This has been quite an exciting week in the Splinterverse with the start of the Chaos Legion presale! The team is hard at work getting ready for the full release of the set as well as continuing to work on back-end updates to help ensure that the Splinterlands website and services run quickly and smoothly going forward as we continue to grow.
We just wanted to take a minute to share some recent updates and changes with the community, as well as some back-end API changes for third-party developers.
SPS/BNB Cake Farm Boost + New Syrup Pool
Our friends at PancakeSwap have launched a governance proposal to boost the multiplier on the SPS-BNB CAKE farm to 1x (up from the current 0.5X) for 60 days as well as to launch a syrup pool which will allow users to stake CAKE tokens and earn SPS!
The governance proposal with the full details can be found here: Proposal to Boost the SPS-BNB farm and a New Syrup Pool and it looks like it passed with 98+% approval earlier today...it was certainly a close one, but we're glad it pulled through :-P
For anyone planning to stake SPS-BNB in the liquidity pool and earn CAKE tokens, we highly recommend doing it through the Kingdoms feature on the CubDefi platform (https://cubdefi.com/kingdoms). By putting your LP tokens in the Kingdom it automatically invests them into the CAKE farm for you, automatically compounds your returns daily, and also allows you to earn CUB tokens as additional rewards!
Please note that liquidity in the SPS-BNB pool is not eligible for SPS airdrop points.
DEC Battle Rewards Update
Despite the recent changes made to the daily quest rewards in Bronze league, we are still seeing huge numbers of new accounts being made by a small number of people with the intention of farming rewards. This indicates that the system still requires some adjustments.
As we have stated many times in the past, whenever a situation arises which incentivizes the creation of massive numbers of new accounts rather than increasing the rating, league, and assets in a single account, it poses a significant risk to the long term sustainability of the system and needs to be addressed right away.
In this case, within the next few days we will be removing DEC rewards from ranked battles for players in Bronze III and Novice league, and changing the reward shares calculation which determines the portion of the reward pool allocated for each win to use the cube of the player's rating instead of the square as it was previously.
This means that in order to start earning DEC battle rewards (and in the near future SPS rewards) players will need to get enough rating and collection power in their account to at least get into Bronze II league, and that the rewards will be skewed more towards higher rated players in order to provide additional incentive to players to increase their rating.
Please note that, once released, the DEC rewards for battles may be a little more volatile than normal and it will likely take a day or two for things to settle in to the new system.
As with any reductions or changes to rewards, we understand that some players will be upset about the change, but the reality is that with the card rental system it has never been cheaper to increase your collection power and it is of vital importance to the game economy and all long-term players that rewards earned are proportional to the assets held.
SPS Minting Update
We also wanted to take this opportunity to provide an update about the minting of SPS tokens on Binance Smart Chain. The majority of the SPS reward pools either launched a little while after the initial launch of SPS or still have yet to launch, which means that the initial minting of 200M SPS tokens has been enough to cover the rewards given out in game to date.
So far, the only additional token minting that has happened is the 20M tokens / month unlocked and given to the private sale investors, but going forward, starting with the next minting on October 26th, 2021 (3 months since the launch) approximately 50M additional tokens will be minted in order to cover the ongoing SPS rewards being given out in the game.
Please note that the minting of SPS tokens is still following the release schedule published in the SPS token whitepaper and that nothing is changing there. These newly minted tokens are held in cold storage as backing for the SPS rewards that are given out in the Splinterlands game as has been the case for the tokens minted to back in-game rewards since the launch.
We are also in the process of developing the minter smart contract for the SPS tokens so that in the future the minting will happen automatically and transparently on a regular basis instead of the current, manual process, but we do not yet have an ETA for that at this time.
API Updates & Limits (For Third-Party Developers)
We are also working on a number of updates and changes to our APIs in order to help ensure that the Splinterlands website and services are able to operate smoothly and without interruption now and in the future as we continue to grow. Third-party developers making use of our APIs should please take note of these changes and should continue to follow our blog which is where we plan to post future API updates.
We are always open and eager to help third-party developers to build on top of the Splinterlands platform and to make sure they are using the available APIs in the correct and most efficient manner, so anyone who has questions about that should feel free to contact a member of the development team on the Splinterlands Discord Server.
New Battle API Endpoint
First, we are in the process of moving all /battle/battle_tx API calls to a new set of servers using the following new domain endpoint: https://battle.splinterlands.com. For the moment, the api2.splinterlands.com domain is still also serving battle_tx API calls, but within the next couple of weeks that will be disabled and all battle API calls must go to the new domain or else they will receive a 404 error.
Login API Call Limits & Updates
We have noticed that a number of third-party automated services and processes are making the login API call many, many times for the same accounts over very short periods of time. The login API call should only be called once for each account when the program or service is initialized, so going forward we will be implementing rate limiting on the login call by both IP address and account.
We don't anticipate that this should cause an issue for any services that are using the API endpoint properly, and will hopefully force other services to upgrade their code to make more efficient use of the Splinterlands APIs.
