Hello Fellows Splinterlanders!✨
⚡️Disclaimer: this content has the purpose of narrating my experience none of this is a Financial Advice⚡️
Welcome back to my personal blog on Splinterlands. I hope you are all having a fantastic time, First of all for all the folks out there that don't know me, I am Dr Estiqaatsi, I started playing Splinterlands in Nov 2021. After 6 months I have achieved different goals with this game and I am here today to share with you to my journey into this world and how it is going so far.. I understand that many people at the moment are not living a fantastic time due to bear market and international crysis so I hope this content can bring you some happiness, and energy to go ahead in your life.
This article will be divided in 3 sections:
1st --> Why Splinterlands? This is dedicated to all the new players
2nd--> The money side of the thing. Show my RoI and how it went so fare
3rd --> Product market analysis of Splinterlands. This is the juicy part for all the veterans, I am a product manager and I have gained a lot of experience over the years so take this as a gift where I share with you my personal analysis of this product. So if you want the juicy part of the article you gotta stick till the end of it👽
😝 Why I joined this game😝
👉Why Splinterlands? Here I am another avid gamer with unsatisfied needs, it's always great to play but I was so frustrated from the fact that your goals, your achievements, never pay you back. I have always tried to give my best in strategy game, took a lot of happy moments, tournaments whatever but at the time of leaving the game.. all I had was memories.
By randomly watching around the web I found out this game, and I decided to give it a go. It was all great, seriously it was so engaging especially thinking at the idea that my time would have meant something and that I had a personal return from my time. I started studying decks, learning about the RoI, rent, so many complexities behind a simple interaction.. but it was not enough. I managed to get into Diamond with a Gold deck and I was happy but it was not enough. I wanted my pie into tournaments, I wanted to see my name in Champion so I did my best to make it happen. All I was doing was renting and trying to optimize the RoI by getting back Reward cards and collect them.. so below you can see my Goals in terms of rank in 6 months
- 1st month G2-G1
- 2nd month D3
- 3rd month Champion 3
Since then every month I am hitting Champion (and luckily thanks to the updates this season I am champion 2)
BIG NOTE BEFORE READING MY MONEY INVESTMENT, I ALWAYS RENTED TO REACH CHAMPION 3 AND CURRENTLY I AM PARTICIPATING IN A SCHOLARSHIP SO NO IM NOT A WHALE👈
🌕 The money side of the thing 🌕
I understand that many of you at this point could say, hey great mate. You did champion by renting, what's good in it?!?!?
Well first of all to me Splinterlands is a great game and my personal goal is to be a good player, yes it is an investment but I have more fun by playing.
When I started playing I was dumb like a shark looking for a scent of blood. Logged in, took 50$ of SPS, 10$ of DEC and started playing (yes I am the dumb guy who bought SPS at 40cent)
By playing and playing I got into the gambling side of opening packs, so thanks to Tribaldex it was kinda easy to buy some packs on the secondary market for sort of 3$
- In total in this game in 6 months I spent:
- 100$ CL Pack, 50$ worth of SPS at a ridicolous price (still going crazy about me being dumb) and around 40 to 50$ on rents.
- My RoI at the end of all my spamming game everyday is...
- 30k Power collection worth 400$ (Yeah m8 I got lucky and with 100$ CL Pack I made around 300$ of cards, and no not a single Gold Legendary card)
- 2k+ SPS (gained through tournaments since I am participating in a Scholarship)
So as recap I spent 200$ and now I have around 500 to 600$ in assets.. This goes to everyone out there saying oh but Splinterlands RoI is low, dec is bad bla bla bla. Focus on your way of investing, look out for discounts, WRITE POST and JOIN CHALLENGES FROM THE SPLINTERLANDS TEAM
Honestly most of my RoI came from the fact that I was writing 2 article per weeks, allowing me to buy around 20$ worth of CL packs, SOLELY VIA ARTICLES ON Splinterlands!
🌕 Product Market Analysis 🌕
Here we are.. that's what you were waiting for all time. CONTROVERSIAL OPINIONS INCOMING! And I will wait down for your comments I want to hear everything you have got to say on this part.
So as I was previously mentioning this is my job so recently I spent some of my time looking at the market, looking at our team and their moves.
Let's start with one important thing...Splinterland team is doing freaking incredibly amazing.
I know that many of you are expecting a lot from them but prior to making any comments I want you to think about some important things.
