Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Summary for August 1, 2022
***** So sorry for the delay everyone! I got the time wrong and had an appointment during the same time so I couldn't get this done until now. I'm truly sorry for keeping you waiting. ******
*Please note: I cover as much as I can of the summary as a record of the conversation. I do not provide my opinion but actual conversation that occurs during the Town Hall/AMA. This summary will have questions provided from the Discord and the answers given by the various Splinterlands' team will be typed by me. Please forgive any typos or errors; some may be from Discord or some may be my own.
Founders Begin the Town Hall (formerly AMA)
Today's Town Hall included: 
Introduction from Aggroed
- Hive Pump
- DEC and Hive are up due to a Hive Pump which has been very exciting!
- It's a lot of things to be excited for.
- I get access to information around customer sentiment in crypto. How people spend money in this ecosystem, so how are people spending? We're seeing double the sales volume than normal. That's exciting! Hive's going up. SPS is doing up. DEC is going up. Bitcoin is going up. I'm feeling excited.
- I can think of one other reason to be excited. Chatter you want to explain why I might be excited?
Huobi will Put SPS on their Exchange August 3rd!
- Chatter explains about Huobi
- Huobi has officially announced they will be listing SPS in the USD pairing. They are one of the top ten and will be going live August 3rd and then withdrawals will be active on August 4th. Huge news for us!
- Aggroed: So, generally my thought is something like, What is the price of a token? It's often tied to how many people are holding it. Huobi being one of the bigger and older exchanges that's really exciting news. That's a lot of people that could go and hang on.
- They started their announcement pretty bizarrely. How did that get leaked?
- They posted on their website this morning. It was literally people that beat us to the punch because the news went out before we announced it.
- We switched PR firms so we're excited about that. Come Wednesday that's a whole lot of new people exposed to this token. There's definitely a push and shove and that's coming on the heels of the airdrop ending. There will be pools that's coming, but when that airdrop ended it was like a 60% of the overall airdrop supply went down so the two things happening simultaneously, we stopped a ton of inflation and then Huobi picked up Splintershards
- Chatter: The timing was fantastic. And pretty fantastic news. I'm pretty excited.
- Aggroed: Nothing really happens in crypto until the actual events start happening so this is big news. It's a southeastern Asian market and that's a great group of folks to get involved in our game.
https://twitter.com/splinterlands/status/1554137276808138753
- splinterlands
Other Marketing Updates
- With the Alliestrasza activiation last week, thank you for everyone that was there on the live stream. She'll be posting 2 other videos on YouTube and then there will be one more stream she'll do this Friday at 2pm Pacific time or 5pm Eastern.
- It was an official paid activation with her. It was a very small price to pay. She was super interested in Web3 at the time. The cool turnaround on the backside of that is, she's really in love with the game and will probably be sticking around after these promotional videos.
- Jason has been working on the tabletop miniature game and the Llama is done.
- Teasing for next week there will be a GIANT announcement. Hilariously I won't be here, but you won't want to miss it.
- Aggroed said the announcement for next week is arguably bigger.
Baltai (Ed) Board Member of Splinterlands
- Thank you for having me. I met you guys I guess 2019 just hanging out with Matt at a meet up here in Philadelphia. I became kind of best friends and they asked me to join the board 2019 or 2020 and I play every day. I've been fascinated with monetization of in-game virtual items for about 20 plus years. I started a company called Aria Systems originally to monetize in-game items. I played a game, I was a blacksmith, sold my swords on ebay and I lost all my virtual items when my credit cards expired. I went down this path of studying virtual economies and ownership of digital goods and items which led me to the founding of Aria Systems. Aria Systems is the leader in virtual monetization for games, cloud computing, a whole bunch of things, Disney Dreamworks, Comcast, Audi, a bunch of cool customers.
- You want to talk about your experience on the board? What's the pace and tone of the board here?
- I've been on like 6 different boards and this is the most high frequency board that I've been on in terms everyone's on the same page, full transparency.
- It's ok to have problems but surprises are bad and Aggroed and Matt do a good job of seeing that before they come so there really are no surprises. It's very high frequency and transparent and one of the best boards I've ever been on.
- What are the kinds of decisions we make on the board? Is it strategic? Financial?
- The way I've observed you guys making decisions. It's non-adversarial, everyone gets in agreement. The types of things we discuss are normal governance, insurance, do we have the right standing and the more exciting stuff are the strategic aspect of the company.
- Aggroed: Do we make decisions based off community feedback and what this community thinks?
