Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Summary for August 15, 2022
*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 Town Hall/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.
SPS Ranked Rewards: switching from DEC to SPS rewards.
Coming at the end of August (or early September but the goal is end of August)
Will be arriving to you as STAKED SPS so the moment you get it you'll be earning interest
You'll be able to burn SPS for DEC
Aggroed asks: Has this been a big project and are we still tweaking this?
There's a bunch for SPS all about creating value.
Ranked rewards was the first release of that
We've been using all the data and adjusting and that's why we've been saying Ranked Rewards Updates because we're fine-tuning
We're feeling better every week about the adjustments
We're really excited about the SPS drop and we had to wait for the airdrops to be over. The SPS will be fixed (see white paper for more details).
Aggroed: DEC was quite high for each season and now we'll have an 80% drop in DEC once that ends. That much SPS going out will be a lot of rewards to play card games. That seems like a big deal. In this case, this is really connected to how good is your card collection. The majority of the rewards is in the upper tiers.
Note: The only way to get DEC is to burn the SPS. This seems like a huge change for the economy.
We are currently working on the SPS Governance first phase so that the community can vote on changes.
Day one it's proposals put up by Splinterlands and ones that we're highly curating. We have ones to circulate to the SPS stakeholders. This is very different so we're tip-toeing into it but it's very exciting.
How is Development Holding Out?
Hardpoint: Fast and Furious
We went from Tuesday/Thursday to just Tuesday and Thursdays are patches so all new releases are Tuesdays now. The real goal for the company is to have the same schedule and when we had Thursdays we had staff working on weekends and we don't want them to have to do that.
Land
We are closing in on tech modernization (the app bar, purchasing SPS, purchasing DEC, purchasing credits)
It's all interrelated in getting ready for land
Non-card Market
I'm excited about that because it will be the first time we can buy and sell backs among players. The first time you can natively do this on our site (before you had to go to Tribaldex, other sites). We can have a more liquid marketing.
A reward system has to go live too for land to work properly for land holders. There's a 5 year distribution that has to happen for land so keep that in mind when you're considering what you want to buy and sell.
We'll be teasing that out.. and to bring that up....
Splinterfest
Stay tuned for land here at Splinterfest
We are still targeting that Q4 release for land. It's underway and we're working hard on land and Splinterfest
Rift watchers
It's Gorgeous! (Aggroed)
We're going to go for sale next month. We are in the closure for that going live. We're going to allow you to buy the packs first and open later.
Aggroed: That will require vouchers right?
Not saying anything here (Hardpoint)
Matt said the last time he was here that vouchers would be required for those first set of packs (that it will be like Chaos Legion).
Is there a promo card? YES! A Dr. Blight style promo card. Only the first purchases will be able to get it. I won't say what it is, but if you want to be awesome, you will want to get those early Rift watchers packs.
Next couple of weeks you'll see more about the vouchers
SPS Validators
Private Net, Public Net and Live Net
We just reached the milestone of Private Net and running it, watching it and seeing how it's working.
Next will be to get it out to the Public, seeing how it works but not used yet for everyone
Then Live Net
Live Rewards are coming for those who hold the Validators. There are still licenses for sale.
We're putting commitment in them being easy to set up, easy to run.
Aggroed: What are you the most hyped about?
Well there are things we can't talk about that I'm excited about
Things we CAN talk about I'm excited about the ranked rewards with SPS coming instead of DEC and SPS being burnable.
This is a big piece of Dec being spent for assets and SPS being burned and that helps getting DEC to the peg.
We have more to come. We had the really exciting announcement last week for Genesis Sports so that was great to finally getting that public that's exciting with the MLSPA. There will be so much more to talk about. There will be airdrops going to our SPS stakers.
We announce this stuff and quickly move on but it's so big. We'll probably touch on this later but just seeing what's being developed for it is freaking exciting. The game we're building has me really interested.
Spliterlands Arcade game
The Wizards will be going over that and voting to see if we move forward.
The arcade will have multiple games. It's a Tower Defense Game.
Hardpoint: I've been working really hard on this and I'm really excited and hope it goes through.
Nate and the Creative department
I feel very honored-- I feel very blessed that these meetings are really fun because we get to talk about all these storylines and the depth of these characters and we're just having fun all day long. A lot of these projects .. there's just so much...
-Aggroed: We've been talking about land for quite awhile so in their defense, they have been waiting 18 months, 2 years.
Aggroed: You can't sell cards and land if it's not up to date though. I hope people understand that. We want it to be awesome. We feel like the land project is great.
Nate: I'm not complaining at all. If you're listening or watching this understand that the team loves to spoil the community with updates and updated production quality and better tokenomics and better everything. So when we're in these meetings we're all excited with "Oh we could do this and this and this" So it's really great dynamic when the team is just as excited and we want to hurry up and have it too!
