Everybody is talking about Splinterlands $SPS delegation market that just got released over the week and as usual, while many welcome it as a good development, there are others who do not agree with it with valid points to back up their claims. In this post, I’ll attempt to explore both views and draw my own conclusions as to what this update might mean for the future of our favorite Web3 game. One of the major points of contention I’ve seen so far is 👇

Odds are stacked against new players

One of the most popular conversations about Splinterlands and many other playtoearn games has always been about the difficulty for new players, we have complaints that range from the assets being too pricey to the game being difficult to climb up the ranks. Everybody wants to earn maximum rewards with minimal effort, but how realistic is that?

When the market is up, new players find it difficult to acquire ingame assets to boost their game plays and earnings, so they’re easily discouraged and want to leave, likewise when the market is down, new players also find the rewards unpalatable, the game gets more difficult as there’s more competition with older players who are also scampering to earn which leads these new players again to be discouraged and want to leave.

Solution - Rental Markets

At every turn the market takes, it looks like all odds are stacked against new players. What’s the solution? Rental markets. With the introduction of Rental markets, the barrier to entry has been drastically reduced for new players concerned about investing a lot of capital and while giving them the ability to earn tangible rewards.

With the rental markets, players can rent assets ranging from cards to SPS as we have it now.
This rental system also provides returns for players who own these assets which feeds into the economy in a circular manner.

SPS inflation and price dump

The price of SPS has been in a state of continuous dump due to the high rate of inflation and inadequate sinks to soak up the inflation and ofcourse they’re have been many attempts to reduce the impact on the price of the token by introducing utilities that can soak up the inflation.

Solution - CP for $SPS

The latest utility is the multiplier system, before, players required Collection Power (CP) to climb up ranks, but now, players can climb up and enter the highest leagues without the need of a certain amount of collection power in their account as it’s been replaced with SPS.

So now, the more SPS one owns, the higher they can battle and the better rewards they get. This will help reduce the amount of SPS that would perhaps have gotten dumped on the open market bringing the price down even more.

Also, players who want to battle in higher ranks will need to acquire more SPS to do so, I’m a practical example of this.

I was a gold league player until the new SPS requirement happened, now to battle in that league I need to top up my SPS holdings, speaking of Utility.

How about DECs PEG?

The hustle to get DEC to PEG is still on, every other week it seems there’s a new update that will require DEC burns and most of us know that a healthily pegged DEC is beneficial to the entire economy and even SPS.

We’ve seen many attempts ranging from the DEC burn event to DEC burns from card rental to listing and sale of cards, we’ve also heard speculations about Lands and how much DEC burns will be required. Today, the price of DEC is at $0.00078, still about 30% down from the peg, at some point something will stick.

The good thing is that these issues aren’t abandoned and left to fate, the dev team are constantly coming up with solutions, listening to the community and implementing changes that will turn around the economy for good.

One thing I know is that this bear market is the best time to get things right, because a bull market can easily mask these issues only to come crumbling when it’s over. So hold steady lads…..we either get it right or we don’t. But at least we’ve got to try. I very much welCome these updates and changes and if something breaks, we’ll try again.

This is it for now guys! As always, battle till you drop…..!!!!