The final day of the ongoing Splinterlands season is approaching and we have gotten an early reward already - the Guilds are now live! This is just one part of the changes we are about to see. Let's have a closer look at what that all means.
Guilds Are Live!
In an undercover update today, the new guild system was integrated into the game. It is not yet linked on the menu and hence hidden from the public eye. It will be properly introduced with the upcoming new season. To find the guilds already, go directly to:
https://splinterlands.io/?p=guilds
Creating a new guild costs 10,000 Dark Energy Crystals (DEC). You can then level up your main building to level 10, which costs about 2.5 million DEC for all levels together. Each level will increase the maximum member amount, but more importantly, increase the DEC for each members won ranked match, up to 20% more DEC on the highest level. That translates directly into a greater daily income for all members of the guild and will make them very attractive to all players.
I have made a video from the test server, where I demonstrate the new buildings and level features in much more detail. Check it out, because you can see that in the game only when you join a guild.
Dark Energy Crystals
There will be massive demand for Dark Energy Crystals now. The benefit is to good to ignore for every serious player of the game. I certainly want to earn 20% more of what I already get - who doesn't? The costs for the guild levels are high and 95% of the DEC will be burned, while the remaining 5% go towards tournament price pools.
Although DEC is inflationary, we already need more than we have pretty much every day. This new update will lower the supply and increase the demand even further - the price WILL have to react on that.
Ever since the introduction of DEC, its market value is basically the bottom for all cards. As we can convert cards to DEC and burn the cards forever, each card is immediately worth a certain amount of DEC, which translates to a greater liquidity. Before DEC, we had to find buyers for our cards. And although cards are in high demand now, it requires patience to liquify cards via selling them. Burning them will always bring less but is instant and can be sold against the buy wall on the Steem Engine market. And there is always a buy wall!
Check out the current market for DEC yourself: https://steem-engine.com/?p=market&t=DEC
The new guild system will hence pull up that bottom of the cards and make the entire game more valuable. This will effect all the cards with lower demand first, as their prices are closer to their DEC value, than of those cards who are highly sought after and already have high prices. The arbitrage market is already at work and buys all the cheap cards from the market, as their value will likely make a jump very soon.
New Rules
With the new season, we will see new rules for the Gold League and higher. There will be two rulesets combined with each other for every match.
Notice anything in that screenshot? Starting soon, in the Gold League and up, battles can now have two different rulesets active at the same time!
We've split all of the existing rulesets into two different categories:
Rulesets that affect what types of Monsters and Summoners can be played; and
Rulesets that affect stats, abilities, or other things on the battlefield.
Now rulesets from the first category will be combined with rulesets from the second category to instantly provide nearly 100 new and unique situations you will have to deal with, all in under 2 minutes!We still plan to keep adding new rulesets from time to time, and now each single new ruleset we add will instantly create 10+ new combinations!
The consequences for this change are yet to be seen but I do predict that we will see many previously less relevant cards becoming more useful than before. The combination of different rules will favor some specialists in specific situations and make them the best choice. This will obviously grow their demand and hence their prices. If you stay vigilant from the start and analyze the new usefulness of cards, you might be able to buy up the right ones for very low prices, before the rest of the market realizes their new value.
Conclusion
Yet again, Splinterlands doesn't stop to dominate my daily life through their innovation and pace of updates. Once more I feel incredibly blessed to be part of this journey early on. I have never felt so excited about a game in my entire life. And I was a long-term World of Warcraft (WoW) player from the start. If you have played Vanilla WoW, you know the strong nostalgic feeling and the meaning a game can have to you. Soon, WoW Classic will come out and I have only heard good things about it. However, I know what I will do, when all those nostalgic players will enter Azeroth again: I will be in the Splinterlands, growing my stake in the revolution of gaming.
How about you?
This post and all your comments are eligible for the following upvotes: