*Please note: I cover as much as I can of the summary as a record of the conversation. I do not provide my opinion but actual conversation that occurs during the AMA. This summary will have questions provided from the Discord and the answers given by the various Splinterlands' team will be typed by me. Please forgive any typos or errors; some may be from Discord or some may be my own.
Personal Notes to you all: Have a Happy Thanksgiving if we don't "see" each other before then! I hope the holiday is safe and wonderful for you and your family!
AMA is now a Town Hall
The big news of the day is the change from an AMA (Ask Me Anything) to a Town Hall style. You can read the full disclosure of what a Splinterlands Town Hall is HERE however here is the main overview:
The purpose of the Town Hall is to highlight new releases and announcements for the game, as well as to answer community questions and celebrate milestones.
The Town Hall has a specific AGENDA as well as RULES and will be viewable on Discord, Twitch and/or YouTube
Founders Begin the AMA, now called a Town Hall
Today @aggroed, @yabapmatt and hardpoint will cover the following areas with various Splinterlands' team members:
Aggroed C.E.O
Matt said hello (C.T.O.)
Special Guest @homesteadhacker welcomed! Doing a GREAT job on Discord! YAY!
Hardpoint will do server update and now Matt will take on more design aspects of things.
We're focused on Chaos Legion, SPS governance, land, etc.
The good news is, that's being worked on while simultaneously other big things are happening.
Chaos Legion Card Stats biggest priority: We will have the team test the cards to get ready.
Getting the first version of SPS Governance get up and running. We're taking this project forward.
Aggroed's Update
I've been working some big deals behind the scenes.
The goal with this is try to get as many people into the game as possible and what I love about the guilds is there are these organized groups that gets 80K to 100K people together. They already play Axie and they have tons of players and it's really exciting to get people like YGG in here, so I'm working on large partnerships that I hope to announce soon.
People are calling this a private sale, but I don't like that term. I'm just making a bigger volume of sales. My goal is generally one level of volume discounts, make that public and make that available to as many players as possible and that's the goal.
Chaos Legion Update
Five Days and 14 hours left
592K packs sold and that to me (Aggroed) has sold. That's bigger than the Alpha sale and it's 2/3rds of what the Beta sale sold, so this is basically already bigger than the Beta Sale (that took 2 years) so we're really thrilled. What's your perception with it?
Matt says: Goals: we didn't want everything to sell out immediately but that opportunity was based upon SPS staked which is also available to everyone but provides utility to SPS and I think it hit those perfectly.
It will be interesting to see, will the vouchers get wasted? This is the time when vouchers will have the most value, so getting the presale packs has more value for before the presale ends. It would be a shame to see the vouchers not used. There won't be a better opportunity to use them. Maybe next year they will have value but not for the rest of this year.
On Dec 8th you'll be able to use your cards in battles with the release of Chaos Legion and another 2 million packs will be made available for sale and vouchers will be dropped at a double rate and still needed to buy the packs. The Wild and Modern Format will come later.
We have the voucher drop continue to make sure that everyone has a chance to get some packs and still drive value to the SPS token.
The rest of the sale (after the other 2 million are sold) won't require vouchers, but you will need vouchers for bonus packs.
Matt said there will be plenty opportunity in getting the Chaos Legions packs during the general sale. You won't get as many airdrops, and so I do understand that people are worried about the first million packs to lose those airdrops. We are thinking of giving a sort of time period, like if you purchased in the first 24 hours you would still have access to those airdrops.
We don't want a situation where everyone has to be on and smash that button to get those packs. We want to make sure everyone who is waiting is able to have an opportunity.
Private Sales: Realistically every pack sale is a private sale. Users pay Splinterlands through PayPal or Cryptocurrency so the payment is all behind the scenes and in the cases where people want to make larger payments and PayPal isn't feasible we work with them and that's fine but there's no benefits over others. These people are not getting around the voucher system or getting airdrops that other people aren't able to get. We're just working with them outside the functions of the cite to do wire transfers and things like that. Matt wanted to be very clear on that, that there are no special deals happening.
