Big changes in Splinterlands with the introduction of the Wild League Pass. Basically, you now need to pay for a pass that lasts a season, in order to play in the Wild League. The idea behind this is to combat the bots extracting resources. My thoughts on this and the profitability of paying for a pass later on in the post.
Climbing Up The Modern League
But before we get into some thoughts and analysis, for this season at least, I have decided to play in the Modern League after a very long time. The Modern League only allows you to use the cards from the last two releases. Most of my cards were from Beta to Untamed, although I do have some Chaos Legion cards as well.
I'm currently in Bronze III and trying to make it to Silver at least by the end of the season. It's a lot harder than it looks because human opponents have way more strategy involved compared to bots.
My cards are also not optimized for Modern at all, but I might trade in some old cards for newer ones soon. Still thinking about it. In terms of Glint and SPS earnings, I now make 0.03 SPS and 8 Glint a battle win.
To pay for the pass or not?
Previously in Wild last season, I was making about 300 glint and 1 SPS a battle win. That's a huge difference compared to now. We'll ignore the glint when calculating the ROI but winning 20 battles a day would make around 20 SPS a day, or 300 SPS a season. 300 SPS at today's SPS price is around $0.24.
The cheapest way to buy a wild pass is to pay with vouchers, which would cost you $0.80 vs $1.35 with DEC or $2 with credits. Even with ~ 30,000 SPS, it still isn't worth playing in Wild.
Will The Pass Cure What Ails?
I'm not totally against the idea of a pass but this does little to solve the fundamental problem. And that is that either new players have to come in and invest or old players have to invest more. If you think of bots as just an ordinary player, we see that just having more players doesn't improve the economics.
The fundamental problem, is that once a player has built their deck, there's very little need or desire to invest more. Now, if players see that their old cards don't hold value once they cannot play in Modern, why would they buy more packs or cards? They might as well rent if they truly want to play.
So, it all comes back to card value. Cards must hold their value in order to attract new investors and for SPS to increase in price, and not the other way around, in my opinion. It is still early days yet, and I might be proved wrong and SPS might go 10x to $0.08. Who knows?