Splinterlands recently made a post of all their planned upcoming changes:
@splinterlands/ranked-rewards-updates-follow-up
One change stood out to me in particular:
Changing Minimum Card Rental Time to 2 Days
We will be updating the rental system by setting a minimum amount of time that a card is able to be rented to 2 days rather than the current minimum time of 1 day. Rentals and payments will still be handled on a daily basis, the only change is that the minimum rental time for all cards will be 2 days instead of 1. This also means that if a rental is cancelled by either party within the first day, it will not end until 2 days have passed since the rental started.
WILL THIS HURT THE CARD RENTAL MARKET?
I think it could end up hurting the rental market's daily volume and subsequently card prices in general. That's my prediction anyways. The longer the mandatory time duration for rentals, the less efficient the rental market becomes for both those renting out their cards and for those wanting to rent cards.
The reason is the highly popular automated card rental services like the rent golem are able to optimize card prices for rentals because they are able to cancel and reprice cards continuously. Introducing a longer rental time frame results in less efficient price discovery of what a card should be rented out for because it slows down the repricing of cards to match market conditions.
WHY THIS WON'T BE OBVIOUS AT FIRST
The planned introduction of SPS for winning battles may inflate the rental market so it will make it difficult to compare one month to the next in terms of daily rental volume but to me introducing longer rental times will just introduce friction to price discovery. I've heard that the rent golem is used by almost 30% of people renting out their cards so I don't really understand why the 2 day rental change was introduced.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Maybe I will end up being wrong and worrying about nothing but to me the card rental market should be treated with kid gloves and any change that might affect it should be carefully considered. Not everyone has time to play and the card rental ecosystem is how some people "play" this game.