Note: More was asked about the Chaos Legion "special deals" Matt answered this in Discord
I thought i was clear on this but maybe not - any "large purchasers" will just be getting Credits and can use them on the website to buy packs when the general sale starts just like everyone else. They are not getting any advantage or first oppotunity, and while there is a lot of interest it's nowhere near 12M packs worth and we will make sure that everyone has an opportunity to get packs during the general sale and participate in all of the airdrops
Special Guest: Homesteadhacker (John)
Introduction of @homesteadhacker : worked in tech for 25 plus years, been a gamer even longer. I have a lot of experience with policy and helping tech companies grow in general.
My main focus is on Discord security and safety. The devs and I-- We want to extend that into our community. The first and most important thing is to provide a safe and secure environment for everybody. You should be able to identify Splinterlands staff much easier now on Discord.
We have Mods that just step up to help the community and everyone's kind of been doing it their own way and so now we want to know what rules we're enforcing so we're getting that on the same page, and once we get that going we'll start working with marketing and enable content distribution and events and have mini-AMAs to help players get started, guest streamers, help people learn how cryptocurrency started.
Aggroed stepped in and said we can use the community to help this ecosystem grow and I think it takes a little organization to get things going. Decentralization doesn't mean disorganized so we need to get organized and get more folks here and I think that can make a big difference. Homesteadhacker we're glad you're here so that everyone is safe. We had a sophisticated hack and we stopped it right away, but we want to make sure this is a fun safe to be. We're glad you're here.
Homesteadhacker said thanks so much and happy to be here
Hardpoint stepped in to say the hack was on Discord, NOT Splinterlands platform. The hack was someone putting up a link for about 15 minutes but it was taken down.
Hardpoint (Richard) Update (V.P. of Engineering)
Server Stability
We don't have major outages but we're working on performance issues, but happily we haven't had major problems. We're working on what to do next for Chaos Legion and the general sale
The Market Place is very laggy with sales and our team is working on scalability to fix that. A lot of the big brains are focused right now on the market.
Introduction to Dev: K-Bucks Dev at Splinterlands used to work in finance
Hyper focused on stability, most recently working on the market so we've been working on some exciting updates coming but I just look forward to open Chaos Legion packs.
We're working on quality of life features, upvoted by the community to feedback on Splinterlands.
You can check out the feedback area on Splinterlands
You're going to see a lot of growth over the next couple of weeks and you'll meet them as that becomes official
SPS Governance
Matt: Ultimately SPS is primarily a Governance token. Hardpoint is getting feedback but ultimately we want it to be a DAO and that will work through validators (they were called Oracles in the original White Paper) as they will not just be publishing data to the block chain but also validating transactions. It will work like WAX and bianance smart chain. SPS token holders will be able to vote for Validators and Validators will run a software that will have control of SPS wallets (so that will be transferred from Splinterlands to the Validators, similar to the Hive witness). SPS token holders will be able to vote on those validators and those validators will need to run the software and will pick up various transactions. The main thing will get the treasury. So let's say there's a proposal to spend 100K SPS tokens on a liquidity pool, someone submits that, and everyone with SPS votes on that and the validators will find that on binance, making it a completely autonomous system and it really gives the SPS community fill control over how that is used and how to move forward in the game.
Matt: Really hoping this will be solved by the end of the year. The validators then will get that software and will run the software in a test environment and then get going the beginning of the next year. The validator will earn rewards and will use that for fees. There's incentive to run these servers and software beyond just being helpful to the Splinterlands community. It's not just for the top players, the top validators will earn the majority of the rewards but the rest of the validators will also earn rewards to be there in case the top validators go down or are not available or something.
Matt: This is super important for what we're doing. It's really making this different and giving players that full ownership. We're all working on this in parallel right now which is fantastic and it's going to start getting better. I hope the community is onboard and excited about our plan.
Back to Hardpoint: You'll see updates on that coming. We probably will see a lighter version and that will develop into a larger design which you won't even have to come to Discord for that eventually.
Support: We will address each one directly when we can. We really appreciate the support team. They're working so hard. Please treat them with respect. We are driving the tickets down. With the server outages, we had 10,000 tickets per month and with stabilizing the servers that's come down significantly. In October we had 7,000 per month and even less here in November. We have 3 million new sessions on the site PER WEEK. It was a 30% growth. What is a website session? It's how many times someone opens up our cite. We're seeing a 30% growth in the Splinterlands website. That's the highest we've seen to date.
