I have played very poorly this Splinterlands season, even though I upped my rentals even more to add a few cards I have never played before. My rentals are around 8 dollars a day, which is significant for a game!!! I feel I didn't even get close to where I wanted to be - which is in Champions 2, but worse than that, I could feel how badly I was playing and then on top of that, I felt I lost a lot of games to highly ranked players that would have given me a decent streak bonus, by single hits.
I think everyone feels that way.
As you can see however, my longest streak was a measly 6, which scrolling through the top 100 in Champions that I can see, is the second crappiest in the list. Those streak bonuses are vital for moving up the ranks and I am just far too inconsistent to get them, unless it is a losing streak against lower ranked players - I had plenty of them!!
I still enjoy the playing though, so running 650 games for the season doesn't feel that bad and it is still 400 less than I played last season. However, I perhaps I should start playing more strategically and utilizing my time a bit better than I do, considering that I could technically get to about the same point with 80% less games, if I was patient.
We aren't at the end of the season yet and there are still two days left, but in order to not be tempted to play, I gave up my rentals and if I click the battle button, I will be screwed. 10 points is easy to lose in champions with my owned DEC.
Perhaps there should be the option to "lock" the battle button, just in case. Kind of like a lock on a cellphone so as not to drunk call an ex. As I am moseying around the interface looking at what is going on and after so many "BATTLE" clicks, it is easy enough to start a battle and it might not be possible to cancel intime before a player is found.
I have never willingly surrendered a game.
Over half the CHAOS LEGION packs have been sold now and it is ticking over pretty consistently, with just over 400K left to sell until the next airdrop. 400K packs is 1.6 million dollars - quite incredible to think that people are spending this kind of money. The other day, about a million dollars was spent in 45 seconds on 500 individual cards - crypto is ridiculous. Just imagine what would happen if we were peaking on the markets.
Speaking of, things are looking pretty green the last couple days, but I am not getting my hopes up that this is a recovery - but I am also not ruling out that we might have tested the near floor for the year. I guessed Bitcoin might have dipped to 28 again based on the war news, but it seems that at least for now, there is a certain amount of impotence from those who oppose Russia, with barely any resistance so far. Even the media doesn't seem that interested in covering what is going on, other than what it means for sporting events and Russian competitors.
There are some demonstrations going on around the place and Finns are stocking up on iodine tablets, but I suspect that this isn't going to be the straw that breaks the nuclear camel's back. Instead, I think that those with capital to spend are going to be buying the dip where they can and waiting for the higher interest rates to be introduced throughout this year to supercharge their investments and drive real estate assets down, so they can ladder back into property, after selling into the FOMO at the peaks. Higher cash rates are good for some people, just not those who are debt-burdened.
After years of the banks giving out cheap money and encouraging the maximization of borrowing amounts, now they are able to reap what they have sown, as they bump the repayment amounts up while the housing markets will cool off, trapping people into their overly large loans at a premium. It is the "long game" position on lending where the first few years are considered the "cost of acquisition" where earnings are "lower", and then the next two decades are the recouping lost potential. Expect record earnings from the banks in about three years from now.
It is kind of like a Subscription as a Service (SaaS) model, except their product is debt. In a SaaS model, the typical repayment period on the costa of acquisition is two to three years, but as long as churn (customer loss) is low, this turns into oversized profits quickly. This is why the music industry is actually doing pretty well with the digital landscape.
For example, back in the physical disk era, people would by music and listen to all of the album a lot, but most wouldn't spend that much each month on it and perhaps by a CD every month or two, if that. However, now they are paying subscription to tens of millions of songs, but only listening to a handful of them, but there is a very long tail on what gets listened to, with people generally listening to music from their youth more than new.
So, in the past, an artist would sell a million albums and get a chunk of cash for it, but now they sell no albums, but have to compete for plays. However, the record companies themselves have their entire catalogue out there reaping micro amounts in constantly, but not having to pay much (or anything) to any individual artist, nor needing to print, store, ship, return or spend much on physical advertising. A great model for them - terrible for the artists. And because no one "owns" albums anymore but want to listen to all the new music, they are trapped into the subscription model, spending several hundreds a year that they probably wouldn't have spent before.
Not only that, what that long tail where people listen to what they did in their late teens and early twenties for the most part is, those same people would have stopped buying music as they aged, but instead, they are now continuously paying for the subscription. Same goes for shows and movies, as well as books too. As while most people would move away from this kind of consumption of new, now they subscribe to it for life.
How many subscriptions do you have? How many did your parents have?
"Mortgage" is a contract until death and indicates that the game being played is long. Debt slavery isn't just a phenomena based on incentive alone, it is engineered as a business model itself. No bank wants you to live debt free, because that is like an oil producer hoping for clean energy so they no longer have to pollute the air and water with what they provide. There is no profit for financial institutions in debt-free people and the incentive from the investors into them is to get a higher return than the investment, so that means expanding debt to increase profits. A few cyclical year costs of customer acquisition is just part of the process to have that customer by the balls for life. While we all want to live debt free, not everyone wants the same for us.
Who thought this was a Splinterlands post?
Is it not? It is hard to tell these days, as there is so much overlap in so many aspects of life, that it seems to me that it would be disingenuous to isolate individual points as if they are separate to the entire economy. All of what is going on in the world today that is affecting the markets is related and affects all of us in some way. It is possible to ignore large parts of it, but this doesn't mean we are left untouched.
We are all subscribed, like it or not.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]