"Splinterlands" Power Strategy Tips #69

As I have now been playing "Splinterlands" for over a year, I've wanted to contribute something of ACTIONABLE value to my fellow players (and FUTURE players) - but NOT just fill my #Hive feed with daily images of quest reward - or battle - SPAM (no offense to those doing so). Ultimately, Hive is about ADDING VALUE to the social experience - that is the magic of blockchain social media technology. So, after some serious pondering, I decided that a weekly "Splinterlands" player strategy diary"" type series, with CONCISE and ACTIONABLE tips, would be of most value to my audience. Please let me know your thoughts (good and/or bad), and I hope that readers (now and into the future) will benefit from this series. If you gain a better understanding of blockchain, gaming, "blockchain gaming", marketing, psychology, addiction science, geopolitics, forensics, law, ethics, philosophy, accounting, investing, anger management, and/or any other area(s) of knowledge I end up exploring (voluntarily or involuntarily) as this series naturally progresses, then I will have done my "good deed" (of providing value) for the week - and have a little extra Hive to buy/upgrade some more Splinterlands cards and/or buy some more swap.btc (#Bitcoin). Also, feel free to hit me up on the battlefield.

@transcript-junky

1 ) In past posts of this series I've detailed my strategy of entering ALL available daily "anytime" tournaments as (aside from the mains goal of actually placing in the tournament(s),AND earning some extra DEC) as a way to provide some additional daily battles which both DO NOT deplete capture rate, and/or ranking points (but instead allow the capture rate to ACTUALLY REPLENISH faster by alternating between ranked battles and tournament battles (which do not deplete capture rate)) WHILE ALSO providing an opportunity to experiment with some of my lower-level cards, and/or cards I use less often (to become more experienced using them). After all, a MAJOR part of this game is skill-based, and so having some powerful cards is essentially USELESS unless you know how to use them in battles (that is, above and beyond the value (hopefully appreciatory) of the cards over time). Well, over the past few months I have realized that there is a clear fluctuation in difficulty level of battles over the 24-hour period of each global daily cycle. I live in SouthEast Asia, and so while many of the folks (a significant number of whom are the most competitive players, and dwell in North America and Europe) are snoozing I am able to make some good headway with some generally easier battling, during the day-time hours over here. So I have now realized that the extra battles which the tournaments provide ALSO help me to spread out my battling activity more strategically through the 24-hour day-night cycle, and this has been leading to a higher success rate (ratio of won battles to lost battles), and overall return on my efforts. My task in the coming weeks is to continue monitoring these 24-hour period fluctuations in difficulty to see if there are any statistically significant patterns of those fluctuation, which I could then take advantage of to lessen my losses and increase wins - thereby increasing daily DEC earnings. Nothing is more demoralizing than a losing streak of 5+ battles on any given day. Feel free to try this out. The 10 DEC per tournament entry is PEANUTS compared to the higher return you get by using this simple strategy.

2 ) Well, it turns out that my liason, @davemccoy, has been successful in assisting in making my originally desired "one tract"" of land manifest, along with all of the benefits I WOULD HAVE gotten had I been able to successfully make the purchase when the countdown clock hit 00:00:00:00 on the deadline of the 1st round pre-sale, when the system crashed, and all hell broke loose. As you all know, I was quite LIVID over that, but after confirming with @davemccoy that my purchase had gone through (albeit costing me an extra 50,000 DEC -- so 900,000 DEC instead of the original 1st-round presale price of 850,000 DEC ), AND seeing my 900 raffle tickets show up on my "inventory" page in the game, I was AT LEAST happy to see that SOMEHOW my originally desired "one tract" of land had finally manifest into (virtual) reality.

I addition to this, after confirming that my land had been acquired, I held a seance throughout the night, and succeeded in connecting with the spirit of "The Great Jarvis"", who informed me that @splinterlands admin had actually played a role in making my purchase of the originally-desired "one tract" of land possible (albeit with the 50,000 DEC loss). "The Great Jarvis" also assured me that my new 100 plots of land (at the heavily discounted pre-sale price) would be WELL-offset by the income generated by that land into the future (in various ways), and he directed me to loosen my current partial boycott a bit as a result of admin's activities in partially rectifying the land pre-sale issues. I promised "the master" to carry out his divine commands, and have now decided to make some small, methodical, step-by-step TWEAKS back in the direction of becoming more pro-active in the game (as opposed to my basically "full" boycott strategy (of ZERO pro-activity) in the game, which I launched on the night of the 1st round presale, after it became clear that I didn't get my tract.