PLEASE NOTE: SUPPORT WILL NOT DM YOU IN DISCORD! We wanted to make sure you know that. If you need help with support, go through the game and submit it or go on Discord and talk to one of our officials there but we will NOT DM you. We have 25 people total and it's growing now.
Nate Eye Candy
Here's @nateaguila Things are pretty exciting, even though we're under a lot of pressure, it's an exciting type of pressure! We are all fanboys of the game ourselves and we have an invested interest that the game is as polished and as cool as possible. I've been working with @cryptomancer to get this ready.
Kelya
She's a dwarf with water but she has an interesting backstory which you'll see
Wave Brood
Water element: Notice the tiny boat. He's Epic! He's pretty powerful!
Diemonshark
Shark
If you're going to introduce creatures, don't make them just fish, so we will give you a special shark and it can go on water but fly up above in the sky and can control the sky and munch on whatever is down below. Pretty horrifying
Go read the story about the River Hellondale to hear about this Legendary Card!
Fire Splinter
Tarsa: Psycho girl summoner
She may look cute, but she walks into a village and next thing you know she's burnt everything to the ground and laughing!
Molten Ash Golem
You won't be able to breathe with this guy around!
Djinn Inferni
They will be on the upper levels of game play. Really think this is one of our nicest looking cards.
He is mad that the Death Djinn betrayed Splinterlands so he is focused on a show down with him.
Legendary: Ifrit Rising
Here's the Fire Splinter Legendary
He's quite powerful
Animations and STATS
Shadow Snitch
Djinn Inferni Animation and Wallpaper
Acid Shooter Stats
Here are the stats Matt dropped for the Acid Shooter
- New ABILITY: SCATTERSHOT
- Will randomly hit an enemy monster
Note about Land and Riftwatchers
Land is all on course. We're working forward with land, and it's going to be such a much larger project (Matt stepped in to add the importance of what they're doing with the land)
Last NFT will be released today! YAY!
Isaria
-Creative Manager
- Also working on the music
- We have several stories The origins of Dr. Blight, the Creatures and we've put out 5 NFTs that relate to each story
- Follow on Instagram and you'll see that as well
- Dygycon is happening this weekend
- Check out the Lore, the NFTs and Dygycon! YAY!
Development Questions
Will there ever be 'BLINTERLAND' same as 'BXIE INFINITY'? If not, then why ?
Yes, honestly that's a goal to allow there to be forks. If there are, we've made it successful player-run project especially as we get the validators set up. We would like to see that it's possible. We did that regarding Steem and we were able to fork off from that. This allows the community to own the project which is a goal even though we hope there's no need for it.
When will we be able to mint our NFTs on SplinterTalk ?
We have some people that we are paying to mint NFTs but I don't think we're going into the direction of just letting anyone do it.
Any ETA on a fix to the bug that prevents owners from taking their cards off of the rental market? Each week I end up losing access to at least one card for 2-3 days when I rent it out.
I didn't know that was a bug. Hardpoint would encourage you to go to the feedback site so we can upvote it and get this as a focus as a fix.
When will the sps player staking in ranked battles be introduced? I can't wait!
It's on the radar, we just have to weave it into the schedule.
We want the utility for SPS, and the whole goal wasn't just to create another token, it's on our minds and we want to provide a lot of utility to it.
Is there any news about card skins?
We have 100% wanted to do that it's just not been a priority. We love the idea of skins and it's at some point for us, but we have achievements too, so if you really want this, please get these projects up in front of us showing they matter to you.
I know this will be way down the list, but are events coming to mobile any time soon?
So the mobile: Here's the vision: Have that experience be even better and be more consistent with the desktop experience. I personally use the mobile experience a lot and I know there are a lot of things that are frustrating to the mobile user, and we're working on that to get more devs in here. We're looking at 3 to 6 months.
Are there any plans to allow us players to store/transfer our Splinterlands cards to linked hardware wallets and still be able to use them in the game?
That would be a matter of getting HIVE blockchain because your cards are held in the Hive wallet. So when and if there is a Hive treasurer, then that's something we can have in the game.
You can lock your cards in the game which means they won't be able to be transferred for a specific amount of days so even if your keys get compromised the hacker can't access it.
Game Economic Questions
Do you have any plans for when the DEC price goes back to its pegged value? The DEC reward pools will be less and more people will fight over it.
