I normally don't write posts. I guess this will be my first and last at the same time for Splinterlands. I've been in this community for a while, but most won't know me. I'm not that active in all channels on Discord, just the ones I choose, but I do follow everything as well as I can.
I've seen the discussions that happened in Card Collectors and Shard Holders and know which side I would've been on if I had participated in them. That would have been the side that got called morons, extractors, peasants, and dead weight. That all came from a high stake holder. Now, I can add being salty to that, but from a team member this time. It all started with my response to the post below.
To get some extra context, Goldmatters called in Dave to verify and he then without knowing anything about me decided to label me as salty. Apart from 1 negative discord post I did after I found out how the conflicts and wagon repair kits were going to work, I can't remember what else I said that was negative. As far as he and many others know, I am a nobody, so why should he care what he calls me. Maybe everybody has the right to speak their mind if they do it in a normal manner. I was once told before that I shouldn't share my opinion and just use my staked SPS to vote and nothing more, that's when I stopped talking in most discord channels.
Below u can find a link to the response of Dave.
If u read the ps, u will also see that he thinks I will figure out later what's happening, well think I have a good picture in my mind of how it is now. I looked up the 30 newest players on Sunday 17/08/2025, the oldest was created on 16/08/2025 12:10:00 and the latest on 17/08/2025 17:02:30. Of these 30, 14 created an account, but have not done anything yet. The remaining 16 accounts showed one account that appears to be a real new player, the actions of the other 15 are shown in the screenshots below.
What I see in this is old players extracting, this concept would have been good if new players could play Frontier, earn these cards to max them out and then they could start selling the extras to the older players who don't want to go play Frontier, but would like to have the cards, this way those new players would have the ability to buy cards they can play in Modern. But at the rate this is going, the cards will have almost no value when new players reach that point. And when the juice isn't worth the squeeze anymore, that nice high number of spellbooks, won't be so high anymore.
The game now has a free-to-play mode that will get new players, there is no doubt in that, but this is just getting those to notice the game. Will they take the next step if they know what the cost is to play the game. Take a regular gamer: if he has a $100 gaming budget, why would he spend it here and not on another game that he can start playing all day from the start, and then not touch it for the next 3 years and then pick it back up. If he bought Modern cards and waited 3 years to come back, there won't be many cards left he can play with in Modern.
Say a player/investor wants to come in with $1000 to $2000 and buys regular packs with that, cause he wants a decent deck to play with, with the new conflicts model he has to rely on luck to get an airdrop, where he would have gotten 1, maybe even 2 in the old system. I think that rewarding such a player for doing that is the best move, but hey, what do I know.
And to attract a Vugtis type of player, I have a hard time believing that the only thing that was holding him back would be the fact that the game didn't have a free-to-play mode.
I guess this takes me to the point I started to feel negative about the game. I did feel like that, but I haven't really said much about it. As I see it, we had a good conflict system, but the Black Foils, another thing that may sound good as a concept, has made a complete mess of it. The game over-rewards those that buy just for the airdrop and doesn't reward enough of those who buy enough packs to get a max set. It feels like the game took a 180 on that and went back to the Chaos Legion style of airdrop. And I don't even know why I'm complaining about this, because I got lucky and am getting more than I would have gotten in the old system. I guess I'm trying to see it from how I would feel if I didn't get lucky and how others feel about it.
For the community this game has, most of the time they are great, but I've also seen how toxic some can become when somebody speaks up against certain changes. The insults that get thrown around are a real shame, just because somebody feels different about something.
This entire post wouldn't have been written if I weren't called salty, but guess I'll end it with just that pinch of