Eye candy from Nate
Wild and Modern on the Creative Side
Phase 1 is not the ultimate vision just so you know. That was just us trying to get it out there. So here's a sneak peak concept sketch for wild.
RiftWatchers
This week we should have final assets over and done with in our rear view mirror the end of this week! So I don't foresee it taking that long to get this going.
It doesn't take that long once we get the assets over to development and then it's able to be out!
Rift Gems is what the packs will be called
Nate says it's the best pack opening to date
Wallpaper
Riftwatchers Logo
Rift Watcher Character
Knight Ghoul Death Card - Concept to Final
Weird Beard and Tournament Announcement
There's a bug going with tournaments and it's being worked on
The Splinterlands Open Tournament (Ghost Card tournaments -- all players that enter have access to all the same cards)
Who is this important to?
It's one of the most requested things.
It's the players and what we can do with it as a marketing outreach pool
A lot of players who want to play a skill-based game.
The other tournaments will always exist but it's nice to see who's really good-- who knows the game.
We can make these champion level, gold foil deck and this lets people play those top cards.
Players can decide, they have two-pronged competition and it makes it so we don't have to always balance a scale.
This allows us to do tournaments with streamers and helps give an entry point to new players.
There are prizes and fees and I can't talk about the fees yet. We still want people to buy cards and assets but the ghost cards we will be able to use on a case by case basis.
This helps new players to experience what gold is like and they can get up there and they want to build their collection.
Making ghost tournaments available is going to be really beneficial.
Aggroed: I'm so grateful for you to be here WeirdBeard. Thank you so much!
Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks we'll talk about the Splinterlands' Tournament.
Bulldog
I'm the community manager here, helping out new players, helping out guilds. Doing some work with the new Genesis project. Let's talk about the Feedback area. There are a bunch of things on feedback.splinterlands.com Let's go over them:
SPS auto
Set SPS so you can automatically claim it (so automatically generates it as staked)
Hardpoint: We love this idea, but it's hard on the technical side. The ranked rewards will be automatically staked SPS. Your money makes money right away. You win a battle and that money starts making you money right away.
Card pools for the Guild
Assigned to people for different brawls and things. Or a percentage of the DEC gets to the guild donation
Hardpoint: Do we read these? Yes, but we can't do them right away because of the technical side but we LOVE the community feedback. I think you'll see improvement for how the guild works, the donation.
Adding a PVE Campaign
Preset teams, a way to teach new players the game
A lot of players who want to play without having those cards and we just talked about this with ghost tournaments and they will be able to do this
Aggroed wants Boss Fights
Support Person: Khan
He's been in the community forever!
Thank you Aggroed. I joined last year and a great journey. I'm from Pakistan. I've been part of support for one year. We can build out things easily. Support has been building support guides with many articles on that. We have a "Wreck It" squad so we can break the tools so we can build the systems within support. A really good example of that was liquidity pools. We identified 5 or 6 issues to solve.
It's been really exciting with the company culture being so diverse and it really adds up to the value of the community.
Team: DorianR - Husband and Wife Team Scott and Ashley
We take care of creating the cards everyone plays, we help write the stories.
We were co-authors of a fantasy series before hand. We still write books as well but when Nate sent out the call we thought yes this would be awesome!
Aggroed: I want to have all that fantasy out there, and I'm glad you guys are there to create it!
Our biggest focus right now has been on Praetoria and all the lore with it. It's been a high priority now and it's good fun and should be reflected on the cards we release and the stories we release.
Nate drops wallpaper
Aggroed: He is wanting more bravery as that focus so people can see themselves in this, I feel that's a great story arch to pull from. That's how we make our players fall in love with our characters.
Speaking from a couple who's done this for many years and written many books and it's so interesting to bounce ideas off of each other and then also having feedback for each other. It's something about working with your spouse that is so much better. It's truly fun.
Nate: These guys were the first narrative team.
Splinterlands TV with RonDon (r0nd0n)
We've had a couple problems. It's 54 players doing this on one channel so we've had a bit of a trouble.
Aggroed is giving shout outs to some of the amazing people that watch and support Splinterlands TV and the community.
We won't have a streamer's spotlight this week but we will next week.
RonDon shares a Clip of the Week
-New Feature: Go to the schedule and every single show will have a link to their last replay and it won't just have the video but also the timestamp for that video.
Pre-set Questions
Battle Rewards
Will SPS in battle rewards be very RNG dependent with big “homeruns” the way DEC is now? If so, how does that work with a fixed pool?
It's just division between the existing pools. We have a set amount of SPS. You still get the home runs.
Will we receive a post with details on how SPS will be distributed before it goes live so we have a chance to prepare, or will it just go live as soon as it’s ready without a lot of warning?