Yeah that's true for DEC and possible it might stay high and it might go back and that's why we're addding SPS to the battle system. Hear this out: for those people staking SPS those are the ones that will earn a lot and if you're not staking you won't be earning as much.
Is the “Q4” land expansion still on track to come out this quarter or have things been postponed with CL and dev ops in full swing at this point? Thank you for everything you guys are doing!
Land expansion is the highest priority along with SPS but not looking like it will be released in Q1
How much longer do we have to wait for our missing DEC/SPS to be returned back to players? It's been over 1+ months for me and I know there are others that have been waiting 2+ months now. Why isn't this prioritized as the highest priority?
It is prioritized. We are working on it and it is a slow process and there are decent amount of these issues with bridges so we're working on improving the overall bridge quality and we are working on it.
Currently a newbie only needs to spend credits to be able to play the game, they don't need to care about SPS or DEC. What do you think of converting this credit value into SPS for new players, to add value to SPS?
So that's not something we can do directly due to regulations but we are attempting to get 3rd party around that. Matt said, it actually does bring value into DEC when they buy credits. The credits are a convenience feature. We are working on getting credit card features and hopefully soon you'll be able to click on a button and use your credit card or bank transfer or cryptocurrency and hopefully will be 100 times easier than now.
Suggestions/ Requests:
Can someone update the https://sps.splinterlands.com/distribution page to be more accurate? Many starting times were missed and things like tournament rewards are coming more slowly I think. I speak to people outside the splinterlands worlds a lot and they always ask on tokenomics and I end up explaining this page is outdated which puts them off getting into the project
That's something we can put on the list
Any chance Cryptomancer can build a preorder system for the final phase of general sale?
Doubtful but we will look at it
Can splinterlands give incentives to guild owners and guild members? Creating and upgrading guilds requires a lot of DEC and is not very attractive, especially for new players.
That's because the DEC price is pretty high and we don't jump in to that. There are guild incentives and we're working on boss fights and we're working on that and we'll see what that looks like.
Would it be possible to add a voucher/DEC Liquidity pool to tribaldex that counts for airdrop points?
Things like that could count but it has to be a lot higher value than it every got to and there's a flood in that pool. I'm looking at it.
Can we get a pause on the daily quest? I'd rather not have to try avoiding winning with my quest Splinter while I’m ranking my way up to a higher league for better daily chest #. Thanks! Keep up the good work!
That's a good one for Hardpoint. Put in your request and we'll see where the community prioritizes that.
Can you make auto rental for 1 day rent only, and not automatically for 2 days? If possible, add a field for the number of days, if the player wants to rent the card for more than 2 days. Cancelling card rental consumes RC credits/power as well. This can half the RC being spent.
That's another one of those Hardpoint list questions
Can someone take a look at the token (DEC & SPS) displays on the website top bar? Half the time the trailing digits have a ton of extra places (ex. 10.0000043) Also can you truncate all the displays instead of rounding, because if you try to send an exact amount and you round up the tx fails.
Yep. We're gonna fix that.
If we could use SPS directly on rentals and buying cards along with credits and dec, maybe it will give more utility to SPS.
Yeah I don't think we're going to go to Splintermarkets but we can look into that if we go 10x again.
Voucher Questions
Vouchers will continue after the pre-sale, but they'll be different, right?. How will the 'new' vouchers differ from the presale vouchers? What prevents non-pre-sale vouchers from being used for pre-sale? Also when will the new vouchers start? After pre-sale or after pre-sale+1 week purchase deadline?
It will be exact same voucher. It starts again. There's a pause now until Dec 8th. We'll do 2 million for that amount and then a set amount after that.
If 6 million or so CL packs sell out in a very short period, can you reintroduce vouchers for the remaining portion so CL lasts a bit longer and it gives everyone a chance to buy in?
We're trying to do our best. You guys have gone back and forth and it's been a funny thing to see how this plays out.
Chaos Legion Questions
When does the general sale for CL start?
That will start in January.
Are there going to be any updates to CP requirements for CL? Each pack is worth 79-100 cp depending on potion use. That sounds like a ton of packs to even break into gold league (4x the investment before CL with 2x pack price for 0.5x CP)
Cryptomancer speaks: @cryptomancer will probably be less exact numbers haven't been decided.
