I'm going to be making a few posts on my blog here to best explain what I think is wrong with splinterlands and what I'd personally do to make it better. The first topic that I've been thinking about is why it's so hard to attract new players to Splinterlands. While it's potentially a super complicated issue, it actually comes down to something very simple.
You have to make the players who invest into a set not just profitable, but filthy rich! When I think about the Untamed era and Kitty was $5000 and Yodin / Llama weren't that far behind it's easy to see why Splinterlands exploded into the launch of Chaos Legion. (The bullrun didn't hurt things either!)
Speaking from personally experience, I found out about Splinterlands and bought my first Chaos Legion packs when Baakjira was the next card to be air dropped. I saw how everyone who bought into Untamed and the sets before that like alpha and beta did very well and wanted a piece of that action and so did many other players and investors.
But why? Why was it so successful? The cards you needed to be competitive were extremely hard to get if you weren't here when Untamed packs were purchasable in the store. Scarcity drove prices up and I believe it is the one thing missing from Splinterlands now. So step 1 is things are (relatively) cheap while available in the store. Step 2. They become much more expensive when out of print.
To truly understand why every card set since CL ends up over printed we have to think about all the mechanics at play. It is not just unlucky or some strange phenomenon that keeps screwing us over, it's actually guaranteed to happen so let's look into the WHY.
Splinterlands panicked when they released Chaos Legion because the packs were drastically overprinted and the set was never going to naturally sell out. They created a burn mechanism to burn unsold packs and liked the idea so much that they decided to add it to every future set since. On paper this makes sense. You can essentially print way more packs than you need, fill the demand of the players, and any excess will be burned. A win / win situation right?
The problem is, when you do it this way, the set has zero chance to actually sell out naturally and create scarcity like it did for Alpha, Beta, and Untamed. Think about it. If enough packs are created so that everyone who wants them can buy them, you are essentially matching the demand of your product with supply. But simple supply and demand economics tells us that you NEED demand to be HIGHER than supply if you want prices to go up.
When you fully saturate the demand for your product, the players who invest in that set will not become filthy rich. If you're a decent player and grind like crazy playing Ranked, Tournaments, and Brawls, you can get your money back sure, I have done this a couple of times myself and it works for me.
However, if you aren't a great player and don't grind like crazy you're guaranteed to lose money in the long run. This is why we continue to lose players and what happens when you gradually lose players is that every set essentially becomes over printed. You sold enough packs to meet demand, demand continues to drop, asset values go down as there are more available than people who want them and it makes the situation worse and worse for those who stay invested.
So what is the solution? We have to stop printing enough packs to satisfy demand. It sounds counter-intuitive but splinterlands to me has always been a luxury product. Think Gucci or Ferrari for example. If everyone could get one, it'd be the death of that brand. Chaos Legion proved this for splinterlands. It was BY FAR the cheapest set you could max and were we flooded with new players? No... the game almost died on the spot.
As of this writing, DEC is 63% below peg and there are no new players in site with Modern eligible cards and SPS as cheap as I've seen them since CL. This is more proof that if things were just cheaper and more available we would attract new players is the wrong mentality for us to have. If anything, packs should probably go UP in price to $10 and have less of them available.
I remember scholaring for Bubke before modern was invented. In the gold foil high roller tournament I took notes on other accounts like this guy doesn't have a max Kitty or Yodin but he has Llama. This guy doesn't have Kitty or Llama but he has Yodin. It's because back then not everyone could get everything! You had to choose wisely which cards you actually went for. Looking at the market right now there are only 131 TOTAL BCX for GF Kitty. That's enough to make 17.5 max copies. Mean while there are 249 GF Dragonlord Mancer's! Keep in mind there are also max level GF Arcane and Black foil versions of him too that just makes it even more overprinted and there are a lot more CA packs floating around than Untamed packs.
So what do we do? We have to manufacture scarcity in the next set. No more over-printing packs on purpose and letting the burn mechanic sort it out. I'm not sure the exact number, but given where the player base is at now, it should be low enough to GUARANTEE a pretty fast sell out.
To make it all fair, I would create a mechanic that essentially allows you to buy packs based on two factors. Your average amount of staked SPS and your accounts average collection power over the past 48 months. This would essentially give the players who have held onto their cards with the biggest collections and most staked SPS the first shot to buy new packs. The higher your average staked SPS and collection power is, the more packs you're allowed to buy. Though there would be some diminishing returns to give new players a chance.
If you're an extractor who rents every card and sells every SPS as soon as you get it, you get to go to the back of the line and likely miss out on the chance to buy any packs. If you sell your cards when they rotate out of modern to pay for the next set you're going to the back of the line.
Scarcity + first dibs on buying new packs via holding onto splinterlands assets over long periods of time is how I see us turning things around.
Once the next set does extremely well and actually goes up in value once it's out of print, we won't have any trouble getting new players who need to buy cards and SPS because they want in on the next set and need to acquire them to participate.
This should apply to mini sets and reward cards as well. We have to stop printing easy access collection power that devalues every asset. The one exception I would make is actually promo cards. Normally promo cards are the most expensive (think hall of legends or Heliose... and how many people that pissed off) but that is the one area it makes sense to me to actually overprint and sell a lot because with limited core sets and mini set print rates, we will need to make money elsewhere to keep the lights on so make promo cards the one area everyone can participate in, just keep how many you release relatively low.
One final thing, I can't stress enough how bringing LEAGUES back is crucial to the success of this idea. We have to allow players a place to play in Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc who can't afford max level cards but still want a place they can COMPETE in, at the level their budget allows once assets begin to skyrocket.
So there you have it. This is step 1 for how I would "fix" Splinterlands. Feel free to tell me how much you agree with more or how much of an idiot I am! It's all in good fun anyway!
