The entire Splinterlands ecosystem remains in a very bad place and with a new Reward Card Set to be released along with the expensive unlocking of the old one, I believe it slowly will become even worse become worse for the following reasons...
The Core Splinterlands Issue
The main issue of Splinterlands that the devs are totally overlooking right now is the fact that cards have no chance whatsoever to hold their value in the current setup. Ever since collection power was scrapped, things started to go downhill as there simply is no valid reason for holding or really caring about cards once they get dumped into wild.
Nobody really wants to spend hours each day manually playing against bots to earn pennies even at the top of the league with expensive cards while you can almost do the same with the cheapest ones when turning on a bot yourself.
Cards dropping in value means all players who care about their card investment are frustrated and there is no incentive for anyone to really buy new packs which kills the revenue from the game. There is also zero incentive for new players to come in or for existing the players to actually want to promote the game.
How Soulbound Reward Card Sets Make It Worse!
So first all reward cards were tradable which wasn't sustainable as bots farmed them and dumped the price down to the ground which also devalued existing cards as they competed with them. As a 'solution' the reward cards were made Soulbound with the idea 'since they now are soulbound we can print an entire set all at once, include summoners, and print even more of them'.
This now has got to a situation where players managed to grind out max-level Soulbound reward cards and just use those to earn in Wild no longer needing actual cards whatsoever. With the new set this will add even more options to this and even less reasons to hold cards. I would say at least 95% of players in WILD don't really care about the game and just run a bot to play for them since the required time investment to do it manually is ridiculous while doing it that way you play with a disadvantage over all the bots who generally play optimally. Why would a wild player hold on to cards if they don't need to and don't really care about them since they don't even play with them.
How The Unlock Makes Things Worse!
So now, players are expected to pay 10x the burn value in a 29-day window to unlock their cards with the only benefit that they can be traded, rented, and used on Land. This will make for a situation where only the whales will unlock them giving a very low supply while most will keep them soulbound. With limited supply, they will be put for sale at an expensive price which makes them realistically unavailable for new players. These new players if they come in and face all the older players who own these 'expensive' cards as soulbound providing a game experience that simply is not fun and unfair.
How Fix Things!
The entire mindset from trying to get DEC to peg to get SPS to get burned to see the price potentially increase to drive demand for cards should be flipped to how can we make sure cards hold their value. The devs think that they are doing that right now with the expensive unlock costs and the fact that the demand and supply for rebellion was rather slow combined with the conflicts system which forces players to hold cards to get the airdrops. Once they get dumped in wild though they will suffer the same faith especially with more reward cards available to bot your account with.
The Cards Supply needs to drastically come down and cards paid for with money need to get priority over cards earned through rewards!
How the Soulbound Unlocks Should be done...
- Unlock cost 2x (max 3x) the DEC burn rate + 1 Similar Type Card needs to be burned.
- Add a Glints Bonus % for players who don't use locked Reward cards (of this set).
- Keep the Unlock Price the same for the entire life cycle of the new set.
- Slowly increase the Glints bonus % each month so there is no upset.
- Once the new set goes out of print, no longer allow unlocking of the old set and give them starter cards status for those who own them so they can keep playing but not earn forever.
What this would do:
- Allow everyone to unlock their Soulbound cards over time at a reasonable price
- Create demand and burn a ton of old cards balancing the supply and increasing card prices
- Create a more level, affordable, and fair playing field for new players
- Still burn quite some DEC as many more cards would get unlocked
- Not increase the card supply more.
- Give cards that were paid for a fair advantage over locked soulbound cards.
How Ranked Mode Potentially Could be more Fun.
Why not have a system where all cards opponents in a battle own are available to both. when a player picks a card that only the opponent owns, part of the earnings in case he gets a win will go to the opponent. This way there is always a fun level playing field on each battle and fair earnings based on assets held even when a player loses. No level limits would be needed that way even though the idea would likely need some serious tweaking still.
Collection Power Needs to come back!
Right now, there is no incentive for anyone to really hold a big card collection. At least part of the rewards multiplier should be linked to the card collection a player owns. This dynamic is completely gone right now. In wild 99% of players care about the returns and optimizing those and the most optimal way right now is to just have the soulbound reward cards along with some of the cheapest cards in the game
New Game Modes are Needed!
One of the main issues with Splinterlands is that there is an unrealistic time investment for all players if they don't want to miss out on rewards. This cuts down the number of potential new players to come in by a lot. Splinterlands needs a game mode (like draft mode) which acts as an indirect way to buy packs which should be given as rewards. This in a way that a player can come in at any time that they want to play, pay the entry cost and have a perfectly level playing field experience. This would be something that actually could bring in new players.
Conclusion!
Cards once they get dumped into wild become near useless. A new Soulbound Reward Card Set that will be released means there will once again be more card inflation giving players who run a bot in wild less reasons to actually hold cards dropping prices even more. Because of the gap between old and new cards, nobody is willing to buy Rebellion Packs and the devs continue to be in an endless cycle of trying to get some revenue and fixing the economy to pay for their expensive salaries instead of making the game more fun and accessible for new players so Splinterlands can actually thrive.
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