We will be posting first before we go live for sure.
Genesis League Soccer
Will GLS be an autobattler? If so, how much strategy will be involved? Is it more of a football simulation or more of a football themed card game?
Auto battler- yes. We're looking for quick, exciting, fast sessions that involve sports. It's still going to be a card game with 3 to 5 minute game.
We're not looking to make joystick games because it's hard to validate them. My hope is we can do that, but at the moment the tech is not ready for that and the companies that are doing that, it's dangerous because you're trusting the company as to who won.
How many packs will we need to buy to reach mav (all-star) status?
I don't think it's been decided.
Is there anything the team wishes they did differently with Splinterlands that they will adjust with GLS since they have a “fresh start”?
Scaling features figured out on day one. There's a lot of lessons that we learned and we implemented a lot. There's not a lot of brand new everything, we're just taking those lessons and doing them at the beginning
Riftwatchers
Will guild building discounts apply to Riftwatchers?
My guess is yet but want to wait to announce that.
Are there going to be any purchase limits or ways to meter the Riftwatchers presale to make it fair? Chaos was limited because there simply weren’t enough vouchers for it to sell out. There are a lot more vouchers now and a lot fewer packs.
You better have vouchers on you. It's possible we will require more vouchers per pack. Even if you need a million vouchers that's 1/3 of supply.
Miscellaneous
If we purchase a VIP ticket to Splinterlands can we use the 2k discount to get a “free” regular foil promo card instead of getting a gold foil?
I don't think that's in the mix now. I think Matt told marketing that if you don't want the gold foil, you'll get the standard, you'll get the same discount.
Aggroed: That's still TBA
Hardpoint: We're working as fast as we can to get that out. We are hoping by the end of the month.
Will the SL DAO be given the power over Land and Validators? This specifically in terms of increasing issuance and price points (validators) or is this fixed in stone?
I think this stuff will come out in stages. We want to give the players 100% freedom to do what they want, but there are technical challenges so it's not quite clear what will happen when. In the short term, no, in the long term, yes they will... and when will that follow... hard to say.
Cryptomancer will give us the whole product list and gives us an estimate. He's the best at that. How long does it take to build a layer-2 block chain? Who knows? It hasn't been done before. The validator stuff is far trickier than anything else we're working on.
Rapid Fire Questions
QUESTION: Will ghost cards tournaments require KYC, staked SPS, entry fee payable in vouchers? Can I bring multiple accounts?
As it stands right now we're looking at doing KYC to keep bot accounts out. We aren't talking about entry requirements yet until after Splinterfest.
QUESTION: Given that non-card market will get here soon, when will we be able to lock our non-card assets?
It's not coming out with the non-card market but it is on the roadmap.
QUESTION: why is a score based game, like soccer, not a verifiable joystick game mode on the blockchain? sorry my tech savviness is low.
Try to go get every click you make, every time you make, and verifying every one of those moves. It's really tricky to do with this kind of technology. I think it's doable but I don't think it's doable yet. But maybe they have tech that works and it's possible they aren't verifying that and they are just telling you that it works. But in Crypto I'd be very skeptical of that.
QUESTION: Playing Champions League and even in Diamond League in Modern most of the times is currently really a horrible experience. Often you have to wait 10 minutes plus to find a single battle. Making it to the leaderboard is currently not about being the most skilled player but rather living in a time zone where you are so lucky that at least a few other players are online at the same time for battling you. Could you please implement some changes to the match making for that reason. I guess for the time being it would be mandatory to allow matching players with a bigger difference between their ranking points. Otherwise Modern format will not attract more players and the issue will persist / get worse.
We are watching it and looking at ideas how to improve that.
Note from Bulldog- Matt said last week that a higher percentage of rewards going to direct battle rewards compared to chests will help balance out the player distribution.
Question.....related to new SPS battle rewards, will there be a scaling method used for how much SPS we need staked per account in order to earn?
Yes but it's not out.
Question: Does Splinterlands Team come over to HiveFest⁷ in Amsterdam in September 15 - 18th. ?
We're looking at it. Probably someone will be over there but my passport isn't up to date.
Question: Can you provide any clarification on stake SPS for earning when that happens. If you don't have any staked SPS will that remove all rewards, cards, merits, etc or just SPS. Will there be a small percentage 5 - 10% SPS earned for those who don't have staked SPS to help new players?
I don't think we're going live of staked requirements but I think we'll implement it over time. This won't effect you in the next 2 weeks but it might in the next 2 months.
Question: Is the rift watcher pre-sale date still targeting the end of August?
We mentioned that earlier in the show, that's still right.
Nope, early September (optimistically) Probably mid September.
Here's the Link to the YouTube video from Splinterlands' Official YouTube Channel if you want to see the Town Hall as well for a reference.