Scalability. This is prrobably one of the most important words in the world of Tech world, a product, a feature to be great and appreciated from the market must be scalable. Looking at the numbers from dapp it seems to me that at the moment Splinterlands is able to manage 500k players. Always bear that in mind, when you look at Splinterlands always think that over a month there are 500k different "players" doing something. yEaH bUt mOsT oF tHeM aRe BoTs.
Indeed they are but we still have a fantastic uptime and unless exceptional events (I remember only few days with the sv going completely crazy the platform is doing EXCEPTIONAL)
I started this analysis with this word because there is another thing that is scaling at the moment and it is the team. I don't know how many of you are into the the management world but scaling a company...is A PAIN IN THE ASS.
All is rose and flower until you gotta teach new people, what to do, when to talk and why they do it. Currently the Splinterland teams is going thru a really particular moment where they need help (if you are looking for jobs look at their Corporate site, many opportunity for fella who want to work a lot). We need to give them time. You do not build a pyramid in a day, trust me. Maybe it will take them 3-6 months, and after that they will need more time again to improve things over and over, but they are going towards a direction where things, products from cute become beautiful. Where passion is not enough anymore, you have demanding customer. So meanwhile there is this bear market try to chill and wait for them to work for you.
Splinterlands team is sorta behind on delivery.. Big elephant in the room.
It is true, I am curious to know how is the PM of Splinterlands living this situation. Bear market, people pressuring and many feature to delivery.. the truth is PATIENCE.
I think that one of the best thing of this team is that they are truly willing to sharewith their customer what they are going to do over a certain period of time. Problem is that they did not tell you how complex and hard is this feature. In the Product Management world we do something called RICE analysis + Prioritization. Before launching a solution, feauture, product on the market the team sit down together and says:
Land.. how hard it is to bring it down? What will be the impact? How long will it takes? If we launch a minimum viable product will the customer be happy? Is it working properly?
When you read, Land, Modern, new packs, new expansion.. always think that there is a world behind, and more over there are people working their a... like crazy to make you happy. Yeah they are behind but also the market is not in a great position. In every case this is the good and bad of knowing everything about a strategy. WE (the customer) know where they wanna go, but THEY (SL team) have a long road in front of them to get their stuff done. And (speculative time) there are some moments where you do not really want to deliver a product because the market is not ready. (Let's hope Elon drop some random tweet and we all moon, maybe then they will deliver something new xd).
So okay, I got lost in my own word.. what I am trying to say is: Developing a product it is not an easy thing and you should let them take their time and trust them while they are making sure that this asset grow in value. Let's be real, some of the biggest collectionists and players are part of the team. Do you think they want all of this to go down? What I personally think (NFA PLEASE DO NOT BET YOUR MONEY ON MY PERSONAL POV) is that this product is great and Splinterland is trying to create an ecosystem where they have a team delivering more than one game and all of this will take time. We know about the Splinterland roadmap but what about the 5 yr plan? They have founded a company and now more and more people is working for them.. Do you seriously think this is all about a TGC game? More is coming and the more will come the better SPS value. My stake in SPS is not about Cards.. is about a company. By being part of this DAO we all are part of a sort of a Public Company were we have our stake.
BIG THINGS ARE COMING: I will be honest all the recent updates are awesome. Rewards update? My god the guy who thought it is a genius. No more renting and then back to play on last day. No more fluctuation in renting price. Now either you play or you rent. Congrats SL Team.
DAO + Vote: I wait this part more than lands, lands to me it is only hype and a good SEO word. Nowadays if there is a crypto game there must be a land, sometime I start feeling like we nerdy people need to go back to a land to farm and understand what is a land. Land is a good word to attract investors, so think about the rest.
BOTS: Yes splinterlands is plenty of bots, and I hate playing Bronze Silver, but you know what? They are part of the ecosystem and with the recent updates I suggest all of you to review your priorities and start playing for gold, diamond. The end goal of the reward update is to grow the number of higher leagues. Probably one day Bronze and Silver will be only league spammed by Bots.
Okay I have talked a bit too much over this. I hope you will enjoy my controversial opinion and this small book about product management and see you on the moon!
As always I hope you enjoyed this article and maybe you can learn something from this. If you have any question please feel free to ask me anything!
Also if you are new to the game you can find my links here! Feel free to check my other articles to discover how I reached Champion in 6 seasons!