This week has been a bit slower (at least so far) in terms of substantial developments in the world of Splinterlands but there have definitely been a few things worth the attention of the community.
Let us begin with the Town Hall we had on Monday. It began with a short update on the development of the Tower Defense game and we actually got to hear what the name of the official name of the game was for the first time - Soulkeep. Well, it's not that bad I guess. It's definitely not cheesy so that is good. Other than that the closed beta of the game will potentially be released to large pack-holders in a few weeks, so that sounds promising. I am not really sure if I will play it or not as I am currently putting all my "fun" money and a bit more solely into SPL assets related to the card game, and I feel spreading across multiple games (TD, GLS, Splinterforge) will not be a great idea. But I might change my mind once the TD game is out, we shall see.
They didn't release any eye-candy so here's a screenshot from the Town Hall for visual reference:
Edit: here's also a nice video showing off some of the gameplay:
Next on the list of the bigger announcements was this week's build which at the time of writing has already been released (yesterday) and it is currently already live and working. The new things we got with it were the New Card Sets they had been working on for some time - the cards are now grouped by the general set they belong to - Untamed, Chaos Legion, etc. So, now when, for instance, you participate in a Chaos Legion only tournament you will be able to use all cards associated with this set - all promo, reward, and mini-set (RW) cards. This is specifically great for Dr. Blight owners (since he's the most broken promo card imho) as well as those who own the rest, of course. This is a filter yet to be released but I've added it here to showcase the way the cards have been grouped:
Another thing which went live with this build was a new interface related to the vouchers in preparation of the release of the functionality of the Validator Nodes. As an actual owner of 1/2 a Node, I am actually looking forward to the point when this happens. The "SPS Chain" is the new chain we got related to the nodes.
Next on the list was Weirdbeard and he, of course, covered the new stuff around tournaments and the community at large. The most significant things were related to deciding if Gladiator Tournaments should reward SPS or Merits, and he also announced the shortlisted names for the Community Leaders. It would be great if you cast your vote for any of these people:
My personal favorite is Gank but the rest of the guys are also worthy of being members of the council for sure.
Last but definitely not least since this is usually my favorite section - Nate showed some eye-candy, this time it was related to Land. Here are what some of the land deeds look like, pretty nice art indeed:
Natural Land Deeds
Occupied Land Deed
Kingdom Land Deed
Legendary Land Deed
Too bad I currently do not own any land. I can't justify its current cost since it's just a huge gamble. Yeah, I can imagine buying 1 plot and hitting the jackpot upon revealing it with it being a Legendary piece of land but the chances are about the same as winning the lottery when having just one plot. I'd rather wait for a potential drop in price of the common ones. I might pick up a few then since I am definitely interested in participating in this new exciting side of the game.
Next on the list of exciting stuff this week is the fact that DEC-B sale is now live. After they added the interface last week, we can now use it for buying DEC-B with DEC or Vouchers. Note that currently there is no "immediate use" for it but, of course, the utility is expected to be added in the near future. Here is the crux of the DEC-B utility as explained in a blogpost released by the devs earlier today:
And here is how you can buy DEC-B from the new DEC interface:
As you can see at the time of writing the community has already bought 319,000,000 DEC-B or 16% of the total available amount.
Last but definitely not least is actually one of the things I have been most excited about this week and that is the fact that the team (or primarily Aggroed) have decided to reserve 500,000 packs from the remaining Chaos Legion cache in order to open them, hold them on SPL accounts, and build Bronze and Silver league decks with them, which will be then delegated to new players through NFTy Arcade's platform. Each new player will be able to use one of these decks for a total of 30 days, and the SPL's share on the earnings from the people playing will be burned. This was met with a lot of salt in Mav's chat specifically but I think a lot of people are not on board with the idea as Aggroed has provided clarifications on the parts of the idea which were rather vague at first. I really do think this could help with the current issue the game is facing and that is - having a real hard time retaining new players due to the steep cost of entry and the hellish experience newcomers have in Bronze league thanks to the cookie-cutter decks played by the "denizens" there. A concern voiced about this idea was that the decks would be used for botting thus making the botting issue even worse but here is what a member of the NFTy team had to say in the Mav Chat (click on it to make it readable):
This sounds very reassuring for the time being. We will see if they can really detect any potential botting offence effectively.
Well this is it for now - yet another exciting week in the world of Splinterlands is upon us. Play More, Bot Less! <3
