I used to be very active in the discord channels but stopped paying too much attention a while back. Long before the bear market brought down the vibe and nothing to do with the team itself.
I just got too busy to be everywhere and there were better uses of my time than watching the splinterlands userbase arguing with each other every day. I don't agree with a lot of the decisions made by the team over the past two years which i think hurt the game a lot when it was riding high but i also respect that they have built one of the largest and longest running blockchain games from nothing which is a major achievement.
Hopefully we are coming out of the previous bear market and once again the team has survived it and built on their previous position. A very strong sign of health.
From the moment I'm all about sitting back and letting my deck keep working with as little hassle as possible.
Play - Earn rewards.
Rent - Earn rewards.
Buy more cards - Repeat.
Sell some - Buy Hive.
A simple but effective way to grow the account.
The game has stagnated of late so it's the best way for me to keep up my activity.
Again, I don't agree with all of this and think that there are a few mistakes being made but the team have been busy.
They tightened up and refocused on building the game.
The first version of land is on the way this year.
Cards are about to go out of print.
At some stage this is going to have a crossover with land needing cards to farm.
Tower defense will also need cards to play and further hit the supply.
The two biggest issues from it's peak are the card supply kept going up while the user numbers went down as the teams changes hurt both sides of the equation.
Hopefully when land finally gets released we see the opposite effect with the oversupply getting soaked up by land and new users coming in for the extended gameplay being added.
The splinterlands bull market was fueled by a rise in web3 gaming combined with the end of untamed card packs and a lack of supply to play the game. It wouldn't take much to happen again.
From 
I guess I think the worst of the bear market is behind us, transferable rewards cards are out of print, and CL is out of print no later than ~30 days from now. I also happen to believe that after what was arguably the worst bear market in BTC history will be the strongest bull market in BTC history.
So, I see cheap rewards cards, lots of ways to stake cards, limited new cards entering circulation and day dream about what that means taken collectively.
We're planning on having land v1 out by the end of Q1 where players will be able to survey land. We expect the full V2 of land where all of production is figured out to take many months even from here, so we're planning a V1.5.
While we are planning on most land buildings only allowing a max of 5 cards per plot, in certain situations you may be able to put unlimited cards and are competing with other players to "mine" a limited resource. You can think of this like hash power mining Bitcoin, for example.
About the proposed studio deal:
before we'd start in earnest on this set
Land surveying will be done
Runi will be out
TD will be playable
SPS validator nodes will be in private net
NPE changes are ongoing
Rewards updates have gone live
Goals will have tradable player cards
There is a lot to proses there lately as well as upcoming changes to the rental system.
The biggest key for all of this to link up and go boom are increasing player numbers which they are trying to do and to not increase the card supply by dropping the next card set too early. Let the market breath for a long time after everything that has dropped this year and create some scarcity and FOMO.
If land soaks up the card supply there will be less to rent.
If there is less to rent then rental prices will go up.
If rental prices go up then card prices will go up.
If card prices go up then SPS will go up.
If everything goes up then more players will come in to earn SPS and cards.
We were in a positive cycle this time last year and could be again if the team do things right and don't fuck it up.
Mostly, don't drop a heap of new cards in the game if we finally see the supply soaked up and prices rising.
Not like last time when we had at almost the same time.
Nice steady releases with breathing space between each project.
Just saying, and if they can get it right we will all be celebrating at some stage.
It's the game that we all love and want to see succeed so here's hoping that the team is on the right track and learnt from past mistakes.
