RE: Avoiding distraction.

It makes perfect sense for a game to give a part of the ownership to it's players. That when you put a significant amount of time or money into the game that you receive assets in their place. That games with digital assets become nft's and we can now have ownership over what we buy and what we do with them.

Buy, rent, play, sell.

That scarcity and utility creates demand and that as the game expands then the newer versions expand at the same rate. Its often been the case with physical collectibles and now we are moving to the next iteration of that genre.

I played the game for years when there was little or no profit to be had. Now that we can actually earn something for our time it's little wonder that it has grown so much this year. It's not a bubble, it's growth and development. The spike in demand was a bubble caused by the timing of a few significant events within the game and playtoearn in general but even before that, the app had been building nicely.

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I appreciate you engaging honestly with what I am talking about. Sorry if my tone was rather harsh before but a lot of people are really dodgy. I like reaching out to you since you always seem to engage with a thoughtful reply even if you don't agree with me. I think there's a lot to appreciate about Splinterlands but if they cleaned up a lot of their false advertising and deceptive practices that would go a long way. Some people seem to like their product as is but it should be noted that when people say they enjoy the game, they are usually talking about the dopamine hits they get from the gambling aspect and less to do with the game loop. Now I should give them a lot of credit for the shiny bells and whistles they have added to their pachinko machine and the masses need a low skill ceiling gambling machine to keep their minds busy.

Personally I like games that challenge me to be smarter and better. I have really appreciated MTG as a game that does this for me and I think one of SL's biggest mistakes was trying to compare themselves to it. They have created a lot of false narratives and if they made a more 1 to 1 comparison then I would be a lot more charitable when considering what could be considered fraud. MTG has always done what Splinterlands is fumbling to get right today and MTG is much more decentralized and deep. I always found it very strange that people in splinterlands try to use the Naples to orange comparison by citing MTGA. The actually relative game to MTGO also known as MODO. It features trading, renting and ownership of your digital goods with the added benefit of if you complete a whole set, wizards will send you the physical product to match. Arena was created much later and was meant to be a free to play and sleeker design to compete with hearthstone and games chasing that market. In Splinterlands you claim to own your "cards" but you aren't really given the freedom to do whatever you want with them. There are other places to store and trade them but the "game" loop is centralized and controlled by SPLINC in the same way steemit had control over steem. Even if we have faith in Matt and Aggy, this is still a vulnerability in the same way the Sun takeover happened. The obvious counter to this is SPS and the DAO but there are flaws to this model in that it was organized way too late and centralized control is already limited to SPLINC its investors and them maybe having to appeal to the biggest whales Matt Clarke and Neal. Contrast this with MTG where formats have been designed grassroots including EDH, Pauper, and Frontier which was later repurposed into Pioneer. EDH has a governing body outside of Wizards and wizards has no control over its rules. Wizards also has Judges which are kind of an in between because they have autonomy from Wizards but they will always be linked so it's a bit unclear how much control they wield over that body.

The depth of strategy aspect might seem like a nitpick or personal preference but it actually matters. Splinterlands doesn't really fulfill the key components of what has differentiated from board games where they separated from. These two features are secret knowledge and randomization from shuffling. In MTG you have cards in your hand that you know but your opponent doesn't know and this secret knowledge changes over time. Skilled opponents can deduce what is in your hand through play patterns and this is an added skill factor in the game. This isn't just fun. Its critical to game design because of something called permutations as well as P vs NP problems. Because of Splinterlands simplicity and "faceup" nature, it can be solved with limited information and this is why the game was plagued with bots for years.

Now let's be charitable and pretend that Splinterlands is just MTGO but on the blockchain with NFTs (Although Gods Unchained would be a more fair comparison). Is that really ultimately an upside? People say NFTs are a hot commodity and the face of crypto through 2021. Even though it was a big news cycle, NFTs actually seem to be more of a squeaky wheel with NFT holders making up about 0.1% of people in the crypto market. This small but vocal group shuffle NFTs between themselves rigorously which gives the perception of high demand and traffic. If the only differentiation these products have are that they are NFTs and that the whole trading, buying, renting, selling is inferior and slower to market than MTGO and the whole DAO idea is a faulty version of OSRS' polling system, what are the advantages for using a less robust, more centralized system?

This is all just food for thought. I like Aggy and Matt. I don't want to bash their game. I just want to be able to be honest and seek better outcomes without pitchforks from the cult of toxic positivity. There was also something I mentioned earlier that hasn't been touched on in that they have crowdsourced money for aspects of splinterlands that they haven't produced yet. Contrast this with the fact that in April the private sale drop of SPS will be fully distributed to large scale investors which creates disparities when the last project they announced has had full fulfilment to certain parties but they haven't done fulfilment for promises from years ago. There are other issues with certain parties getting different entry points on different financial products and services which super shady and questionable ethics but I'm not sure about the overall legality of that but I get a lot of weird Theranos style vibes from it where they make pie in the sky promises that always have goalposts pushed back as the market is left with relatively little except forward looking statements.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zU5JsP6pUpc