Will there be a card like gelatinous cube on the chaos legion set for the modern format? I can't count the times I won because of it.
IDK we're gonna have to see. I don't know all the card stats.
Will there be a 10% SPS discount for the 2m?
No
First off, I LOVE the game! Will the packs that don't sell in the presale get put into the next 2m or public sale?
I'm not sure yet. I think most of those packs will sell. I'm thinking about not selling some of the remaining ones for future promotion events but not for resell
Will the current reward cards be a part of the new starter deck ? Also will the starter deck change over to the new one when chaos packs become openable or will it be when the modern and wild addition happens? Cheers!
That's a good question for @cryptomancer . I don't think the reward cards are part of the starter deck. It's just the core pack cards. I think you get Untamed, Dice and Chaos Legions as your phantom cards.
Will spellbook changes occur when CL releases or when the modern queue is released?
I think that's when it releases. Starter cards will change when it's released.
Will the general sale start immediately after the 2 m packs sell out?
Hopefully but there might be a small delay
Has the airdrop rate of bonus cards after Dr. Blight been determined yet? Ie how many packs purchased guarantee a drop of one L summoner? If so, can you share? Thanks!
No we can't share because they haven't all been decided. That's kind of purposeful so we can go work with our partnerships. Can't give you the exact amount.
Do the Chaos Legion airdrops appear in the CL pack itself or how do we claim it?
“Quick Sale” Chaos Legion Questions:
Have you thought about the possibility that after the voucher requirement is removed the remaining 12 m packs will be purchased almost immediately? This would make the landscape exactly the same as it is right now (new players have to use the base set or buy individual cards), slowing the growth of the game.
Yeah that's possible but we also provided an NFT market cap a lot of money has gone to the players making you pretty freaking wealthy.
Given that the team have expressed they do not believe the packs will sell out instantly, and have said they kinda hope that they don't .... doesn't it make sense to implement a failsafe to prevent the immediate sell out, just in case you are wrong?
No that goes back to if it wasn't announced initially then it really shouldn't be in there. If there's some kind of emergency but generally no. We set some rules, leave it alone, even if we don't like everything about it.
Are you considering some mechanics similar to the land sale in case the CL sale is quick? (draw on several windows, raffle tickets and lottery)
Not really but we'll see.
“Private Sale” Chaos Legion Questions:
How are you guys going to prevent the "guilds" participating in the private sale from flipping the packs in a short period of time? Do you care about that or just want their business? The moment the market changes, these guilds are gonna dump everything on the market and just leave. They are whales, that is what whales do.
Yeah that's part of why it's not really a private sale, it's more like a high volume discount sale and I think that's important to do because it takes days to set this thing up and I'm going to try and get a post out to explain what we're doing. They aren't just going on the market. They want to build communities so they aren't just going to buy cards and dump and I guess I can put that in some of the contracts.
Will every guild in the world be able to participate in this "private sale"? Can IG, Team Possible, bulldogs, Marcus whall guild or some others participate as well?
Yeah again not trying to make it private.
I keep seeing you guys will be allowing private sales via group buys, I am interested where can I find out more?
I'll put out a post about what the big buys are so hang tight, hopefully later this afternoon.
Other Questions
In the new modern format, will the power for cards that can’t be played in alpha, beta etc be included for the league requirement? oOr is it only cards that can be used that will be included for the power. Cheers
If it's for the league requirement it should just be... if you need a certain amount of CP Alpha won't help with the Modern format.
Can someone please take a look and revise this card? I believe it got a bit neglected as it is the only epic card that has no change between the 4th and 5th level:
Djinn Renova
Yes she's missing something, maybe we'll see
Do we have to buy the presale 1,000 packs at once to get the Legionnaire title? or can we separate into 500+500?
We will get that confirmed. Any combination equally 1000 works for the title
Will the SPS reward pool for ranked battles be added when the Wild format starts or earlier?
IDK when that's starting. I think Wild Format will come before that.
Are there any copyright/royalty issues if players use the artworks from splinterlands in profitable sales? or If we use the logo with our own fanart, would we face any charges of some sort?
We really don't want people doing commercial things with our cards. You can make your own fan art, but you shouldn't be making shirts that use our exact characters or making your own video game platform and if you want to do something come talk to us.
