I think its time I accepted how obsessed I am with this game. It´s hard for me to come to terms with this as the life I dream of is not heavily oriented into gaming.
But I can't help it. Sometimes I'm doing whatever through the day and out of the blue I come up with a new strategy and immediately want to try it out.
Yet, no matter how many different strategies I come up with, they just never make the game profitable enough versus the time and energy invested in it.
Many times I've just said: "fuck this, I've got better things to do". But after a while I feel the impulse to play again and so it´s a bit of a vicious cycle.
Today I've decided to stop fighting against my this and finally make it a nice and profitable experience. But for that I need to take it seriously. I can't just have a quick idea in my mind and hope that will take me to the top. I need to be organized and take into consideration the different factors that compose this game. Especially considering I'm a small fish in the ecosystem, with no stable income.
After all, it is a very large, complex, and strategic game, considering that it's not only the gameplay, but the renting/buying/selling/staking that make this what it is.
And what a better way to organize thoughts than to blog about them? That way others can learn from your process, and you also make some coin on the way.
My current situation on Splinterlands
At the moment of writing this I have 143.43 USD worth of cards. This is the third time I've built up a deck after selling two others when the prices went up (which has been the times I have profited the most from the game).
This time I attempted to have a very diverse array of cards that could adapt to any situation and I was avoiding leveling them up because I only wanted to play on Bronze and chill, accepting whatever shitty reward this league threw at me. However, that lasted until I had enough CP for Silver league and as is expected, I got ambitious.
I started renting out Silver-level cards and attempted to get as many chests daily as I could. For a while, this worked well and I got some decent stuff, but later it just became a potion fest. Potions have no real value and I felt cheated by Splinterlands. Then there's merits which I find a bit offensive that they would be on daily chests even if people aren't in a guild.
Still, when things went sour on daily rewards, they usually improved on Season rewards. Or so I thought. Until I discovered splex.gg which offers different tools, including one that calculates the value of your rewards.
These were last season's rewards. Very bad, considering more than once I rented around 700 DEC (0.63 USD with current price) worth of cards. Sure, in 63 chests, there was a possibility of something nice, but then again that's just gambling and I play Splinterlands because I want to believe that there is a strategical way to make it big, as opposed to plain gambling.
I've seen plenty of people promoting the game with very dishonest comments. Saying that you can make plenty of money with a small investment.
Like this guy:
This is just not true. If you invest little on rents, you get your ass kicked, which means you'll be spending a ton of time to get something that could remotely be called a reward. If you invest too much, you'll probably end up with negative numbers on your account. You have to know exactly what you're doing.
And that's what I want to do! Learn enough to know what I'm doing. That my time is being rewarded, that my rentals are on spot regarding the price and the rewards they give me. I want to give this crazy addiction a bit more of a direction so that it actually benefits me, instead of sucking my energy and wallet dry.
Battle analysis!!
I'm going to start by removing one bad habit: unconsciously fighting battle after battle with no deep analysis of what just went on.
I think one of the things that makes Splinterlands so addictive is that battles pass on quickly, and every time you win, you have the illusion of profit. But it's just an illusion.
Winning 1 cent for a minute of your life isn't really a win. 60 cents an hour, who could live off such a meager salary? And you can't even make that, because your energy capture rate is constantly going down. Plus, that's on lower Gold league for which you're either renting quite a bit of DEC or have invested a significant amount to own the necessary power.
No, the path to Splinter-glory lies elsewhere, not mindlessly mashing buttons in hopes of those reward chests containing something worth your time. It's in whatever you can actually learn from the experience and doing things in an effective way.