Splinterlands Now Has Free to Play Feature

Hello there! @saydie here, playing Splinterlands everyday!

A month ago, I wrote a post about some of my ideas which could help in order to improve the New Player Experience as my participation for the TPG Challenge, a unofficial Splinterlands contest initiated by @thepeoplesguild. In that post, I wrote about how having a Spellbook requirement early into the game can serve as a paywall that might result into potential new players to turn their backs in the game even before trying it but at the same time, it was an important source of revenue for the company so I do not want it to be removed. As a solution, my suggestion was to move Spellbook purchase to Silver so that even new player will be able to do more things to the game making Bronze League and below into a Free to Play zone. That was not that far with what the Splinterlands team has done as for their recent maintenance, they were able to include a free to play feature into the game which removes the previous limitations on player progress. With that, lets have a dive to know more what the Splinterlands Free to Play feature has to offer.

^{Link On My Original Post}

What Does Free to Play Feature Can Do?

With the November 12, 2024 update, Splinterlands has finally introduces a Free to Play feature. This could be one of this years most important update by having new players to have more access to the game that are previously locked within a Spellbook purchase. With this, new players can now enjoy most of the game features without requiring the Spellbook and this includes:

Create player account name (will have the _lite suffix and will be removed with Spellbook purchase)
Earning Glint from ranked Battles starting Bronze League.
Join Guild and participate on Brawls to earn Merits.
Purchase Credits
Purchase, Rent and Combine Cards.
Open Packs.
Receive Gifts of cards or packs and receive card Delegations.
Purchase Rewards from the Glint Shop.

Having this adjustments made for the Free to Play feature enables the game to be open for a broader audience and more freedom for new players to engage with the game in order to help them decide if they want to further invest to the game. At the same time, being able to receive packs cards and delegations were a very huge thing as our community has a lot of kind people that are willing to help new players such as the Card DAO initiative by @brybro27 and if you were a new player that was reading this post, I might be also able to help on delegating some few cards. Just drop a comment below and I will answer you as soon as I can.

Now, it does not required for new players to have SPS staked as there will be an automatic 1x modifier as well as the penalty from using starter cards were removed for players in Free to Play mode. To make it more manageable for new players only the oldest set within the modern format which is the Chaos Legion set are the only starter cards that new players can use in order to slowly help them adopt with the games complex strategy and mechanics.

What Does Free To Play Feature Cannot Do?

While there were a lot of things that a new player can now do without the purchase of Spellbook, there are still some actions that are left locked without having one in order to encourage new players that are seeking full functionality to invest in to the game. This features that are only available for Spellbook Holders includes:

Sell, Rent, Transfer and Delegate cards.
Hold DEC or SPS.
Create Guild, enter Tournament.
Access Land and Soulkeep.
Earn SPS and Jackpot Rewards.

I assume that Free to Play accounts does not have access to Hive wallet which means that they won't be able to request for keys and interact with the broader Hive community or use Hive other Hive Dapps such as Peakd or Hive Keychain. They also won't be able to use Arcade Colony in order to play GLX and Moonkarts as well as to receive Colony tokens from having GLX and SPS tokens staked. Also, although Free to Play players can purchase items from Glint shop which include Chest, they won't be able to get any of the Jackpot rewards such as Land, packs and titles. While they may be able to burn soulbound cards for Merits and Glint, Burning NFT should also be not possible for them since they cannot hold DEC or SPS.

Final Thoughts

The addition of the Free to Play mode in Splinterlands is a major milestone to the game and may be one of the missing pieces that we need before the game to finally take off. It's gonna take some time to build up steam but with more marketing push, we might be able to reach more people again with better player retention.

Thank you and see you at the next post.

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All the image that I edited here belongs to Splinterlands and Soulkeep.

Card abilities and rulesets from Splintercards.

All the battle links provided comes from my personal accounts and from the scholar account that I am using from Balthazar Guild.

Thank you for reading my post. If you're interested to play Splinterlands, you can join by clicking the images below and follow me on Twitter and 3Speak for timely Splinterlands updates.