- It's interesting because I think when we talk about stuff it's usually not just "hey, this is what I feel," but we think about the players, the players who have been here a long time and the new players. As a board member I try to do everything that's in the game. I started my own guild and got players to join and built it up together and we're doing pretty well. I think I have a pretty good view into the new player and how do we help them when they are struggling. I like how the decision process is focused on all the layers of players.
- Aggroed: It's important to me that it goes from the smallest minnow to the biggest whale. And in case it isn't clear, if Matt and I disagree, Baltai is the one that makes the decision. That's how this board works. I don't know how to emphasize that Ed is one of the most important voices in the company. He hasn't been on a lot of these Town Halls but I wanted to make sure you guys know. It's not just Matt and I as two yahoos doing whatever the hell we want. We find a lot of people that have a lot of experience and we think are smarter than us. Ed has an extraordinary understanding of corporate finance, corporate financial transactions and really has been an asset to us. The other area he helps us is business development. We've been talking about partnerships with other companies and in particular other brands and Ed has been leading that and has helped us with that. There may or may not be an announcement that Chatter alluded to, but things are coming and things that are coming has a lot to do with what Ed does, new business development and help us branch out to different intellectual partners. Anything else you want to add?
- Not that I'm allowed to say.
- Anything else you want to get across as a board member?
- I'm Champ II. I've been following this monetization and history of gaming for 25 years and I really think we're at a special place and time. When I was first getting involved in gaming, people said let's go into software because the gaming industry was suppose to be only 2 billion dollar industry. It's a 200 billion now. That was in 1998 or something and it's 100x what they thought it was going to be. What's going in is the ownership of assets and what Splinterlands has done is a once in a lifetime experience just watching what's going on is really really amazing. We're in the early stages.
Jens - Game Developer
- Hi! I'm from Oklahoma. Actually I'm from Denmark. I'm a Maverick. I'm working as a software developer and until very recently was assigned to the SPS node validator.
- I was a contractor before Splinterlands for the Danish Healthcare services.
- Aggroed: give a project update on Validators
- The biggest feature was the SPS delegation I was almost code complete but now I'm assigned to something different. SPS when you have that to be able for instance in tournaments you need your guildmates to enter tournaments you can send SPS to them. We also have the future battle rewards that might need SPS staked.
- Aggroed: You also manage a couple bots in the game.
- I'm one of the biggest bot operators in the game, and I'm a bot whistleblower if you can call it that where I um.. when I started Splinterlands I really fell in love with it and then I started botting and through this process I found some very broken things and that's how I built a relationship with the company.
- Aggroed: Is it worth botting now?
- When I started there was something called quest potions but now they aren't around. Currently, it's been a long process fighting bots. In the beginning, we had the quest potions, but then the team removed them but it was still extremely profitable so the team lowered rewards for the bottom half and many users were crying because if it. Right now the most recent change, my bot farm hasn't run for a month and it takes time for bot operators to deal with it and you mentioned 2 day rentals and I know for a fact a few exploits were patched by that.
- Aggroed: Is that the end with bots and you're doing or you going to continue operating?
- I think I'm still gonna operate many but my hope for the future is that more and more it makes sense to consolidate because then you're playing real players and you have a level playing field so bots don't have an advantage.
- Aggroed: We're gonna have bots. We want bots to have a place in the ecosystem but not a leach in the system. It's a really hard balance to find but I think we're making progress. I think it's good that we have open communication with one of the bot owners so we can find out what's broken and how do we deal with it currently and I thank you for sharing things that are broken so we can work on it.
Nate and the Eye-Candy
- (He introduces himself) What we're currently really excited about is UI team is really ramping up and you'll notice changes with the dashboard and front in tools and it couldn't come at a better time with SPS doing well. There's a lot to be excited about. The game is DeFi aspect is just as cool as the game itself. We're working hard with all the storytelling. We're in the midst of changing out who is involved with the artistic story. We're doing what we can to get better and better.
- We're working on getting Riftwatchers finalized and done. There's lots going on.
- Aggroed: What's the highest priorty for you guys?
- To be honest is something I can't even talk about. It's kind of one of those announcement to the announcement of the announcement. We're working on the UX and the UI so we can be ready to get those liquidity pools ready. We're optimizing the pipeline so we can get things out to you quickly.
- We just finished up the icons for those who own titles so if you have a title you'll have an icon. They are beautiful! They did a great job!
