Did onboarding new users just become too difficult with the Collection Power?

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(Edited)

Splinterlands is quite essential to the HIVE ecosystem. We want mass adoption of HIVE and cryptocurrencies in general. Splinterlands could be among the top second layer solutions and ease new users into the ecosystem. For that to happen, Splinterlands will need a lot of new players coming in regularly.

Constant development is always a positive, but this is bound to sometimes cause confusion and dissatisfaction among users. Straight off the top, I'm not a big fan of the collection power YET. (This can definitely change, I have an open mind towards new ideas). If the team is reading this, MOST new players aren't either.

As always, we welcome constructive feedback about these changes (or anything else) from our players.

Consider this post my feedback.

In fact, all of the changes described in this post were a direct result of player feedback themselves.

I have problem with this to begin with. The players whose feedback you took are all the veterans. Newer and relatively "smaller" users didn't really have any say in this and expectedly, these changes hurt them the most and benefit the veterans. While we have a lot of veterans who help out new users with cards and delegations, a lot of the veterans will not give up even on the 3000 DEC prize money of bronze leagues or 5000 of the Silver leagues for new users. Not saying this is against the rules or anything. It is perfectly fine for them to play whatever tournaments they want. Hell, even go play and win the novice leagues! I don't take issue with that.

But what I have issue with is that these players' feedback is deciding the fates of new users in the game. I have a lot of doubt about whether their "feedback" is directed towards the advancement of the game and user adoption, or to establish their monopoly hold stronger. Here let me acknowledge that maybe I still do not understand a lot of the mechanisms of the bot farming and I absolutely appreciate the team trying to reduce this. But this will also majorly effect new user experiences. Feel free to let me know what I'm missing of the concept and what are the flaws in the few suggestions I'm going to make as the post goes on.

I came in to the game expecting this to be an investment with decent ROI. It took me 1 week to realize this was not the case and that is completely fine. I enjoyed the game and kept on playing and buying cards just for the fun aspect. I stopped caring much about shit rewards and useless potions. But once this game becomes a massive negative ROI, I think the team needs to see these changes from a new player's perspective.

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This is a screenshot of how much DEC I earned playing ranked battles and claiming daily quest rewards this season. Leaving out the burn value of cards, that's a grand total of 12,437 DEC playing in Champion 3 and 2 for over 90% of the duration of this season. Every season I put in about 15-20 HIVE for my rentals, that about 9000 DEC considering the average price of DEC to be at 0.0022. Minus 1500 DEC for my guild fees. I'm left with around a net positive of 2000 DEC. I am not even considering the amount of DEC I use to buy cards and upgrade my deck every season. But if I do, the net value will be negative, somewhere in the range of -5000 DEC per season. Reminding you again, I play in champion 3 and 2 for the majority of a season.

I'm not complaining my "earning" from the season is so less. In fact, I have said on multiple occasions I'm no longer playing SL for the earning, I'm playing for fun. So as long as the net value does not go too much negative, I have no complains.

In comes Collection Power

With the cards I played, including the ones I rented, my collection power puts me at Gold II. (Not everyone has a friend like @reazuliqbal to bump their collection up to 500k, so we're going to ignore the fact that my collection score now shows me at over 500k).

With the same amount of investment, playing in Gold League is now going to pull the net value at the ends of a season much, much negative. Including money spent for buying cards, that should be somewhere around the -15,000 to -18,000 DEC per season. There are three reasons for this.

  1. Ranked battles will earn you around 7-8 DEC (on average) per game, compared to somewhere between 30-35 DEC (on average) per battle in the Champion 3 and 2 leagues.
  2. In Gold II league, you get 7 daily quest loot chests compared to 16 and 18 in champion 3 and 2 respectively.
  3. Season reward of Gold II is 22 loot chests compared to 80 and 120 loot chests in C 3 and 2.

I'm pretty sure I speak for most new players, we are not willing to put in about 15,000 DEC every season to play Splinterlands just for fun.

I have been told that now I should just go and upgrade my deck to not have to spend 9000 DEC every season. I did the math. It will take me 270,000 DEC at least for the monsters I use and only the beta rare summoners, no legendary summoners. That's 30 seasons worth of rentals and all for what! 7 daily loot chests and 22 season chests, which will most likely be filled with potions - Nah I'm good, thanks.

I will bring in a DCity comparison here for 2 reasons. One, DCity and SL are the top two blockchain games on HIVE. Number two, there has been a lot of talk about DCity requiring a hefty investment upfront to get a good daily return, which was not the case for splinterlands up until now. New players could still play splinterlands and have fun with a fair enough low investment. With collection power, this advantage is eliminated from Splinterlands.

