With the exception of the last paragraph, I strongly disagree with every point you've made here. If the DAO votes to end an asset class and the team agrees, that does doesn't damage trust between the team and DAO.

The thought that we introduced something so now we have to stick with it forever sets a far scarier precedent than getting rid of a token after 3 years of discussion, a supermajority vote on it, and the team agreeing. Calling that "on a whim" seems disingenuous to me.

Voucher were created on a whim by a team that was overworked and looking for a solution to a specific problem. People thought CL packs would all be bought up by whales in the first hour and vouchers gave everyone willing to overspend on one a chance to get at least one pack. They were precautionary and they didn't even fulfill their original purpose because CL packs never sold out at all. And now if we don't keep them forever, no one will trust the economy anymore? eh

And I don't mean to be insulting but the whole thing about artificially boosting the economy through tokenomics when we really need new players is the same lazy thinking that has kept us in this mess for years. If you were running a company that lost a lot of customers and found yourself too big and unwieldy, you of course want to get your customer base back. Everything would be fixed if you could just get a bunch of new customers again but in the mean time you'd streamline and cut costs.

If you had a ton of debt you'd reorganize that debt. When there's too much liquidity in a local economy and inflation gets crazy, they pull some back and even destroy assets. If you had a farm that created 100k eggs per day but everyone in town moved and there's only demand for 10k eggs now, it would be great to have everyone move back but until they do, it's fried chicken for dinner.

These things happen because we need to get everything back to a manageable place before we can grow again. A place where supply matches demand. Splinterlands is no different. It's not just the steemmonsters company that needed to downsize before they can grow again. The amount of assets we have needs to go down to match our player base so it becomes more manageable and we can get back to green candles that attract new players.

Everything would be great if we got a bunch of new players. But no one has come to this game in 3 years for the most part and its not because we don't have a new player experience or marketing. We all got here just fine when the economy was in order. This economy needs to to be simplified and streamlined. Its too complicated and its sprawling. There is too much of everything and nothing does anything but go down because of it. Vouchers are a prime example of having too much. If vouchers didn't exist, there is not a single thing in this game that would function any differently. If we have to invent reasons uses for them then they are the perfect place to start rightsizing our economy. Cutting the fat isn't a tokenomics trick.

Leaderboards?

And I know you said leaderboard rewards are far bigger than vouchers but that's just not even close to being true.

Leaderboard rewards print 1,970,000 DEC per league per season. That equates to 7,880,000 DEC PER MONTH total. Vouchers have in game (not speculative) value of 50 DEC each. 40,000 * 50 is = 2 million DEC PER DAY or over 60 million per month on average.

Voucher print is the DEC equivalent of almost 10x the leaderboard rewards. In fact, if you wanted to create 2 million DEC by burning SPS, you would need to burn 330k SPS at today's price. That means one day of voucher print is currently the DEC equivalent of about half a day of SPS print. And that percentage goes up the further SPS drops down (which is all its done for 3 years and likely isn't stopping soon). I've always wanted to get rid of leaderboard DEC payouts but you can't compare those to how massive the voucher print is.

We aren't digging our way out of this hole by inviting new people into this disaster and hoping they stay. Matt says he wants to get someone who is "really good at web 3 marketing" to come in and find new players. That tells us the customer base we're looking for. Those people are going to come in and look at the economy first. And ours looks like a bomb went off and no one bothered to clean it up. And in the corner theres a sparking, smoking, malfunctioning machine spitting out vouchers like monopoly money.

As for the validators running out of rewards 3 years from now, that's the only valid concern I see. But, the whole game is going to run out of rewards 3 years from now and we have no answer for it. If we don't come up with a solution that works across the entire economy, there won't be anything to validate. Right now it seems like the hopeful solution is that SPS goes to the moon so the DAO can give out dust and players will still be happy. SPS going up isn't helped by 40k vouchers being printed every day, stealing its utility.

Honestly, the right answer for validators will probably be to give out DEC (printed out of thin air) once SPS emissions stop. It's better than vouchers because we don't have to invent a reason for it to exist. And if we get the SPS increase we basically need in order to keep the game running so the DAO can handle rewards without going broke, the effect of the DEC print on SPS will be minimal. Let's say SPS is 50 cents and we need to print $1000 in DEC to replace the (20k vouchers * 5 cents peg = $1000) in vouchers each day. That's only 500 SPS worth of DEC at that price. If we get SPS to where we need it, 500 SPS worth of DEC would be a rounding error. But in this economy that's far from a rounding error. In this economy we need to be very careful about how much we print. And vouchers aren't needed.