Hello there.
The Splinterlands team are still hard work at churning out new content, while also trying to improve the player experience. One of their priorities is to get more players while also improving the New Player Experience [NPE]. There was an update recently, and they pushed out one of the improvements they have planned; 1 click rentals.
The rental market has been tweaked a few times in the past. When I started, there was no minimum limit to how long a card was rented. Some would let their energy get high, rent for a day, and go through all their energy. This saved them a day or two's worth of rentals, and some considered it an exploit so the minimum duration of rent was changed. There was also the addition of season rentals, where the cards are delegated to a player for the whole season. The minimum rental price was also changed to 0.1DEC, and there is a passed proposal waiting implementation of increasing it to 1DEC per day.
This was the eyecandy used in the Townhall update.
But going back to the 1 click rentals, this is mostly aimed at new/beginner players. Renting individual cards can be hard to understand for those just starting the game, and knowing what cards to rent even more so. This 1 click rental system aims to solve both of those things.
Initially, I misunderstood the term Set as just a set of cards that the owner wants to rent out; similar to what NFTY decks were. But when I checked, it was actually a complete collection of a specific Splinterlands Set release [Chaos Legion, Riftwatchers, etc.]. Since they will be renting a complete Set, players don't need to look for the best deals on cards that they want to rent. Another good thing with renting a set is being able to try all the cards. This can help them determine which cards work well with their playstyle, which in turn will help them once they decide to rent individual cards.
I tried to create my own set just to see how the process is, and it is actually pretty easy and straightforward. The autofill will try to put in all the cards that pass the filter that's been set. It is pretty nice that you can alter the card levels, and they are not just locked to Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc. levelling. If one wants to rent out all their cards, I guess they can just set all to max.
I also checked out the Set Rentals page to see how it looks. It can be found in the Market, and has its own tab. Seeing how the Create Set only had Chaos Legion for now, it isn't surprising to see that as the only option for now. I'm guess the Riftwatchers, and older sets will be added at a later time.
Looking at the set available for rent, I was surprised at the pricing. The cheapest cost per day is currently at 185 DEC. I haven't tried renting the whole CL Bronze set individually yet, but I don't think it reaches 185 DEC per day. CL has the most number of cards available, and with the cheap cost of rentals, these look very overpriced. I checked in the Peakmonsters, and the highest cost card for rent in Bronze CL is Nerissa, for only 0.4DEC per day. So the 185 DEC per day is exaggeratedly overpriced, and the owners are possibly trying to take advantage of newer players that don't know better.
To be fair, there are only 7 sets available for rent, so it should get lower once people start fighting to get theirs rented out first. But this is definitely something to look out for. If this is supposed to help newer players, we might want to make sure that they aren't getting a bad deal. It would be counter productive if the NPE updates aimed to help new players end up hurting them instead.
As for viewing the cards, I like the clean visual, and being able to hover over the images and looking at the cards. What I don't like is you need to hover over the cards to check which ones are gold foil. It is very tedious to hover each one, and hard to remember which ones are GF. It would be great to have a different view [maybe a list view], and to be able to determine quickly which ones are GF cards. Maybe adding a filter can also make things easier. I'm thinking they can maybe just tweak the card collection interface for this, since the filtering there is already good.
I also noticed that there are some sets where the card levels are all over the place. In the image above, there is a Lily level 1, but there is a Naga Assassin and Dhampir Infiltrator at lvl 7 which is way above Lily's level. If these high level cards are their reason on why the rent costs a lot, I don't think it is right since the summoners can't cast those monsters anyways. The renter would need to rent other summoners just to use the high level cards at those levels, which kind of defeats the purpose of the set rental.
Overall, I think the idea is good and has promise. It can definitely be helpful to newer players, but it still needs some improvement both in presentation and implementation. The good news is it was just released so these rooms for improvement are expected. I just hope they listen to feedback and are willing to make changes. I know the team is busy, so I'm also hoping that it isn't too hard to change things.
That is it for my review of the recently released 1 click rentals. Do you see yourself making use of it in the future? What changes do you think can help make it better? Don't hesitate to let me know what you think, and if you have suggestions for improvement.
And as always, these are Not Financial Advice, and Do Your Own Research.
If you want to start playing Splinterlands, you can use my link:
Splinterlands Referral Link
