The team and others are effectively claiming (and probably believing) that the problem will fix itself. Yet, many of the assumptions that they base this claim upon are demonstrably false. There are ways to fix the economics (described below) but the team must actively plan and work to do so in coordination with the community whose sunk investment in the game far exceeds theirs.
Card values are down over 50%. The claim is that values are basically guaranteed to "eventually" recover. If you believe that "guarantee" or you believe that there is really any chance for that recovery to be swift (barring wise planned intervention), then either you don't understand markets or you haven't been looking at the numbers.
The specific claim is that the cards dumped on the market by jr6969 will "clear" and that prices will rise to previous values. Unfortunately, this entirely ignores the realities of market saturation and the effect on demand. Splinterlands is newbie-hostile. Prices are propped up right now by experienced players taking advantage of low prices and by card speculators. These groups are not large enough to absorb all the cards currently on the market -- much less the additional rewards and Untamed packs opened. Since new consumers are not appearing prices will continue to drop as more and more enticement is necessary -- yet the continued price drops will start scaring the speculators.
Where card prices will eventually settle is highly dependent upon the rewards offered to offset the users' costs to play. There clearly has been a Splinterlands "bubble" fostered by the major bot owners and speculators that has now popped (though many people still haven't gotten the message). Worse, rewards are constantly decreasing while remaining ridiculously concentrated at the top and the number of cards required to play is increasing quickly. Simple economics says that barring Bitcoinesque speculation, prices will continue to drop until prices equal rewards (tangible in-game rewards plus the joy of playing).
One only need look at the rate at which the total value of all of jr6969's accounts are declining. It is very slow and decreasing. jr6969 has pretty much total control over where the market goes -- but if he wishes to sell out this decade, he's going to have to drop prices further. Purchases will temporarily increase with each price decline but our investments will most likely continue to tank until card values are low enough that Splinterlands begins attracting newbies again. Watch the graphs. This is simple, demonstrable economics.
Price drops and market flooding will be exacerbated when market speculators realize that we are nowhere near the bottom and that any recovery will take a long time (if not forever) given current conditions. We'll still have an awesome game and the very early adopters probably still have their initial investments (if not a bit more), but the rest of us will have spent a lot of money to play that we'll never see back again.
The first, most obvious and most necessary fix is to reduce the supply of cards. Our biggest current problem is a glut and when supply goes down, prices go up. To stop the bleeding, this has to be done immediately.
The simplest, quickest fix which requires little thought and likely little intensive programming is simply to increase the max level of cards by one (commons to 11, rares to 9, epics to 7 and legendaries to 5). I would, however, argue that instead of the required cards increasing exponentially, the additional cards required for the new level should match the additional number required to gain the previous max level from the level below it.
Another solution is to require spells to "consume" a monster of the appropriate level and splinter in order for the caster to first be able to cast it (i.e. one monster per spell ability). Even if that enhancement is a ways off, simply announcing it now it will work will serve to incentivize people to stock up on and hoard cards.
I've previous proposed a third solution of Forced Growth that also has the advantage of making the game much more attractive to newbies (the next problem that needs to be fixed if Splinterlands is to survive).
If the team commits to any of these solutions (or another with similar results), I believe that we will see jr6969's cards start to clear and prices go up. If he's wise, he may even stop selling them temporarily to encourage the price rise to where he doesn't take such a huge loss.
This is a turning point for Splinterlands. If the economics keep going in the current direction and the disincentives for new and/or lower level players continue, the audience will slowly decline until it is unsupportable. Talk to the team during the AMAs. Ask them how they envision addressing the current death spiral. The answers will tell everyone where Splinterlands is headed.