Not only is the advantage of splinterlands eliminated, the advantage is actually handed over to DCity. The reason is simple and straightforward. Despite DCity requiring a heavy investments to set up the city, the daily return on investment is always constant and is in fact quite a handsome one even under a 54% city tax structure. This is unfortunately not the case for splinterlands, where the daily return on investment depends heavily on your Luck to pull a GFL at regular intervals, or hit that jackpot of a DEC Loot. With collection power now, it's almost entirely dependent on luck.

An investment where the return is dependent almost entirely on luck is textbook "Bad Investment."

Tournaments

This is a "solution" that keeps getting presented by certain officials. You can earn by winning tournaments. I'm sorry, but this is bullshit, for lack of a better word. Can we please stop pretending that new users win these tournaments all the time! Jeez!

I dare you to go look at the last 200 completed tournaments and I can guarantee you AT LEAST 80% of these tournaments are won by VETERAN PLAYERS, not new players. The percentage is actually well over 90%, but I haven't done the math, so I'm being conservative with my claim.

If you really want this Collection Power to not turn into a fiasco, a very logical next step with tournaments will be to restrict participation in tournaments. If "Silver Power" players can not play in Diamond league for example, "A diamond Power" player should not be able to register for a "Silver Tournament." That's the fair thing to do, which will definitely NOT be done.

League Leaderboards

Much has been made about this "magical" leaderboard. But it's all words of no value until it is implemented or at least an exact leaderboard reward structure is revealed. For example what does the top player get in the silver league? Do they get 75 packs, or do they get a gold foil barking spider?

Either phase 2 and phase 3 of the collection power has to be released at the same time, or exact details about phase 3 must be released before phase 2 is implemented.

If the League Leaderboard is done right, this could potentially fix a lot of the issues new players will be facing once phase 2 goes live. But for us to have that confidence, we need to know of the exact structure and plans. Maybe if we had, I wouldn't even be writing this post.

I also do not believe in the timelines set - Leader boards will be released within 1 month. coughs, -guild wars, land, azmare dices- coughs

Reward Structure

Oh boy where do I begin! This is something the veterans and new players all agree on, For the greater good!

I used be very vocal about making potions transferable as these have no value to those of us who don't buy packs. I have moved away from that stance now as I sort of understand why that will not be possible and why a DEC sink is necessary. But with the new restrictions of league levels, this becomes an issue again. Players are getting restricted to lesser loot chests, having 5 potions out of seven chests is just not going to be acceptable under any circumstances. so the first step would be to remove potions from loot chests. Period.

Next, if that is not happening, potions must be activated for reward cards again. Although I'll admit, I prefer potions being removed altogether as I don't believe potions really work. I'm not convinced with something as vague as "chance." But there are believers, so fair enough if it is re-activated for reward cards.

Finally, what is up with these 5-6-7 DEC chests! These have to go, ta-ta, bye-bye! There should be a reasonable minimum amount of DEC per chest.


We'll have to wait and see how this pans out, but we all want the same thing here : For Splinterlands to thrive. There could be technical stuff I am missing, do feel free to point those out.

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18 comments
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:reply:
I happy that Splinterlands have you. No replies from bosses of Splinterlands, while I gave plenty of comments on their posts about implementation of Collection Power.

:kudos:
You have nicely presented all many of problems in length, and again I am sad that bosses have their own vision leading to destruction of the game. Because when you have no players than you have no game.

:thought:
IMO one more destruction will happen. Collection Power will destroy card markets because I see players will be left with no motivation for selling his/her Collection Power to others. Then it will practically kill all interest for DEC which will get to value 0.

Cheers!
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Thanks for dropping by :)

I am very very keen to see what happens to the card market. There are so many dynamics that will come into play that it's almost impossible to sort of work out what might happen.

The buy pressure on cards might seriously increase. People might stop selling cards and the card price goes up. People might start selling off and crash the market. Too many directions.

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:reply:
I am actually hoping for anything to prove me wrong, as of now I am seeing seriously bad impact to game future. They want one thing and talk about it but I am discovering problems in many side effects.

Cheers!
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Collection Power will surely change the economics of Splinterlands and after it will be enabled beginning of September the players will speak through action. I see it as a decline in playing and motivating the new players, but in the same time the Splinterlands team responded based on the stats.

So I expect a correction once the player numbers will decline at least for modifying the Collection Power threshold. But probably we will need and see.

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Yes, only time will tell. But this is all unnecessary confusion created by the premature announcement. They should have revealed details of phase 2 and 3 together.

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(Edited)

First of all, this probably belongs to the Splinterland community. It’s a good feedback from an avid player. You know me, I am a new player myself, but I think most people will agree that I am not the “typical” new player. I don’t think you are either.

