out what that actually means.
One thing I am very aware of, because some of them use Ottermaker, is how much some of the low-level botnets are pulling out of the game. I don't really understand why just pulling their starter pack rights when they're identified isn't an option, though. It seems like that would be more effective and also reduce the outgoing rewards considerably more than just cutting them for everyone.
Yep. That's the issue for me. It sounds from yaba's comments below that the lower players all get lumped into the same category as the bots which has happened before.
I want the bots stopped too. I actually consider myself an investor more than a player but this has stopped me in my tracks now.
i was planning on creating more Heron accounts but now I'm not sure. As you say we don't know the actual amount so can't work that out yet.
Maybe it would help if we saw some actual numbers . . . how much are the lower players (not the bots) taking out out of the game relative to their contribution and how little are the big players getting.
Also, it's not just about money. I've made a massive time contribution into the game too.
I don't disagree with the need for something to be done and I suppose, as a non dev, I just think there must be other solutions to reduce the bots.
First I will apologize for not discussing these changes with you and others before they were announced. Our communication can definitely use some work and I think that's a side effect of having a very small team juggling a ton of different things trying to keep this all moving in the right direction.
I guess if you can let me know your concerns here then I can consider and try to respond to them.
As for identifying and removing bots, there's really no way to do that short of doing KYC on every player. We could do that now but then they would just come back and adjust how they work to avoid whatever previous identification method we used. It's the same reason you can't ban bots on Steem.
Bots really aren't the problem. They can even be good and in general we should welcome them. The problem is when it's better to play many low level bot accounts than a single high level account. Getting to higher leagues and increasing your card levels should always be the best route to earning. Currently that's not really the case and it needs to be addressed.
Your Herons service is really fantastic and we are in no way trying to hurt that, we want to support it as much as we can. Please let me know how we can help you to make it better. For one thing, I'm planning to add that as one of the things shown in the "Did You Know?" section on the new daily popup.
Most of my developer concerns with the update are fiddly technical ones, like I'd like to know when exactly the new cards will launch and what their ID numbers are, and what specific changes you're making to the rewards.
Something I can tell you from my poker experience: KYC is completely irrelevant to stopping bots, or even multiaccounters. It doesn't work. They have to get at it by pattern and timing analysis, which is also how you'd have to do it here. It's expensive, which is one reason I haven't suggested more actively that it should be done here if figuring out how to have an ecosystem that includes them doesn't work out.
I think this is incomplete. Yes, it's important to encourage progression, but you also have to make it available; if so much of the earnings are dedicated to higher leagues that the only way to get there is by spending thousands of dollars from scratch, then you lose the long tail of players who want to play and reinvest.
The key to keeping earnings in the game is that people should be able to use the earnings at their level to make psychologically satisfying progress toward the next level. When they feel like they can't, then they stop buying more cards and start cashing out.
As delighted as I am that card prices have been going up, as one of the top holders, I'm also seeing a lot of people giving up on their Silver accounts because they don't feel like they're making progress, either to try to turn them into a Heron for someone else to play, or selling off their own cards to play an account with cards owned by me or Aggroed or Neal. There's already a lot of frustration before this change, with it being really hard to use earnings to move ahead in the game. So I see this as likely making that problem worse.
It really doesn't hurt Herons unless it drastically reduces the demand for playing level 4 accounts, and then those owners don't upgrade them to level 5/6 accounts, which seems unlikely. Overall I would say on a purely selfish level this probably makes me a little bit more money, because it's mostly top players who reinvest their rewards in building Heron accounts.
But even though I'm not a free-2-play player here by any means, I still am at heart. All the money I've spent here came from the F2P/reinvestment cycle in other games, and I'm still F2P in way more games than not. So I feel strongly about not trapping those players into places where the only way they can grow is by cashing out and playing something else.
I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars that way. I want people to be able to do that within Splinterlands with patience and skill. One of the things that's very popular in poker, and draws in new players like nobody's business, is the bankroll-building challenge. Start with zero or $10 or $100 and blog or Twitch the hell out of turning it into $10k. I want to see that here, especially since Splinterlands has some real advantages over poker, like you can't just sit down and lose that first $100.
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Can we talk about how to accomplish this on Discord? Again, not because it's private, but because I really want to understand and see how you think we can do things better and it's just going to take forever for that to happen going back and forth in comments. We can publish the whole conversation afterwards if you want.
I desperately need to sleep, but if you have time one of these next mornings you could DM me.
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Good points @tcpolymath I especially like the last idea of the bankroll building challenge that would be a blast. One thing from your people getting frustrated comment earlier on is that with growth in the game not all cards are going to be meant to be owned. A year from now I certainly would hope that I own a lesser percentage of the cards ever made and if the game continues to grow the more new cards will add excitement and liquidity income to the game developers in the process. We have gotten conditioned that we all must own every single card as highly leveled as possible. That is not going to remain viable over time unless people start massive leasing accounts which would be good for everyone. The psychological effect of not owning virtually every single card is a "you problem," not a "game problem." Besides as these cards start hitting zero new production the older cards that this person is carrying in their (say for example) in their silver level accounts are going to carry a massive premium over time due to the difficulty of obtaining, that is if the game keeps growing. The days of us all being able to carry all 5 splinters fairly well stocked along with much if not all the dragon cards, promos, rewards, and betas pretty much all maxed are going to come to slow down if not an end at some point if the game keeps growing. In the end the growth of the game shown in increasing values is just about the best possible anecdotal PR spread for the game as just about anything. People want to hear far more about the "Blockchain game that has trading cards that tripled (+) in value," versus "the blockchain game that has cards that own within the game." Both are nice, but the first one is makes the ear burn a little more at minimum.
Bots are not good for mass adaption. Most "normies" hear the word bot and think I'm being cheated. Changing that mind set is likely not going to happen.
The new cards look like they will be popular. I think the Chicken card will come in handy in allot of situations.
I'm in favor of reward cuts as I have always thought and expressed that the rewards have been/are too generous. However I'm not a fan of the lower levels taken 100% of that hit. I personally think the rewards need to be reduced all the way up the league, more so at the top then bottom.
I always viewed the $10 starter as the initial fee to purchase the game so changing all the starter set codes to non-transferable cards to stop inflation/dumping of said cards makes sense to me.
I do see a big negative with changing paid starters to non transferable cards and that is, now the person who has little to spend needs to buy an extra summoner to get that level 1 summoner to level 2. That's a little unfair to the purchaser vs. the person who got a free starter pack.
How do I get a heron account? And how do I figure out if my cards are good enough for that.
Look at @herons-unlimited and/or come to https://discord.gg/hXpQsHC
In general we have a long waiting list to play gold accounts or higher, but silvers come up every couple of days, usually more at the beginning of a season.
To make accounts I require at least four playable elemental splinters at the equivalent of level 3 rare summoners. That seems to be the minimal place for keeping players at the moment.
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