I seem to remember there being a post somewhere on PeakD regarding looking for more artists... Is that still a true statement? I know somebody who is talented and might be a good fit. What should I do to connect you?
Question: currently with the poison rule set if a monster is resurrected it is no longer affected by the poison is this intentional or is it an oversight that needs to be patched ? thanks for the amazing work team. cheers
ANSWER: Yeah it's right
QUESTION: I heard earlier in this AMA about credit cards but maybe I missed something. Anyway Vietnam is banned from using Paypal to buy credit (not sure about other countries). What is the reason and do you have plan to resume it again? It will help buying credit much easier than using crypto only.
ANSWER: Yeah we have a huge amount of credit card fraud from Vietnam so we cancelled what was there rather than losing thousands of dollars.
QUESTION: Can incentives be offered for guilds to go up to Tier 3 for Brawls? Currently every guild is tier 1 or 2. The assumption is rewards are better with lower competition in lower tiers vs higher tiers. There are half a dozen guilds eligible to go up to Tier 3, but currently Immortal Gods is the only guild willing to go to Tier 3. If the guild and brawl system remains this way, no guild will go to Tier 3 and brawls will only have 16 frays.
ANSWER: Yeah that sounds boring. We'll work on that.
Question: WHAT IS THE FUTURE USE OF VOUCHERS ASIDE FROM PRE-SALES & BONUS PACKS FOR RIFT-WATCHERS & WILL THEY STILL BE AIRDROPPED AFTER CHAOS ENDS FOR A SPECIFIC PERIOD OF TIME?
ANSWER: Yes they'll be airdropped continuously and we plan to do things with them.
Question: Please confirm - all packs bought in first 24h of general sale will get all airdrop rewards?
ANSWER: That's something that might happen but not settled yet.
QUESTION: can a collection power column be added on market? doing the math based on BCX is troublesome
ANSWER: Yeah I guess I'll put that to Hardpoint
QUESTION: So as there are different sides (Invaders and Defenders), which side will the top6-design-summoners be on? And will the splinters for the summoners each top6 buyer will get be randomly drawn or is it first come, first serve?
ANSWER: No it's the highest spender gets to pick and you go down the list from there.
Question: recently u guys made changes to bronze reward chest to help combat bot/people who arent very invested. have u thought of giving people who are above the 1000 rating but decide to stay in bronze for the leader board, the normal rewards like they would be in silver. those people are definitely invested.
ANSWER: Nope if you want to get those rewards you gotta move up.
Question: when we will have a translation in Portuguese our community is huge and when we translate by google chrome it gives a bug.
ANSWER: It's in the works.
QUESTION: Are you seeing quest potion discount by using vouchers?
ANSWER: No.
Question: What happened to renters setting the amount of days for rentals
This simple fix solves everyone moaning and complaining about renting.
ANSWER: Put in suggestion list
Question Are the SPS DAO treasury plans from the whitepaper still intended and if so, when might we see progression in this area? Referencing specifically to the Foundation/DAO Funds page
ANSWER: It's coming
QUESTIONS: 1. With regards to the airdrop/promo cards, is there a fixed total amount or could theoretically, in some extremely unlikely event, every single pack generate an airdrop card? 2. By extension, when it comes to the opening of packs themselves is there a fixed pool of cards that slowly depletes, or is any specific card virtually unlimited?
ANSWER: No every single pack could get an airdrop card there's no specific amount. (2) Yeah theoretically, the only card is one common and gold foil and every card is just that but it is possible.
Question: DO CARDS ABILITIES (SUCH AS POISON OR HEAL FOR EXAMPLE) PLAY ANY FACTOR FOR USING THEM ON LAND?
ANSWER: Working on it
Question: would it be possible to add to the SplinterLands site the past prices that cards have gone for to better understand and know what prices we would like to buy cards at, so we know of the cards are indeed at ATH or of its a good time to buy them
ANSWER: That was tricky to read. Sorry Yeah someone of them do that. We'll see what to do.
Question: I dont know if you want to answer this but, what is splinterlands doing with all the sps gained from the presale? Do you put it back on the market?
ANSWER: Might bring that.
Here's a link to the YouTube video of the Splinterlands' Town Hall:
@homesteadhacker welcomed! Doing a GREAT job on Discord! YAY!
@nateaguila (Creative Director)
@cryptomancer to get this ready.