You are skillful, resourceful and an asset to the game. We need more players like you. I agree with all the problems you describe. Especially the fact that they are not “your” personal problem anymore as you WILL BE playing in the Champions League regardless. So with that out of the way, let me ask you this; is there a solution to this that you are proposing. Put yourself in the owner of the game shoe and think about a solution and the may be write it in the next post.

I am no expert in SL game, but I am a bit of an expert in another card game where I invested nearly 20 years of my life. So from that experience I can may be give you a few pointers. Card games go through lull all the time. There are periods where the game loose players because it is not interesting or development is slow. But if the roadmap is robust and loyal player base is there, the game bounces back. Sort of like bitcoin. You can google how many times experts predicted that Bitcoin is dead. But hey, it’s still out there and about 11000X more expensive than USD ;)

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(Edited)

I'm no expert either dada and quite unaware of the technical aspects. I can only speak from a player point of view.

is there a solution to this that you are proposing.

Yes dada, although I'm not sure whether what I proposed in the post are feasible or not. I want someone from the team to discuss them and give a proper explanation why they are not feasible if they are not feasible.

Of the 3, I am putting my hopes on the "Leaderboard" solution and as I said, if done right, this could potentially eliminate all the issues.

Now the question would arise, what do I mean by "right." I do not know dada. If you asked me what would be ideal, I would say a leaderboard prize on par with the current leaderboard. But would that be "right" for the game? With the current leaderboard, the game is giving out over 1000 untamed packs. If they are to maintain this in all the leagues, they would end up giving over 5000 untamed packs every season. Is that sustainable for the game? I can not answer. The team will have to weigh out all these options and come out with a structure that would be attractive enough for players in all the leagues.

From my position, and from where most players stand, unless very experienced in these dynamics, it is unlikely we would know what is sustainable and what is not. Which is why I said in the post, the team should reveal the exact plans for phase 3 and see the reaction of the players to that. They must know what is a sustainable structure, and they should tell us this is what we're planning to do. If they haven't figured out what is sustainable as of yet, they should also delay the release of phase 2 until a time they have it figured out.

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(@azircon+@simplifylife)

:reply:
I can add to all you pointed out that what they are talking about is merely solving their problems of many bots harvesting Champion Leagues rewards. And my way would be to keep motivation for human players by solving the issue in different manner. Collection Points are clearly destructive IMO, while I see that modifying pairing system would give same result, which is coming from my long time experience with board game based tournaments. I think that Splinterlands is not wanting to invest money and create a solid experienced team that would deal with in game systems. As a Senior Developer I am noticing that implementation of in-game chance system based on random number generator is low quality.

:reply:
"Leaderboard reward" I am seeing as reserved for bots. Final score is relied on rating points and no human can play 24h a day, and bots are actually doing it. Again Splinterlands team is wrongly creating uneven game playing conditions for players because of favoring bots in final instance, again as a side effect to some decisions.

Cheers!
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I think that Splinterlands is not wanting to invest money and create a solid experienced team that would deal with in game systems.

Yep, this is something I've heard from some of the older users too.

About the leaderboard, yes. In the end this is what will make or break this system.

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When is the collection power going to be kicking into gear?

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From the beginning of the next season if I understood the timelines correctly.

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This is how they are eliminating the bots?? So funny, cause now the main problem will be for the new users and if anyone to play this game and earn some penny, they have to buy at least $500 cards, that's quite impossible for any new users. I must say this is very harsh, also disappointing for me, as I am playing three accounts but none of them 500k dec, so I will be playing in the gold league. Lol, seriously after playing for a one year of something this is what I am supposed get?? Some people are using bots, so why not they eliminate them, rather fixing it they are just imposing something that is totally unacceptable, at least for me.

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That is the problem bhai. Some of the "bigger" players were not happy with people getting similar rewards by spending less money than them. What they don't understand is, we reached the champion league by playing and winning fairly not by cheating. One of the officials once answered me "we" should have never even been allowed to reach such high leagues, so now we should not complain about getting lesser rewards, because apparently that is what people who spen less money "deserve." Imagine that! This is a response from one of their officials LOL!

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(Edited)

Lol! So this is all about money, if you invest more, you will earn more. Then what about the new users??? Actually, once this game was about skills but now all about investment. But what steps are taken to prevent the bot accounts?? Nothing!

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Yep, it's all about money. Giving potions in the loot chests and deactivating them for rewards is also another way of "forcing" people to buy packs and the soon to be released Azmare dices.

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Money hein toh honey hein, 😂😂! Cheers!🙏🙏🙏🙏

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