How I Came to Join Splinterlands at Exactly the Wrong Time...

I had pretty much made up my mind it was worth investing 10 bucks in a spellbook. I watched a few videos. I was inspired by a video by an established player where he talked about starting small three years ago and slowly building assets to his current impressive level. (Nothing against that player - when he made the video it was still possible to do that...) So I took the plunge and bought a spellbook just in time for the dev team to completely nerf bronze rewards.

The new user experience was devastated. Ground zero. It was very, very, very annoying. To this day, there is zero incentive for new players to join the game (unless they know the score and have thousands of dollars to invest).

I did what many other people did, I whinged, I made snide comments on Discord. I think we had (have) a valid grievance, and I don't think it has ever been properly acknowledged by the devs/established players. They may have had compelling reasons to do it. Sure, they had a problem with bots playing multiple accounts using starter cards, eating up the reward pool without contributing anything to the economy. And I know rank reward changes are in the pipeline. We shall have to see how they pan out. I can't imagine how rewarding people for playing longer is supposed to disincentivize bots...But we just have to wait for now.

I know the dev team are keeping 17 zillion plates spinning at the same time and I know their job is far from easy. Anyway - I stuck around. I invested. In the bubble. Bought cards. Staked SPS. I don't really enjoy battles very much, and, to be honest, I'm not especially good at it. It's fun to play every now and then, but I quickly get bored with it. And, right now, battle rewards are pitiful. At lower levels, at least. I'm focused on renting out cards. I'll cover that in another post. The DEC I earn from renting go towards buying and maxing out more cards to rent. I also play other games which bring in a few tokens. By convoluted routes I can convert them into credits to buy more SL cards. That's about where I am at the moment. Hope everyone is well. If you agree or disagree, or have anything to add, please leave a comment.

Originally posted on Splintertalk.io here