I have a lot of praise to give to Splinterlands but also a lot of criticism. The reason is because I can see something incredible being formed amongst all the chaos. There's a cohesive machine being built that I am in awe of. It has principles that follow nature but are otherwise ignored in economics.
I want what I'm seeing to come to life.
I'm not even sure if the team sees what they are building. They might be too deep in the forest to see it all but each mistake they navigate their way out of does bring them closer to something incredible.
I think Rift Watchers was a mistake they would love to navigate their way out of but unlike other problems they've created, they don't own Rift Watchers anymore and can't do anything unless we allow it (or do it ourselves). The very fact that they can't fix their own mistake is a sign the DAO is maturing.
Rift Watchers Was Fundamentally Flawed
The altruistic mini set where the team works for free and gives the proceeds to the community was an interesting idea. Dice burning DEC was an interesting idea. Rift Watchers funding the DAO was an interesting idea. But Rift Watchers should have died in the idea phase and the mini set as a concept should be retired for good.
Ultimately, RW was a distraction that did more harm than good because:
- It didn't bring the DAO closer to being self-funding
- it blurred the lines on what the DAO should be relying on the team for
- It set an unsustainable expectation in the community for how the DAO should get its funding
- It inflated card inventory
- It tried to tap an already exhausted community and highlighted just how exhausted we all are
- It devalued SPS in the eyes of many as just another token that needs utility at any cost
- It assumed selling the community something else would spark an asset rally
- It hurt the confidence in the community
- and It could further hurt confidence if it keeps sitting on the market. If no one is buying these, who's going to buy Rebellion? We are going to need people to buy Rebellion so the team can keep the lights on and keep building.
And now pack sales are just sort of stuck due to a mix of a lack of excitement (its not longer new), lack of need (most of the set not being needed to play competitively), and a sale mechanism that makes it unattractive if SPS isn't way up. Plus, it's awkward that its being sold for SPS when everything else is about DEC. It gives that feel of too many random tokens without distinct purpose.
The team's attempt to fix it by switching it over to DEC further pissed off the community. And while switching to DEC would have been better, just selling it in DEC wouldn't fix anything. I'm doubting it would even sell that many more packs at this point.
The problem with Rift Watchers is that it should have never been made. The team got distracted by the shiny thing instead of the principled thing.
So why did they make Rift Watchers?
I think they made it for multiple reasons. One, they loved the idea of DICE being this altruistic thing that no other game company was doing. But the DAO and SPS weren't things when Dice came out so DEC burning was the best they could do. The DAO and SPS gave them more moving parts to play with.
The concept was, instead of burning DEC, which is no longer the reward currency, they would fund the DAO AND get SPS up in the process. The theory I believe was that if SPS popped, the whole economy they just built on SPS rewards would be sparked and we'd see the Summer of Splinterlands part two.
I figured at the time they were probably hurting financially but they were telling themselves that they just had to change the rewards system to SPS and get to Rift Watchers in order to light the fuse on this incredible economic machine they'd just built. If they resparked the system, the layoffs didn't have to happen.
It didn't work. It was never going to work for so many different reasons we won't get into here.
But the main reason was because it didn't align with the ultimate goal of making Splinterlands a decentralized, self-funding game.
Relying on mini sets is a problem for the DAO
According to Matt, the only reason he is here is to build the first truly decentralized game. And this means building a DAO with real power.
Right now the DAO has a problem with power separation. The line in the sand is that the DAO controls all things SPS, vouchers, and whatever is in the DAO's treasury, while "Splinterlands the company" controls everything else. But what is everything else? At some point, the entire game will run on the SPS chains' rails and SPS will run the entire show.
Between now and then, the team has to walk a thin line to make sure they don't put anything under SPS that they still need to be able to control in order to keep the lights on.
So what is SPS? It's everything. It is the economy. Its governance. It's the reward and it's what all assets will be derived from soon. It's not a token that needs utility. Its shares of ownership in the game. And it shouldn't be devalued by making it how you buy the latest mini set.
SPS is not ownership in "Splinterlands the Company" though and this is important because while the DAO can't tell the company what to do, the DAO can restrict the company's access to the economy and eventually it will have to. We aren't there yet but I think the idea of doing a miniset to fund the DAO is the equivalent of giving the DAO a fish instead of teaching it how to fish.