- Splinterfest Wallpaper
- Fire Summoner Drop Conqueror Jacek
He's a fire giant that's so huge he keeps a phoenix. He's sure to cause a big splash.
Aggroed: I'm going to keep pushing Matt to release the stats on this and part of the situation was that number of packs -- so let's go back to April. We've had some weird pack sales. In the month of April we did 150K packs. May was better 247K packs. June was terrible 131K packs. How many packs do you think we sold in July? I'm sharing this because it impacts how long we get to the next airdrop. We did 466,680 packs. That's a lot of packs for us especially in the middle of an edition. That's huge so if we get to the end and we get that fire summoner dropped then I think that's gonna be a major draw and I think people will be buying packs to get that legendary airdrop. The other thing it will do is push us over the 10 million pack drop. Now, I don't know if you guys have been around for other sales like Untamed and Alpha and Beta before it but when we hit something like 66% of the packs going out you start getting a little bit of the FOMO because you can see OH CRAP we're getting to the end of this. These are all legendary summoners that are gonna be released There's something magical about getting to that 10 million pack limit and especially if you do that with SPS apparently rising and Hive pump, it's very likely packs will be flying off the shelf. The end of this edition is coming. We're got the fire summoner to boost things along so that said we're gonna get a bunch of these pack sales were getting out. Anything else Nate?
Concept for Epic Earth Riftwatchers Summoner
Here's the concept page.
Then it got colored and rendered.
Weird Beard Update
- So, I had some interesting conversations. We've been working behind the scenes. We're about 80% of the way on a specific tournament. We've also been putting together things for a Splinterfest. I want to talk about it but Chatter's on the call and I'm scared of that man. I feel like I've been saying that for awhile now but it's finally here. We're doing a town hall this Friday 9 a.m Eastern so we will make an event and put it inside the Brawls channel for those who want to attend. I also talk to the internal economy team and we're looking at all kinds of ways we can be evolving the tournaments over the next couple of months but the big event is Splinterfest and that's what we're working towards.
- Tournament Town Hall come Friday 9 am Eastern. It's gonna be a lot of stuff. Next week is gonna be a massive Town Hall announcement and hopefully then I'll get my day in the sun.
Support Team Update
- Mark Jason
- I'm from the Philippines. I'm part of the tech support team and financial support team. I help anything related to financial issues. I've been here since 2018. There's a lot of Filipinos. There's 44K members in the group. The sentiment with Splinterlands is good, people like the new updates and still play.
- Ace
- I help with quarries and help with questions, anything with the blockchain. People request support more when there are updates in the game, but it's fine because the team has been going so well.
- Alex (or OKeene)
- ZenDesk Development team. We are building the support team to help our players. I'm in tech support on discord and working on tickets. I'm from Germany. We have a lot of players from Germany. We do a lot of different tasks but they all have a place to go. I built different tools for our support agents to look up answers in the blockchain. We try to make it as easy as possible. There are a lot of things coming that I'm not allowed to talk about it but this is amazing team. There are a lot of backgrounds here and it's wonderful to be here.
Splinterlands TV
- Splinterlands TV Shout out to Delta. If you're interested in getting your name shouted out on stream. Be sure you're watching over there.
- Ron said we're completely revamping Splinterlands TV. It's going to be announced next week. Nate's team put together an awesome new logo and I'm really excited about that. When you go the site it will seem familiar but it's different.
-Shared a Clip of the Week - Aggroed: We've seen a ton of people buying packs. I don't have a crystal ball but if Hive prices are spiking and SPS is rising, you can figure how much longer are you going to get heavily discounted packs?
-The followers on Splinterlands TV is at 1400 and watch time has gone up 30% this month.
Questions: Markets/Economy
- Will the non-card market allow players to swap tokens in-game?
- We'll have things to share at the next Town Hall
- Do you have to hold the SPS-BNB LP tokens in your wallet to receive the reward or can you stake them in the SPS-BNB farm on pancake swap?
- I don't know the answer to that. Nate- I would assume you have to use the tokens.
- What keeps DEC at “peg” when there are no packs for sale?
- Splinterlands has to go purchase a bunch of DEC but also how many cards in circulation and there's always people looking to buy DEC. When Hive pumps people look at buying DEC because it's more stable than Hive.
Questions: Battle Rewards
- If SPS in rewards is automatically staked how are new players supposed to progress at the beginning? Waiting a month to get their rewards to grow their collection is going to prevent many from continuing in the game.