Actually, some of the TWEAKS I made to my strategy as a result of the boycott over the past few weeks have actually turned out to be valuable EVEN WITHOUT the boycott activity. For instance, my new strategy of using the free Untamed packs I get in daily quest and/or season reward dumps as the "season milestone" packs (that is, the one pack I open when I ascend to each next level in the season) - in place of the Dice packs I was purchasing, and generally getting a low ROI on - has been working well, as I have found over time that packs GENERALLY have a LOWER ROI compared to simply buying the cards I desire manually on the market. But since my purchase of packs on the market was partly a way to support admin's fundraising efforts I will now try to figure out some additional ways to return to SOME of this type of support, but in different ways other than buying packs straight out. However, if my new 100 plots of land end up producing a significant amount of DEC income in the future, AND there are additional "airdrop promos" in future card edition releases, I MAY decide to buy up an initial large round of new edition packs into the future to take advantage of the airdrops. As I have explained in the past, I think the MAIN valid reasons for buying packs (at full price) are to get one's hands on the a "starter" deck of any new edition of cards, AND to become eligible for airdrops. If there were no airdrop opportunities I would probably not even bother buying ANY packs, since the ROI has a general TENDENCY to not be as high as simply buying cards on the market. The airdrops at least provide some reasonable incentive to lay out the DEC for the packs.

As part of the process of gradually REVERSING my boycott, one task I WILL re-include in my activity is to start listening to the official #Splinterlands AMAs again. I think that, now that I have my land, it WILL be productive to stay informed about developments related to the land, and some other topics related to the game ( for example, the "guild wars ). As I have said in the past, I have been a strong supporter of the Splinterlands game since I started playing, and as long as admin treats me (as a player) fairly then I will return in kind. In other words, it's a give-and-take - as is life in general.

3 ) For the previous post in this series I got a JUICY payout of 3,762 SPT tokens, and in line with my new strategy of staking ALL of the SPT I earn from these posts I have staked this new payout. Along with the smaller payouts from my secondary weekly series posts, as of writing this sentence, my total staked SPT is now ~ 4,800 tokens. It should be interesting to see if, and how much, the value of these accumulated staked tokens increases over time. Since @flawy seems to be bullish on SPT, and I trust his opinion on stuff, it can't hurt to just stake all the tokens and see what happens in 6-12 month. Hopefully I can eventually cash out, or earn enough of a regular dividend from the stake to have another stream of Hive income to convert to DEC to buy some more desired cards. Building multiple streams of crypto income is a key goal in this overall endeavor, as I have explained many times in this series.

4 ) This weeks post of my secondary series on "Blockchain Gaming News":

Trending Blockchain Gaming News #38 - November 27th, 2020
https://hive.blog/splinterlands/@transcript-junky/trending-blockchain-gaming-news-38-november-27th-2020

received a surprisingly fast and large upvote boost within just six minutes of making the post. I'm not exactly sure why, but it may be due to my recently joining a dedicated "NFT" Discord channel, and posting the link there. The important thing is that this is now motivating me to work on finding more ways to increase the exposure and upvote income on my two secondary weekly series posts, with the ultimate goal of getting the payout from each of those two weekly posts up to roughly the same amount as each of the two posts in THIS series ( which is around 10 Hive, and equivalent in HBD) per post. If I can accomplish that then that would bring me up to the original goal of $5.00 USD of swap.btc purchase per week. Right now, I am averaging $3.00 USD of swap.btc per week with the current income from all of the four weekly series posts. Also, as I have explained in he past, since the payout of these Hive posts pays out in Hive this eliminates the extra step of converting DEC to Hive (and taking a loss), versus simply converting the full Hive payout from these posts into swap.btc, which only requires ONE step. I have learned that the LEAST number of conversions you do the better in the crypto world. My hope is that by the time I am ready to cash out my swap.btc to #Bitcoin, and then to fiat the appreciation will have been so high that any loss in conversion fees will be insignificant.

5 ) Okay. As I did in the last post in this series, the highly-detailed "diary" of my daily #splinterlands activity is laid out in the last part of this post, for those of you who are inclined to follow, more closely, what I am doing. It occurred to me that this "diary" section is JUST THAT - a highly detailed record of my daily activity in the game, with some JUICY "play-by-play" analysis notes, and commentary, on what works, what doesn't, and some suggestions for further tweaking and experimentation. So, with this in mind, I hope some/any of you will enjoy this information. If not, you are under no pressure to read it fully, and are free to SKIM, or even IGNORE, any parts, or ALL parts, completely - at your discretion. I lay this out because it also HELPS ME to document my progress in the game over time, and may help some people NOW, and into the perpetual future...

November 28th, 2020

Starting DEC : 275,976 DEC
Starting Capture Rate : ~ 100.00%
Ending DEC - 276,438 DEC
Ending Capture rate : ~ 98.47%
Balance = DEC Earning = 462 DEC = -> 3.229 HIVE x ~ $00.122 USD/Hive = ~ $00.39 USD

Spent :

earned 150 for placing 42nd in "The Golden Rule (Untamed, Bronze)" tournament
https://steemmonsters.com/?p=tournament&id=b073ed12ec7953a320bab3e52eca95c1355c8d9f

462 DEC leftover for weekly swap.btc purchase

Daily Quest (today's "dragon" quest)

Notes - was only able to win ONE "dragon" battle today, and lost too many battles trying to complete the quest. Will try again tomorrow.

November 29th, 2020

Starting DEC : 276,438 DEC
Starting Capture Rate : ~ 100.00%
Ending DEC - 277,257 DEC
Ending Capture rate : 84.69%
Balance = DEC Earning = 819 DEC = -> 5.476 HIVE x ~ $00.120 USD/Hive = ~ $00.66 USD

Spent :

No cards bought today due to low daily DEC earnings. I will use the full DEC earning of today for the weekly swap.btc purchase.

819 DEC leftoever for weekly swap.btc purchase

Notes - wasn't able to win ANY "dragon" battles today, and lost too many battles trying to complete the quest. Will try again tomorrow. The season ends in 21 hours, so I will NOT put too much focus on this quest. These "dragon" quests are really becoming a challenge, so I need t focus on upgrading some cards in my dragon deck.

November 30th, 2020

Starting DEC : 277,257 DEC
Starting Capture Rate : ~ 95.43%
Ending DEC - 278,755 DEC
Ending Capture rate : 88.60%
Balance = DEC Earning = 1,498 DEC = -> 10.192 HIVE x ~ $00.123 USD/Hive = ~ $01.25 USD

Spent :

1 x "Flame Monkey" (Gold - Level 3 - $0.60 USD - 694 DEC -- four (4) cards remaining to Level 9)

804 DEC leftover towards weekly swap.btc purchase

Season Rewards ( "Champion II" season level - 120 loot chests
keepers -
1 x "Centauri Image" (Gold - Level 2 - $2.13 USD - 2,000 DEC)
(+) 480 DEC
nonkeepers -
(+) 275 DEC
potions - 16 legendary potions, 22 alchemy/gold potions
Untamed - 3 packs
DEC - 631 DEC

Dice (season milestone Dice pack for starting new season at "Diamond II" season level -> + 50 loot chests --> + 50 season loot chests )
keepers -
(+) 20 DEC
non-keepers -
(+) 60 DEC (total DEC = 80 DEC)

December 1st, 2020

Starting DEC : 278,061 DEC
Starting Capture Rate : ~ 100.00%
Ending DEC - 278,611 DEC
Ending Capture rate : 95.60%
Balance = DEC Earning = 550 DEC = -> 3.625 HIVE x ~ $00.129 USD/Hive = ~ $00.46 USD

Spent :

Note; Light day today. Still couldn't "dragon" quest from two days ago. May cancel it tomorrow.

550 DEC (full) daily income allocated towards weekly swap.btc buy

deposited 11.917 Hive from Hive wallet to Hive-Engine (from previous two post payouts) towards weeklky swap.btc purchase (which will be made in 2-3 days). Also staked 3,762 SPT income from previous post in this series.

Whew! These posts are growing dense - but that's okay. Take what resonates with you,and leave the rest. I hope you find some/any of these tips useful in increasing your understanding and/or skill level in the Splinterlands and/or any other game(s) - and the " blockchain gaming " industry as whole - which I end up exploring as this series evolves. More JUICY tips to come with each weekly update, as I dig deeper into this whole REVOLUTIONARY PHENOMENON, and become more experienced and successful in the game(s).

See you on the battlefield...

@transcript-junky