Yesterday, the new Proposal to introduce DEC-B was launched and I voted No ot in for these reasons...
Important: These are just my own personal views on things and I'm always open to change my mind if better info is presented to me. So feel free to argue for this proposal in the comments!
My General View On the Current Splinterlands Situation
Right now I feel that there is a big conflict between the Developers needing/wanting Revenue and players/SPS holders wanting their fair share of this in the form of earnings from the game. Mistakes have been made by overhiring and overprinting pretty much everything (DEC/Vouchers/SPS/Cards/...) which makes the outlook for the Rebellion expansion not the best unless DEC gets back to peg. The devs are sitting on a lot of DEC which they considers company revenue and I assume there are also some whales that still have a ton of DEC. So this entire narrative of putting priority on getting DEC to Peg so the 'flywheel mechanism' can come into play to possibly push that price up more feels to me like a play to make money go to the devs instead of the players.
I would argue that for players it is not an issue that DEC is trading a lot below peg because that makes everything more affordable with the main issue being that SPS and Vouchers right now have too little use case. The introduction of DEC-B won't change any of this and might even make things worse.
Arguments against DEC-B
These are some reasons why I voted against DEC B
So the problem right now is that there is too much DEC and not enough demand for it which keeps the price low giving players discounts on both packs and DEC burned for Upgrades. The way DEC-B tries to fix it is to basically create more DEC with the difference that part now will be locked and it can only be used for upgrade burns. The reason more will be created is because it will be given at a discount and also it allows Vouchers to be burned for it. While this might create a pump in the short term, in the big scheme of things it makes things worse.
Basically this:
We Don't need another Token!, so far problems have always been fixed by creating yet another token, First DEC and when that didn't fully work anymore SPS was Introduced with Vouchers. There is land, SPT, Totems, GLX ... we don't need another token to overcomplicate things even more. It will also be a burden unless there is some kind of end date before the DEC-B totally expires.
Prices aren't known yet, so getting a 20% discount turning DEC into DEC-B is mostly for something we have no clue what it will cost yet. Things might be crazy expensive which I kind of fear seeing how they introduce something as the potions for land openings giving those that use them a higher chance on rarity or in other words those that don't use them indirectly get screwed over. Also, it could very much be that the prices just went up +20% to what they were supposed to be not giving any discount at all.
Voucher Value should not be determined by the team. Right now there is little to no use case for vouchers at least compared to the 40k that are printed each day. I don't like the idea how an arbitrary number of 0.005 Vouchers for 0.8 DEC is set as a way to burn vouchers creating more DEC. This means that the value of Vouchers is not worth more than 0.16$ based on the price of DEC at peg. I prefer a system similar to SPS were a certain dollar amount of Vouchers need to be used to get something meaning more will get burned if the price is low and less when the price is higher depending also on the demand.
More Reasons To Delay Land. So one of the reasons that land has taken forever is because the devs got all the money from it upfront at the start of the previous bull run which made it less urgent. Now locking in DEC for future use-case is pretty similar to this if you ask me. It's just better to use and burn the DEC at the time the land gets here and it might even be cheaper that way for players as overall there will be less DEC around when also counting the DEC-B.
The Main reason to Burn DEC is to Expect more back in the future. One of the issues with creating even more DEC is that the main reason players burn DEC to for example upgrade buildings in the guild is that over time they expect to get more out of it. This is pretty much the entire nature of Play2Earn games. I'm not sure when doing the actual calculations it all is actually worth it right. So creating DEC-B as a band-aid will likely in the future fire back similar to how the massive DEC printing in the first place along with the massive pack and reward card printing got us to this situation now.
How To Fix The Problem
I would say that the team likely needs to cut costs more to be sure to survive this bear market without the need for DEC to be at peg so they can sell their bags. Eventually, when land comes there should be enough use case for DEC and it slowly but surely will get burned potentially make the 'flywheel' a potential use case for SPS.
Give SPS & Vouchers Real Use Case! So far I would say that the main use case for SPS is to get more SPS, to get the GLX Airdrop (which is yet another created token) and to buy Riftwatcher Packs. Personally, I would not mind if Riftwatcher packs were sold in the form of 5$ worth of Vouchers. With 2 Million packs left this would mean 10 Million Worth of Vouchers while there currently have been 14.5 Million Vouchers created. It's far easier to give vouchers a proper use case keeping their price high as there is less supply while it directly gives SPS more value since they can be minted by staking SPS. Needing SPS staked to give the upcoming soulbound reward cards to turn into real reward cards also could be a proper use case.
I'm slightly worried about the removal of Collection Power and it being replaced by SPS Staked as the Collection Power really helped to create more even matches and needing both a card investment + SPS Stake investment for new players will be an even bigger step to overcome.
Vote Status
It looks like a close call right now and I assume it's because both the Devs and some Whales want this to pass. There are still 6 days to go though. Expect Voucher prices to go up and DEC to get a brief pump to dump back down again after the conversion period is over.
Conclusion
To me, this so far has been one of the worst proposals similar to how there was a proposal to switch SPS to DEC for Riftwacthers packs. DEC being low is good for players but bad for team revenue and I would rather see the focus go to downscaling operational costs while giving SPS and Vouchers more actual use case instead of this 'Flywheel' idea. This vote gets a NO for me even though I will respect if it gets voted for. This being said, the blind trust I once had in the team is slowly but surely fading away because of proposals like this and the entire conflict between the company revenue and the lack of SPS use cases.
Play2Earn Games I'm Playing...
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