Splinterlands Town Hall Summary - April 25th, 2022 - 4PM Eastern!
Town Hall Summary
- Speakers:
- Aggroed (CEO)
- Chatter (Director of Growth)
- WeirdBeard (Tournaments/ESports)
- Doogie (VP of Project Management)
- Sicarius (Developer)
- Farpetrad (Developer)
- Wrathed (Product Owner)
- Main Topics:
- Development Updates 💥
- General Team Updates ⚡️
- Q&A 👀
- Recording:
Timestamps:
- 00:35 - General Intro
- 02:00 - WeirdBeard Update (Tournaments/ESports)
- 21:10 - Sicarius Intro/Update (Developer)
- 33:00 - Farpetrad Intro/Update (Developer)
- 48:25 - Wrathed Intro/Update (Product Owner)
- 1:06:45 - Doogie Update (Project Management)
- 1:22:45 - Q&A
- 1:59:30 - Closing Remarks
💥 Company Updates 💥
Development Updates:
- Ranked reward changes are still the highest priority
- Other big projects being worked on in parallel:
- Modern/Wild
- Tech Modernization
- Guild Brawl Revamp
- Splinterlands has more than 50 servers running to maintain the game
- API Documentation is being worked on as well for third-party developers
- Accessibility controls have been added for team selection
- Allows the ability for visually impaired players
Tournament/ESports Updates:
- All current tournaments have new icons and are Lore-based
- Biggest backend work has been focused on more KYC tournaments
- Prevents multiple accounts and bot accounts
- Looking to announce some big name tournament sponsors soon
General Team Updates:
- Biggest developments being made right now are on the infrastructure of the game
- When Splinterlands was first developed, it was using the languages that Matt knew best
- Now that we have full development teams, the team is working on using the best, most scalable solutions
- Takes a good amount of time to establish across all teams and platforms
⚡️ Q&A Summary ⚡️
SPS Validators:
- Goal is to have a layer one, agnostic blockchain that can be integrated with other chains
- Team things HIVE has the best ability to scale
- HIVE also allows for key recovery unlike most chains
- Team will continue to build on the chain that is best for Splinterlands
Bots:
- "You can't have a decentralized game and a centralized authority determing who can play, and who can't" - Aggroed
- Team understands the current impacts of bots, and are working on things behind the scenes to counter them
- This will be a constant work-in-progress
- There isn't just one solution to get it all right
- Team will continue to push out updates, monitor them, and determine what changes need to be made next
In-Game Communication System:
- Team would like to build a communication system in-game
- However, it isn't a high priority currently with the other projects going on
- Would be beneficial for future game developments to have in-game
Market Transactions:
- There should be some upcoming changes made to help the market issues of buying in the same block
Rebellion:
- Rebellion won't be released until after Chaos Legion sells out
- Team will make sure the deck set is ready to go around the end of this year though
- Packs are the best way to allow new players to enter the ecosystem
🔥 EYE CANDY 🔥
New Character Art
Recent Announcements
Terablock Partnership Update
- New staking and rewards program
- Staking TBC tokens will allow you to earn a discount on bridge fees
Insights - Tome of Chaos Story
- This week's story follows Delya from the Xenith order
Past AMA Summaries
- Monday, April 18th, 2022
- SPS Validators 💥
- Ranked Rewards ⚡️
- Eye Candy 👀
- Wednesday, April 13th, 2022
- Company Updates ⚡️
- Eye Candy 👀
- Q&A 💥
- Wednesday, April 6th, 2022
- Official Roadmap 💥
- Company Updates ⚡️
- Eye Candy 👀
Next AMA - Monday, May 2nd, 7PM Eastern (11PM UTC)
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Uncle AGGY will make You RICH !!!
Carlos Matos will make You RICH !!!
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"You can't have a decentralized game and a centralized authority determing who can play, and who can't"
sorry but i think this is hypocritical, i think the developer team has massive bots themselves and their friends too and that's why they don't want to ban it. because this central not central argument doesn't work anymore, after all i'm banned from renting out my own nft my card when i played it, this contradicts everything blockchain games stand for!
you can say only one person can use it in 24 hours ok accept their battlefield their rules, but to determine whether I rent my property or not is just a step too far, this is a greater intrusion than the bot ban, because as I said you can just say bots no access to the battlefield, legitimate rule!
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It sounds like a good point and I would like to agree with the premise of the quote. But you are right, they ban people for other things, so it is kind of a hollow sentiment.
