Land Presale Lottery: Advantages and Short Comings

So the Splinterlands Land Expansion has been a real hit, with the level of interest shown by the community exceeding the expectation. The land hype and concerns by community on missing out the pre-sale due to technical reason, made splinterlands team introduce a lottery system for the sale of plots, so that every interested party have a fair shot at garbing the land they wish to purchase.

30 out of 27 regions/equivalent amount of tracts/plots will be available for the lottery. The interested parties willing to purchase a region or 10 tracts or 1000 plots can pre-pay in DEC or Credits to be a part of the lottery. If number of entries exceed 27 available regions, then the region/tracts/plots tickets will be drawn in a proverbially fair & verifiable way by 1st hive block produced after the lottery ends. The winners will be given their claim tickets and rest of the participants will be refunded in their in game account. And if no of entries remain below 27(very unlikely, as of now), then each of participant will receive their claim token and remaining region tickets will be rolled over to the presale.

The Presale will have remaining 3 regions(3000 plots) available in terms of tracts or plots, which will be sold on 1st come 1st serve basis. Maximum cap of purchase per account during Presale will be 1 tract or 100 plots. This will allow people who wish to purchase less than a region.

The lottery system is a nice decision by splinterlands team to ensure that lands are distributed to the interested parties in a random and fair way regardless of their time zone, internet speed and hive node response time. Although 27 is still a small group but it will prevent lands from getting concentrated in the hands of an even smaller group of people who can latter monopolize the system. 27 regions in lottery means we are gonna have a mixture single rich owners and pools. This may still seem a bit centralized but, trust me it is still much better than having huge chunk of regions in the hands of a single owner.

Despite of the fact that lottery had improved the odds of a fair land distribution, their are few concerns still bugging my mind. Their is always a chance that some single big investor/a group of investors may enter the lottery multiple times (from different accounts) increasing their likelihood of grabbing more than one region. With instantaneous refunds, their is no risk involved in multiple account entries. One way to counter this problem is to refund the un-selected participants in terms of only Credit, which can only be used in game. This will prevent huge dec hodler from manipulating the lottery with multiple entries. Plus, if a party is genuinely interested in region purchase, they sure can risk 750k DEC for 750k credit. Or if refunding in terms of Credit only is not feasible, then refunded DEC shouldn't be allowed to leave the in-game account for at-least three months. Any investor would think twice before pledging their investment for such a long period.

At the moment of writing their are already 18 entries with about 3 days and 17 hrs left. I am pretty sure that no of entries are gonna exceed 27 regions available and we are gonna have a lottery.