- Yeah, I hear some of that. I don't think it totally stops us. Maybe we won't stake 100% but I think it's beneficial. We'll see where it goes. They might have to figure out how to earn. Jens was talking about the delegation tools you're likely to go get rentals so you might rent the SPS power.
- Does SPS replacing DEC in rewards (fixed pool that can’t be inflated) increase the chances we get an ECR potion?
- I don't believe so but that's a better question for the ranked rewards guys. And there's no ECR potion yet. The ECR potion is a good thing to have but the pricing of that is incredibly tricky. We have to be really cautious about how that's designed. I don't think SPS replacing DEC has any impact on that.
- Is there any data available yet on the number of merits being distributed through battle rewards?
- I think if they want to play 24/7 that's fine especially if they're burning SPS. I don't know how many Merits are distributed. I need devs to help answer this today.
Questions: Governance/Validators
- Can we get some greater clarity on SPS governance on BSC? The paper discussed BSC governance but today hive governance was discussed. Are we going to have multichain governance ability?
- Well yes and no. The SPS staked in game will have SPS game governance ability and the SPS staked by a smartchain will have SPS governance by the smartchain ability. Pluck (In Discord) answered this he says: So early in the season...daily chests had...
Champ 500 merits/day
Diamond 150 merits/day
Gold 50 merits/day
Silver 15 merits/day
- Well yes and no. The SPS staked in game will have SPS game governance ability and the SPS staked by a smartchain will have SPS governance by the smartchain ability. Pluck (In Discord) answered this he says: So early in the season...daily chests had...
I don't quite understand. Is it everyone person at 500/merits a day in Champ. Is it likely they each received merits? Is that like the entire merits?
-Ads on Google: Chatter brings up Splinterlands ads running. Some are good some are not so there will a couple weird images and then we'll see going forward and trim down going forward.
- When will players be able to vote on community validators?
- Well that's what Jens was in here saying. There's 2 months left in Q3 and we won't have validators up. I think the safest bet is Q4. If we're really lucky Q3 and if we're doing reasonable well Q4 but if there's a problem Q1 of next year.
Questions: Riftwatchers
- Will there be a presale promo card for Riftwatchers?
- Yes
- It’s been said Chaos is intended to last for 1 year. Is the same true for Riftwatchers? I think it will sell out much, much faster if it's a free for all.
- So, there is a pre-sale promo card. We're doing 3 million packs and if I remember right every 600K or 500K something like that we'll have a first promo card and the rest doing airdrops. I don't know what my expectations are. If all that SPS is going to the DAO but it's not rewarding anything yes at least temporarily it acts as a sink. If there's 15 SPS held, that's 214 million, it's a quarter of all the SPS being soaked up by the DAO. If it's popular enough, it will have a market impact.
Miscellaneous Questions
- When will we see the character animations in the game?
- The animation stuff, although it's not a super high priority... (because we have other things) creative is still trying to prepare for when that day finally arrives. Everythings TBA. Right now my mind is of Battles 2.0 will be phase 1 of team building stage (you click on a card you hear a voice clip "Yes to war!"). I'm not sure when. Here's an animation clip.
- Will there be a new use for Champion points now that the airdrop is over?
- Yes at some point but that's not something right now.
- If there is a tournament at Splinterfest how will we login to a public device?
- Probably using your posting key. Chatter is finding a way so you won't have to worry about security. As Weird Beard hinted there's a new Tournament form coming out.
Questions for All
- PLEASE NOTE: I did not add this section since I was not there live and was running out of time to get this posted for all of you. Again my apologies but I hope you enjoyed the minutes above! So many great things happening in Splinterlands!
Here's the Link to the YouTube video from Splinterlands' Official YouTube Channel if you want to see the Town Hall as well for a reference.
If you enjoyed my post and want to try Splinterlands, please use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=rosiew
Please remember my post is not meant to be financial advice and is just my opinion.
Follow These Folks:
Splinterlands: https://peakd.com/@splinterlands/
PeakMonsters: https://peakd.com/@peakmonsters/
Monster-Curator: https://peakd.com/@monster-curator/
1Up (#OneUp): https://www.1up.zone/
Here are some great links to join as well!
Splinterlands Discord: https://discord.gg/Tw7KjNsQGs
Monster Market Discord (Monster Curator): https://discord.gg/DR3J9rfRFV
PeakD Discord (PeakMonsters as well): https://discord.gg/7mQmzZeugE
NFT Studios Discord (aka 1UP Discord #OneUp): https://discord.gg/4VYBcNuVQd