My friend started playing and was banned a few days later. The reason was something about 'suspicious use of DEC' which was nonsense... he had literally done nothing but buy spellbook, a couple thousand credits and play a few dozen games. He had to go through customer support to get back into the game.
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What the hell are you talking about. This should be impossible. How do you get banned on blockchain??? You'll have to show some evidence.
He wasn't banned from blockchain... he was banned from playing Splinterlands. There is a difference.
If someone gets banned, it is because they violated the Terms of Service. If it was DEC related, I'm going to guess he had bought one of his own cards from the market, with credits, in order to convert the credits to DEC. Our system can detect these type of transactions and we ban if caught.
This was like 6 or 7 months ago. He had just started playing, he didn't sell any of his cards (to buy them himself.) He still has all of them now even though he hasn't played for months. He did appeal and get restored also because he did nothing wrong. I'm sure it was a mistake.
However, the point still remains. The quote rings hollow if people are getting banned for anything. Bots could just as easily be listed as against terms of service, detected, and banned like anything else. So there obviously is a centralized authority determining who can and cannot play when it comes to certain criteria, but not bots.
Splinterlands ban players from using Splinterlands site and nothing more, you can move your assets/tokes using others hive dapps. In the same way, when they ban an account is because they violated the TOS in some way, mostly is due selling/renting cards between owned accounts to ëxchange"credits to DEC or doing paypal chargebacks, for example. However, everyone can appeal a ban and they will check it out
Exactly, they ban for other stuff but not Bots, the Truth Is that they dont want to piss off whales with thousands of bots
The issue is that they ban from their website (UI interface) but they do not ban from the game/blockchain. They could ban the bots from the website but if the bots don't interact with the site (which to my knowledge they don't), that wouldn't do any good.
I would imagine it is not just a ban from the website ui. It is most likely a server API. The game isn't played just by blockchain transactions. Whether the bot is using the website or not, it is going through the Splinterlands servers. Think about when the game goes down for maintenance and is inaccessible, they aren't bringing the entire blockchain down, just the game. A ban essentially does this, isolated to an account. So if they actually detect botting from an account and wanted to ban it, they definitely could. They just don't want to.
Yes, since they are the only ones processing the custom transaction related to Splinterlands from the Hive blockchain they could block them.
I mean to clarify and say currently the way they ban is by not allowing banned users to access the official Splinterlands website.
I don't believe they have ever banned someone from the API. Even though from a technological standpoint they could, I don't believe they do that and it would be a large change in the way they operate/enforce policy if they did.
Is there a source that actually confirms this? Seems... unlikely to be done that way from a technical standpoint. As a software engineer, it makes zero sense to me that they would ban an account from a website ui and not just interacting with the server as a whole.
I agree it is hypocritical.... Its pretty simple IMO, every account must have ID verified... boom no more bot issues. Take it one step further, allow only a certain amount of accounts per verified ID, that allows people to have a maximum amount of accounts pulling rewards and is more fair for everyone involved. This will stop poeple who are merely trying to drain the rewards from the system.
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Let's just be real the game is unfair at this point it's like we are playing against cheaters. Aggroed is just saying stuff to not upset the bot farms. Hopefully, he isn't that blind as not to know that his words are complete bullshit.
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It always cool to be able to hear directly from the developers. I'm excited for some of the big changes coming up in the near future! 🙂
Again no solution for bots, disappointing
I disagree Know Your Client Tournaments is getting invasive and does nothing to the bots it just gives Splinterlands more user information and reduces privacy.
If a bot needs to rent power to enter a tournament then so be it they already need to stake SPS to enter which is sufficient to reduce botting tournaments you can't say that bots are ok to use in regular play then KYC them out of a tournament which requires SPS that is a contradiction.
"You can't have a decentralized game and a centralized authority determining who can play, and who can't" - Aggroed
Unless it's a tournament apparently then lets monitor the heck out of our userbase.
I need a drink after reading this
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an analysis of Bots/Rental ratio to card investor QTY. https://peakd.com/splinterlands/@splinterbin/how-many-bots-or-rental-accounts-right-now-running-in-splinterlands
Share the knowledge of investment in Splinterlands and its potential gain in current rewards system. https://peakd.com/splinterlands/@splinterbin/how-is-current-earning-in-splinterlands-a-play-2earn-nft-game
That's a contradiction to what you said before. You said before that new players are going to want to go in and buy individual cards not packs. If you changed your mind about it that's fine though but at least acknowledge that you used to say newer players would be more interested in single cards rather than packs back when we thought all the packs might sell out. Which at this point makes me wonder what I was smoking. Now I feel like these packs will be here until the end of the year.
