Most of my developer concerns with the update are fiddly technical ones, like I'd like to know when exactly the new cards will launch and what their ID numbers are, and what specific changes you're making to the rewards.

As for identifying and removing bots, there's really no way to do that short of doing KYC on every player.

Something I can tell you from my poker experience: KYC is completely irrelevant to stopping bots, or even multiaccounters. It doesn't work. They have to get at it by pattern and timing analysis, which is also how you'd have to do it here. It's expensive, which is one reason I haven't suggested more actively that it should be done here if figuring out how to have an ecosystem that includes them doesn't work out.

Getting to higher leagues and increasing your card levels should always be the best route to earning.

I think this is incomplete. Yes, it's important to encourage progression, but you also have to make it available; if so much of the earnings are dedicated to higher leagues that the only way to get there is by spending thousands of dollars from scratch, then you lose the long tail of players who want to play and reinvest.

The key to keeping earnings in the game is that people should be able to use the earnings at their level to make psychologically satisfying progress toward the next level. When they feel like they can't, then they stop buying more cards and start cashing out.

As delighted as I am that card prices have been going up, as one of the top holders, I'm also seeing a lot of people giving up on their Silver accounts because they don't feel like they're making progress, either to try to turn them into a Heron for someone else to play, or selling off their own cards to play an account with cards owned by me or Aggroed or Neal. There's already a lot of frustration before this change, with it being really hard to use earnings to move ahead in the game. So I see this as likely making that problem worse.

It really doesn't hurt Herons unless it drastically reduces the demand for playing level 4 accounts, and then those owners don't upgrade them to level 5/6 accounts, which seems unlikely. Overall I would say on a purely selfish level this probably makes me a little bit more money, because it's mostly top players who reinvest their rewards in building Heron accounts.

But even though I'm not a free-2-play player here by any means, I still am at heart. All the money I've spent here came from the F2P/reinvestment cycle in other games, and I'm still F2P in way more games than not. So I feel strongly about not trapping those players into places where the only way they can grow is by cashing out and playing something else.

I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars that way. I want people to be able to do that within Splinterlands with patience and skill. One of the things that's very popular in poker, and draws in new players like nobody's business, is the bankroll-building challenge. Start with zero or $10 or $100 and blog or Twitch the hell out of turning it into $10k. I want to see that here, especially since Splinterlands has some real advantages over poker, like you can't just sit down and lose that first $100.

#sbi-skip