The DAO can't be funded by relying on altruism from a contractor
"Splinterlands the company" has a stated goal of becoming just another contractor for the DAO. One day the code will be run by the validators and everything will be owned and run by the DAO.
Who will create the new packs at that point?
Selling packs in Splinterlands is a huge money maker. "Splinterlands the Company" employs about 50 full time employees and pays to keep the servers running with that cash. Imagine how profitable it would be for a contractor to be able to sell us our next packs if they had no further responsibility to use those funds to run and build the game.
Creating and selling packs will be big business and its also something that could easily break the game and the economy if not controlled. Imagine 20 companies just creating whatever cards they want and dropping their packs on the non-card market for a quick buck.
Someone needs to play gatekeeper and decide how many cards the economy needs, who we trust to make those cards, how much those cards will cost. Who will do that?
The DAO will.
And when the DAO grants a lucrative license to a contractor to create new packs, part of the deal is going to be that the DAO takes a cut to fund itself.
What there won't be is an ability for the DAO to demand someone make it free packs just because the DAO wants money and that's how it used to get it.
So if this is the way it will work in the future, why are we not looking at this path now?
Rift Watchers was not a step forward but a shiny distraction the team ran with because they actually thought MOAR stuff to buy would spark a rally.
Rift Watchers was a well-meaning mistake that we should now rectify.
Why is it important to rectify this mistake?
The DAO shouldn't be run through temporary solutions. Every step it takes from here on out should be pushing it closer to being a self sustaining entity that is ready to take over when the time comes.
So even though its nice to get a hand out from the team, the DAO needs to take a few more steps into the unknown while it's young and doesn't need the funding yet.
The act of fixing the Rift Watchers mistake will undo damage because it will erase some of the confusion it created. Rift Watchers made it seem like the DAO needed to rely on the team giving it handouts to fund itself. Like the team would always just be there and that the DAO had no further power other than what the team makes in order to give to the DAO.
Rejecting Rift Watchers publicly opens the conversation to what power the DAO does have to become sustainably self funded by monetizing the access it can grant contractors to the SPS economy.
New assets that are created and sold to the community which can be used to win SPS are absolutely part of the SPS economy. It would be more helpful to start discussing how the DAO can monetize that than it will be for more mini sets to be introduced and just to flounder.
And just to widen the conversation away from card packs, land is a mechanism to create assets which can be sold to the community in order to win SPS. Land should absolutely be in the conversation in how to fund the DAO.
What should we do with Rift Watchers?
Literally anything that would encourage play and interaction with the overall Splinterverse while taking them off the market as a sad funding mechanism for the DAO.
So many people want to see the DAO spend its valuable liquid assets to help the economy and build participation but we are sitting on 2 million+ very illiquid reminders that the community is tapped out and SPS is in the toilet.
If one of those is going to get spent to help the economy, I'd recommend it be the Rift Watchers packs.
They can reward tournaments, contests, bringing in new players, creating content, we can sell some for SPT and give that some much needed love. We can reward playing tower defense or splinterforge or put some in the battle pass.
Honestly, it doesn't really matter. They just can't be how the DAO gets funded and we need to make a clean break.
Before I end this I just want to clarify something
This is not in any way an adversarial message attempting to position the DAO against the team. I realize the DAO is young and its not even close to ready to stand on its own and also that the team is probably the DAO's #1 cheerleader since they made the thing.
This is just to get people thinking about the mechanism that is the miniset and why it doesn't fit into the vision of the game and the DAO.
And BTW, if you read the DEC-B proposal that gave future mini sets like Dice and Rift Watchers as possibilities for spending DEC-B, its clear the team is also entirely unclear on what mini sets are supposed to be anymore besides card inflation.
It's also to move the conversation forward as to where the DAO should be looking at funding itself. I think talking about land now or maybe getting the teams thoughts on the DAO taking a small cut off the top of Rebellion instead of having a new mini set made could be helpful.
PS: The reason it shouldn't go back to making packs for a DEC burn is because DEC and cards are competing assets. Adding more of one to have less of the other doesn't move the needle on the economy. Reason number 2 is that there's no need to inflate the actual amount of individual cards. If we get this new movie studio mini set in April, we will have over 400 cards in MODERN. We don't need 400 options to play in modern.