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It's not even true that packs bring in a bunch of new players. The game had its biggest expansion period ever when packs were sold out last year. The game was in new player growth and active player decline though the CL launch.
The thing is they've hired so many people that now this "decentralized" dev team needs extract all the money brought in to the ecosystem to pay for it all. They can't be as dumb as they seem when they are selling us new supply for fiat out of one side of their mouths while saying they are doing everything in their power to increase the value of the current assets out the other. No one can think yet another new pack is going to reward asset holders. Especially after seeing what just happened with CL and the value of the entire game collapsing.
This is becoming borderline fraudulent.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it fraudulent. I think it was mismanagement and overcompensating for the projected growth. I think their calculations on who was new players and who was bots was wrong. But before, they Aggro was saying that newer players would be going for individual cards and building decks that way. So why mint so many packs? Even though some new news can turn the game around, they need to get some of the packs burned or take them out of circulation for a while and get some new content released like game modes and the land and everything else.
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The level of mismanagement would border on complete incompetence. They know exactly how many cards are out there and where they are. They know they have players running bot farms with over 10k bots each. They know the players. They hang out in the mavericks room and discuss it daily. Last week Ybapmatt said it was a good thing to have them if they rent cards. They didn't misinterpret of overcompensate for anything. They knew their stats and you could see it from a mile away. I spent 15 minutes looking through whale accounts one day and quickly understood that if they came out with some crazy number of packs for CL,
and the whales got at all active in the rental market they would way over supply the game as even in the price hike last year it was already way over supplied. Whales were just holding all the cards.
Now after seeing this play out they are going to come out here and lie to our faces that the best way to onboard new players is new packs? What are they miscalculating in that statement? Did they not look at their new player numbers even once in the last 5 months?
This devs treat new players like trash all the way around but every time they do something unpopular they pull the new player experience card.
As as for my borderline fraudulent comment, they sell what could be (and probably one day will be) considered securities and they are not being honest in how they do it. That is actually fraud. Like under US law, selling securities while lying to your investors is actually fraud.
"You can't have a decentralized game and a centralized authority determing who can play, and who can't"
As long as there is this understanding, the game will grow and flourish. @aggroed, Respect!!!
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I would love to see the statistics on the bot accounds. This might give more transparancy behind the reasoning of the choices.
Though call. The market is now drowning in new "cheap" cards. It mightbe good to let this dry-up a bit. But in this tempo it might take quite some time.
Well, nice, but since new tournaments come out every week now, there should be an in-game reminder to prevent that players unintentionally miss to enter them on time.
You find my corresponding feedback here:
https://feedback.splinterlands.com/1059
You can really tell the Splinterlands dev team has a bunch of bots by the simple fact that they added a "Acknowledge All" button when receiving a gifted cards, lol. Nobody thought that was a problem, and there's better low-hanging fruit out there for devs to work on in their spare time
To all those bitching about bots: I HATE bots as much as the next guy, but it's a balancing act. You want the value of your assets to dump precipitously, go ahead and ban all bots right now. That would be completely stupid. The right strategy is to squeeze them out through attrition. You build corners of the game with human verification (kyc tournaments), and you introduce aspects of game play (land, spell items, etc.) that make operating bots less and less profitable. Now maybe they wouldn't publicly admit that this is the strategy, but it would definitely appear that this is the direction they are headed. i.e. as the game gets more complex, the more human you are, the more rewards you get for participating. As someone with zero bots and a lot invested in the game, this would be my expectation on the way forward. That is, to make running bots less attractive and less lucrative over time.
BUMP
Agree. I dislike bots myself but they are a necessary evil. So we just need to squeeze them hard and de incentivize them as you mentioned. I think the gamemakers agree with this view and they are doing the right thing.
I appreciate the reply. It's just amazing that some would consider outright blocking people from using their assets considering where it is we exist.
Those people have no idea about the economy of the game. Thankfully our gamemakers do. So I think we are in good hands. We just need to voice our opinion so as to make our thinking visible and support the game.
"You can't have a decentralized game and a centralized authority determing who can play, and who can't"
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