Splinterforge. Why SL players should play it & why SF Devs need to work on fundamentals

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Hello everyone!
Today I would like to drop few words about new hero in the town.
I heard about Splinterforge few months ago.
I thought - another game on Hive blockchain? Sure! I jumped in and well... hm...
Game reminded me my first and not the last nightmare in p2e games.

Cryptoblades :D
I'm sure part of you remember that great XD game!
Oldshool graphic from "Eye of the Beholder", mindless clicks and lambo in dreams.
I thought - "well, I put my hand into fire once and it should be enough".

Some time later SF devs showed in Splinterlands AMA.
So it was some kind of sign that SF is not a scam. I decided to give it a second chance,
but well... "ranked, tournaments, brawl and brawl again" in Splinterlands and I just forgot about SF.

As I mentioned few times before - we have small polish nerds community on Discord.
We gather every few days on voice and talk for hours about all nerd stuff around Splinterlands.
My friend @maxmaka mentioned SF few times, but we were deaf on his calling.
I used to say - "You know Max, I can dig in my basement for my old Amiga 1200. I have few games like that, and I dont need to spend a penny"
But few weeks ago we said - "ok, ok lets give SF a chance".

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I started carefully. I just bought few packs, got some gear and start battling.
I was FAR FAR from top 100 and Forge rewards. With main account and few alt I have I started to farm Forge token, change it to DEC, and buy cards in Splinterlands.
Meantime my other SL friend @atnazo went heavy into Splinterforge. He bought far more packs than me, traded on SF Discord to get better gear and fought for leaderboard. With success.
So thx to Atno's inspiration I followed his advices and made some investments into my equipment and cards.

Let me share some screenshots.

My actual gear.
This is nothing too crazy, but fair.
I started from few common/rare parts and slowly change to legendary/epic.
My gear is mainly for warrior, this is not maxed for Bronze Boss, and I lack diversity.
I mean I dont have good damage output for ranger/mage class.

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This is what my warrior looks like.
As I said. Far from maxed, but the most important stat - dmg is 8/10 and low speed is buffed with Jacek and Kitty.

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Here are examples of evolution in damage in battles.
From low gear with no key cards up to gear I shared above with cards which are must have.
Second picture shows I turned the counter.
There is cap for Forge token you can gain from battles.
And it shows in one picture two ways of playing Splinterforge.
You can just farm Forge from battles and fight for leaderboard for bigger rewards.
I will write about those two ways below.

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Personally I play both. One on my main account, second on my alts.
Lets cover second one, first.

I think an environment to play like that have to change ASAP.
Why? Because there is a huge possibility for exploit.
We all know how bots hurt Splinterlands ecosystem. There are some arguments that bots in SL have some positive aspects, too. Bots farms rent those thousands of cards, provide battle liquidity and gave us chance to buy reward cards cheap.
So imagine bots in Splinterforge. They can print Forge token for almost 0 cost with nothing in return.
Here is an exemple.

This is my rental account.

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My assets are worth around 900$ and I get 425 dec daily.
I rent in few key cards for farming Forge token and those cards are worth 45$.
It costs me less than 20 dec daily.
Those 20 dec worth cards plus ghost cards we have access from spellbook can farm 200-300 Forge daily, so around same DEC amount.
Look.
This is 2 days of mindless clicking in SF.
I have office work, so I can do it manually, just between loading pages for my work.
I had to invest almost 1k$ in Splinterlands cards to have same passive income.

There are two conclusions.

  1. For players, especially low leagues, if you play SL you need to play SF as well.
    You can farm Forge token and change it to DEC for almost 1:1.
    There is no better way to earn with low cost and use those resources to level up your SL's deck in exemple
  2. For SF devs - you need to change it. Bots can destroy your game.

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Ok. So lets talk about second way to play Splinterforge.
Leaderboard.

There are two steps to be made. At least.
First - you need to invest in gear. I spent 50k Forge in trades, maybe a little more + few packs with medium drops.
Second - you need to rent/buy few key cards like Jacek, Kraken and most imortant - Kitty.
With my warrior build I could achieve top 150, so 1500 Forge every 2-3 days, not counting tokens from battles.
I set bid on Peakmonsters for Kitty and one day it got filled.
I think I will keep it forever, or until owner will cancel the deal, or when I will look for lvl 3.
I started to use her in silver tournaments and there is one thought I got -
This is some kind of masochism not to play with Kitty.

