Splinterlands: Why I Started Playing it Again?
The Early Start
I started playing Splinterlands quite early after it was launched. I invested $10 to get the starter spell-book and the rewards system was quite generous in the early days and you would regularly be rewarded legendary and gold foil cards. I was also loaned several useful cards by @Costanza whose post on Splinterlands had motivated me to start playing. Once I used his referral link he gave me several cards which helped me get a head-start and I was soon moving into the silver and then the gold league.
I really liked the daily reward system which encouraged people to play every day to claim their daily reward chest. I had soon formed a routine to play Splinterlands for 15-20 mins after my 9 to 6 life finished.
The excitement of opening a reward chest was like scratching a lottery card and every time I found a epic, legendary or gold foil card it just made my day.
As I was playing regularly my card deck kept getting stronger with each passing season of 15 days. The end of season rewards were even more valuable and I will always wait eagerly for them.
The Sudden SabbaticalÂ
As I was moving and progressing from the 3 tiers within Bronze and then Silver leagues I was always very excited. This abruptly stopped after I moved into the Gold league for the first time. I thought I will be really satisfied with this achievement as each higher level meant higher number of reward chest and better quality of cards awarded. What dampened my excitement was the realization that the competition at this level was with pro players and my win rate took a hit. I was losing more fights than winning which added to the frustration. I had 2 options then, either to buy some strong cards or go to a lower level so my win rate was better. I felt at that moment that the reward rate was very biased for whales who had a big pack of high end cards. Rather than patiently waiting to earn more cards and strengthen my play I just stopped playing and soon lost interest to do the daily battles.
The ComebackÂ
For over 6-7 months I never logged into the game and completely forgot about it and was more involved in the new things which were coming up in crypto space specially the new 10K sets of NFT collections. Towards the end of 2021 I read a few posts from people talking about the pump in Splinterlands native token DEC and how the card prices had started mooning. There were people who had made life changing gains through the cards they got while playing Splinterlands. I rushed and opened my account and was shocked that some of the gold foil legendary cards I had got for free were now trading for over $500 each. There was a particular gold card called Ancient Lich which I had been rewarded just before I stopped playing. It was trading for more than $1,000. I realised this was another opportunity I had let slip.
If I had patiently kept playing the game just spending 10-15 mins everyday I would have also been writing a post titled how I made life changing gains on Splinterlands.
I then started playing on and off again but not as regularly as earlier. This changed once I heard about the new reward program introduced by Splinterlands. This I found in a post by @Heruvim. When I went and checked the site I realised that in the new system players at each league can earn upto 30 daily chests and 150 season chests.
I am now playing daily again and I will not repeat the mistake of rushing to the Gold league in haste this time.
I think the game is still in an early phase and once the adoption goes mainstream it will again offer the regular players to make life changing gains. Fingers crossed!
I am adding a short video of the opening of 81 chests I earned last season as the reward payout I think is very decent and lets see how long it continues.
Cheers,
SamBTC