I have been playing Splinterlands and have been a part of the Hive community for about a week now. Prior to that I had no experience with blockchains at all. I have been entirely and 100% FTP (except for the spellbook of course) and I intend to remain that way. Now on to the thoughts of a week old FTP play player.
- Gameplay
I have had my fair share of trial and error, frustration at extended losing streaks and unexpected losses, and elation at win streaks and pulling surprise victories seemingly out of nowhere. In the last week I have found myself going from playing only a few battles a day to get my daily quests done to playing quite often and and 10s of battles a day. There are several things about the battle system that differ from my experience with physical TCGs, specifically MTG. However, as I get used to them I find myself enjoying them more and find that they add more flavor to the game, keeping it from becoming the monotonous grind that it could be. Battles do become more of a struggle as a FTP player the higher I climb, though I have only started really pushing for rating in the last couple of days, as I face more people with a larger repertoire of cards, though renting cards does help ease the difference to a degree. I have yet to participate in any tournaments as of yet, though they are on my to do list for the near future. Overall I thoroughly enjoy the game and find that it offers a lot of features while keeping itself from being to much or becoming to monotonous.
2.Marketplace, NFTs, and P2E
I absolutely love this function. I have long talked about how awesome it would be and how someone needed to develop the software to allow people to easily be able to buy/sell/trade in game items amongst players. The ability to rent cards and sell cards to earn money is awesome and the ability to rent cards to keep costs low for players who may not have alot of investable capital brings the cost barrier down to a manageable level to prevent alienation of FTP players like myself.
- The Community
Aside from just playing the game I am also in the community on peakd (obviously), splintertalk, and in the discord server. The amount of information that is put out, both education and entertainment, is encouraging to me. It shows me that people are invested in to the game and a greater sense of community, as many of you know, helps with retention and expansion. The team putting out information and answering the same repetitive questions repeatedly in a day in the calm manner that they do also shows me that the team cares enough to both respond to the people and treat them with respect. Though I have had no technical issues myself from what I have seen in the chats the response from them is very quick, where as many games I've played getting ahold of tech support can be quite the nightmarish ordeal. I hope that I can grow to be a bigger part of the community and to also be able to help the community itself grow and flourish.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you have any thoughts or advice please do share it with me. Hope to see you all around!