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When I added Kitty to my build, with which I am able to reach the top 150, my results got a huge boost.
And suddenly I went from top 150 to top 50.
Of course, I don't know how it will end, but the change is fundamental. Because of only one card.

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There is a spoonful of tar in a barrel of honey.
There's basically no fundamental difference between playing low tier just for battle rewards and playing "higher" with better gear and key cards.
When we find the right build for the rules of the boss, it is enough to repeat them indefinitely, or rather his death.
At some point, the game comes down to whether you have Kitty or Llama.

I would have a humble appeal to the developers of Splinterforge.
Take advantage of the Splinterlands experience.
Introduce more rules that exclude specific elements, legendary cards, etc. Anything that would require a change of strategy in every fight and having only a few key cards wasn't a sure win on the leaderboard.

To sum up.

Splinterforge proves to be much more than a Cryptoblades specter.
The fact that we can use resources from Splinterlands is great.
The fact that SF is on the Hive blockchain is a blessing.
Splinterforge has a chance to become a nice puzzle game and not just a free token farm where players only think about making ROI and cashing out.
The developers of the game face a serious task - they need to introduce more variables so that the gameplay is definitely less predictable.
If this happens - then playing this game will become something obvious for every Splinterlands player and will certainly give you reasons to be ready to invest more funds.
What do I wish for this game!

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Image licence: ISTOCK
Edited with Canva
Fonts thx to: CoolText
You dont play Splinterlands?! The best game on blochchain? Here is my Referral link



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16 comments
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Thank-you for your Blog and you are right we do have a lot of work to do yet. Its hard to just straight out nurf cards or ban them. Although we could ban kitty and llama the negitive impact of doing so could also hurt the game. It may come down to that yet and there is precident in other CCG games where that has been done. I won't rule out that happening but would like to keep it as a last resort.
We hope to find time to appear on TH again and that could happen sometime in the next few weeks. We have strengthened our collab/partnership with Splexx and will soon be launching a card market on splexx. possibly this week if the testing goes well.
In the future we plan to add more ways to play once we clean up the front end display. Thankfully we built the game with our main focus on getting the back-end working correctly so even if some things don't look right on the front it is more than likely to be correct on the back end. We still like having our players point out these front-end errors and when they do we also check the back end as an extra check. This does slow down our development a bit but it ensures that when the front end is fixed we also know the back end is still doing what it was designed to do.

Hope you all enjoy the game. =)

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I really like how you have built the game so far. The game is fun and challenging. It's normal that not everything works perfectly at the moment. I belive that nerfing cards isn't the solution but maybe there could be a way to limit summoners according to leagues, like only common, rare in bronze; common rare and epic in silver and gold; all levels in diamond. This would even out the playfield I believe.
Also, I believe it would be great if you added the rulesets no melée, no range or no magic. If one of these would be added in each game, this would require a new setup each time.

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Thank you for your comment and upvote :)
!PIZZA

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I actually suggested having limits on summoners by rarity to boss level to the DEV but he was not a big fan of the idea and as i delved deeper into the idea i realized it would be difficult to balence due to the limited number of summoners available at each rarity lvl. This could change as more editions of SL cards come out but for now its not really an option.

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Hi,
the last thing i want is to ban any card! :)
It's just that these few meta cards don't have such an impact on the leaderboard results.
I think adding a market on the splex can have a very positive impact on the game. Not every player uses Discord, and even if they do, many people do not trust p2p trading.
I also realize that Splinterforge is actually in alpha, so it's hard to expect everything to be tip top shape.
I wish you lots of community !love for your game.
And I can't wait for more improvements! :)

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Very interesting article, thx for mentioning it, as @forgemaster wrote above it's still plenty of work to do, I have to honestly say that I'm not big fan of this kind of game. But still, if interface will be better, and as Laaca said it would be less repetitive gameplay where you need to figure out almost every battle with different combat rules instead of spamming Lama/Kitty/Hero all over again, I think I will give a second try :)

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Hopefully you'll have reasons to come back to the game :)
!PIZZA

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they need to introduce more variables so that the gameplay is definitely less predictable.

I'm playing Splinterforge regularly and I quite agree with your statement. You could play Splinterforge with maybe 20 cards in total. I use almost always the same cards and the same 3-4 summoners (Kitty, Lama and Jacek and sometimes Mimosa Nightshade). So if there would be some additional parameters where other types of cards could become useful, it would increase the skill level of the game and make it less predicatable.


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I'm happy that other players want a fun and challenging game and not a token farm!
!PIZZA

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