My experiences and thoughts being a new crypto/splinterlands player.

I want to keep this short and sweet. I just to share some of the experiences I've had with my first week playing Splinterlands and my first week getting into crypto gaming. (Keep in mind, these are just my opinions. It's totally fine if you guys don't agree with me. I also am a very competitive player so this might not apply to all people! :)

Onboarding / Barrier to entry

As someone who's a total noob with crypto currency it was quite hard to figure out how to setup a hive keychain+wallet / using binance to buy hive / using tribaldex etc... just to be able to buy a little bit of DEC so that I can start passive earning SPS or buying a few cards that I needed.

I was a bit overwhelmed that I just used my paypal for the first couple days to buy some credits to get the spellbook + a bit of cards.

I feel like improving this process or having guides on how to get up and running (right on the splinter website) could be improved to help new players get into the game easier therefor growing the player-base.

​

Bronze rewards are pretty bad..

I've only been playing this game for about 6 days now, I'm already top 8 on the bronze leaderboard. In my opinion, it's only my first season playing Splinterlands and I feel the rewards aren't that great. As a new player I'm actually losing money.

As a competitive player, I spend more DEC renting cards per day to climb than I can actually earn winning games. This was a little bit of a turn off for me.. and honestly if it wasn't for me livestreaming and Clove supporting me my first week I probably would've quit the game.

I've come to the understanding that the game wants to incentivize players that rank up and add more cards to their collection, which I think is a really good approach so players don't just stay in bronze league every single season. But I feel there needs to be a better balance to allow new players like myself to rent some cards and be able to pay it off if I play the game a lot. Right now the game is quite the opposite.. If you play less - you earn more DEC. Where as in my opinion, if you play the game a lot and put a great amount of time/effort into the game, you should get rewarded for that -- instead, my DEC gets drained and there's not much point for me to play.

I was told to just make multiple accounts if I want to earn consistently, but I feel as a competitive player I want to put in time into completing decks on my main account and grinding for that #1 spot on the leaderboard.

Conclusion

I guess to sum it up, it was a bit overwhelming to get started - I hope they could improve the onboarding experience in the future. That should allow a lot of new players to join the community without feeling overwhelmed.

And on the competitive side, I wish I got rewarded for the amount of time/effort I put into playing Splinterlands and grinding the leaderboard. I feel like making 6 different accounts is just not a great solution - but again that's just my thoughts here!

Thanks for taking the time to read - this is my first hive blog! :D
If you want to see my gameplay, I stream over at about 4-5 times a week.

Hope to see you guys in-game!
Cheers,
koN.