Summary for the 60 minute AMA session
Azmare dice (orbs replacement) delayed by two weeks to four weeks to deliver a previously-unplanned an airdrop. It should be released at the end of August or first week of October. [*]
Splinterlands' partnership with Ubisoft Lab has had no financial return yet. It's expected to happen only after the new-player experienced is fleshed out. This has suffered delays because of Covid-19, since online meetings are less fruitful.
New-player experience includes hand-holding tutorials through the website interface, combat and collectible / financial expectations, linking the player to external resources when it is completed. This has the highest development priority for the main development team. Still needs a lot of work. Expected in two to three months [*].
New players are expected to spend a bit of money in cards in order to get better rewards. This will remain true despite that some mavericks oppose it. *This is the right way to do it. Every card has financial value. Players should expect the need to spend at least a little if they want to get acceptable returns from the game.
The collection score limits how much players can earn based on the cards they can play with (including leased to them). You can't go past maximum rating score allowed to your current league (i.e. 1899 for Silver) if your collection score is below the Gold League threshold. However, the required score should be low enough to accommodate those who can climb with more skill while using fewer cards.
The collection score has already been implemented, but it does nothing yet except for showing an account's score. The way it is calculated is still being tweaked, so what it shows you may vary. This is the first phase. There will be at least four phases in total, each one targeting more specific systems such as tournaments.
A player cannot expect too much profit by just playing using the first 10 booster backs, however the plan is that they still should be able to increase their earnings over time by putting their cards to good use, collecting reward cards and so on. The collection score should not prevent this.
Guild wars is being developed just as much as collection score, at the moment.
Azmare Dice will introduce new 3-mana rare summoners for each splinter. Instead of boosting status, they will offer them one ability, much like the legendary untamed summoners.
There won't ever be new cards that make old cards obsolete. Matt works really hard so a card never becomes redundant. This is why something like 2-mana summoners with abilities will never exist, since they would render beta epic summoners useless.
In a few months[*], the top 100 players of a ranked season will be offered an invite-only tournament to distribute prizes. This should make prize distribution fairly, replacing the chaos of the last hour before a season ends. It's not a high priority update, though.
There will be no further changes to tournament rules and/or number rounds until more work on collection score is completed.
There will be no further changes to lootboxes until more work on collection score is completed, even if potions really are dropping too much for the moment.
Potions will never be burnable or transferred. They exist to encourage packs purchases.
If enough people miss out on the Azmare Dice airdrop sale which will happen in during its first 24 hours, it could be extended.
There are no extra leagues planned for the foreseeable future (like something beyond champion).
The splinterlands team is working together with the peakmonsters team to further evolve and promote card rentals.
Mobile app is not out yet because of the Play Store's policies regarding crypto. Some more stuff has to be removed from the app. It has to be completely compliant with Google's terms. This is what has cause so much delay. However, the development team has expanded. There is somebody new (or a new group) designated specifically to take care of all this.
A partnership with the Wombat app is kicking in. Splinterlands should be promoted on it.
The trial mode of Splinterlands, which is basically ranked with only proxy cards and no earnings, seems to be driving away some people before they can purchase the summoner's spellbook. A review of it is planned.
A lot of promotion will take place after the new-player experience is completed.
Incentives to streaming on twitch is considered. There are some ideas, but it's not a priority.
Lands might not happen in 2020. The presale is scheduled for the end of 2020, but the update itself might only happen in 2021.
A fix for the connection problems is being worked. It has a high priority. It is not a splinterlands problem. Some blockchain nodes are faulty. This will be worked around thanks to Matt updating both the website and the hive keychain to middleman the connection to a functional node instead of leaving it up to the players to inform and correct this themselves. Meanwhile, these problems can be avoided by logging in on splinterlands directly, without either hive signer or hive keychain.
Guild wars tournaments will let the guild decide which player is taking on which battle. This suggests a single player cannot fulfill all positions in each round.
Lands can use monsters to boost something they do. What it is and how it's boosted has been disclosed. This part of the conversation happened regarding gold-foil cards. It should be the mechanism that actually makes gold foil worth holding.
The latest community drama served as proof of how the economy is great. Although some players seemed to be leaving, there was always someone else to pick up the cards they were selling. The bad thing would be if no one wanted to buy them.
There are more active accounts than ever before, reaching as high as 5981. Over 22 thousand battles were fought in a single day, just the day before this AMA was recorded. There are around 70 new users every day.
There are a lot of interface and code changes being worked on for the lands update, since it will include marketable items.
Prefix titles for usernames will eventually be a thing, but only some suffix titles might actually generate some kind of benefit. Oh, achievements are still far, far away.
Someday we will have little cosmetic things like animated emojis for guild chat, custom avatars and custom guild banners.
The team might use a third party's roadmap app to offer further transparency.
Direct-invite tournaments without passwords involved are planned.
Warning: Parts of the text marked with [*] represent an interpretation. There was no specific timing mentioned for it during the AMA session, but this seems accurate according to the conversation's context.
If you still want to watch the AMA session, below is the link to the official source:
