56723a37cddf15865f7a6fd562ec9a4548da79f1
Summary
The ability to earn rewards indefinitely and at scale, without ongoing additional investment into the ecosystem (i.e. bot farms in Wild format) causes significant issues for the game, namely:
- Bot farms play in Wild and earn rewards indefinitely without needing to ever purchase/rent more cards or otherwise put money into the ecosystem
- This creates a large drain on all assets and restricts the types of rewards that can be provided in the game due to them being exploited by these bot farms
- This also causes Wild format to be "easy" because players are matched up against the large number of bots with low level cards which allows them to easily get to higher ratings and earn higher rewards than they would be able to normally
- This encourages more players to switch to Wild from Modern to get the easier rewards which makes Modern even more difficult and causes a negative spiral
The community accurately identified the issue in this recently passed proposal, however its reliance on Collection Power as the solution leads to issues which are described in detail in the full description below.
Instead I propose that we both increase the staked SPS requirements for Wild format and introduce a cost for playing in Wild format every season. By requiring an ongoing cost on a per-account basis in order to keep playing in Wild we:
- Reduce the number of bot accounts considerably
- That will allow more types of rewards to be added without fear of being exploited
- That also means that players will no longer be able to constantly battle against bot accounts with low level cards in Wild format and get to high ratings and earn high rewards easily
- Which will encourage players to move back to Modern (also to avoid the new cost)
- That will make Modern easier and have more match liquidity by having more players with primarily lower level decks playing
Full Description
I believe the recently passed proposal to try to address "bot farms" in Wild format has accurately identified probably the number one issue in the game currently that should be addressed ASAP, but its use of Collection Power makes it quite difficult to implement. Instead, I would like to propose an alternate solution to try first that will be much easier to implement and simpler for players to understand while hopefully still addressing the primary issue.
Please note that if this proposal gets implemented and still fails to adequately address the problem, then the original proposal linked above can still be implemented instead of, or in addition to this one in the future. They are not mutually exclusive.
My main concern about the previous proposal is the use of Collection Power as the metric. Collection Power is very resource intensive to calculate and requires a good bit of work to prevent exploits. Every time a card is minted, transferred, sold, delegated, rented, etc. the Collection power has to be updated for both players. With the large number of those transactions it takes a lot of processing power and has been the cause of server issues and latency in the past, and will likely cause problems again if the game grows.
Additionally, the above proposal uses a different version of Collection Power that excludes soulbound cards, which would require us to either start calculating two versions of collection power for every relevant transaction or to change our existing collection power calculation which would require us to re-calculate the collection power of every account from scratch.
As if that wasn't enough, Collection Power can be easily manipulated by transferring/delegating cards around to different accounts, so the proposal includes another stipulation that a cooldown needs to be implemented for cards that are transferred, delegated, or rented. That is also going to be quite difficult to implement and make sure it works properly and I think these types of cooldowns have been historically very confusing for players and cause a lot of unnecessary support tickets.
As a result of all of this, my very strong preference is to remove collection power from the game entirely and to handle the issue of bot farms in a different way, which is described below.
Alternate Approach
First, I propose we adjust the SPS staking reward multiplier for Wild format so that roughly double the amount of staked SPS is required at each rating level to maintain the same reward multiplier as before. This aims to address the idea that in order to be able to earn indefinite rewards in Wild format players need to at least have more stake in the ecosystem for each account.
I believe that staked SPS requirements are a much better way of doing this than Collection Power requirements, which is why the CP requirements were switched out for staked SPS requirements originally in the first place. It is better for two main reasons:
- It is significantly easier to implement and maintain going forward as described at length above; and
- the entire system is set up such that value is supposed to go to the SPS token and from there it filters down into all of the other assets. For example, more demand for cards does not lead to more demand for SPS, but more demand for SPS will lead to more demand for cards (as cards are one of the primary ways to earn SPS in the game)
For those of you that are thinking that simply doubling the staked SPS requirements will not be enough to really solve this issue - I agree - which is why I also propose that players be required to purchase a Wild Season Permit in order to be able to play in Wild format at all every ranked play season.
I propose that the permit will cost 2000 DEC/DEC-B or 40 VOUCHER tokens (all burned) and will be required to be purchased for each account before they can participate in Wild format battles each ranked play season.
While I expect that some people will have a knee-jerk reaction to this, I encourage everyone to spend some time and really consider the implications. I believe this has the potential to create a massively positive change across the entire ecosystem that will finally address an issue that has been holding us back for years now.
For players who have only one, or a small number of accounts that play in Wild, this should be a small amount to pay that in most cases will be covered by the rewards earned, and they will always have the option to switch to Modern format where there is no permit required. For operators of bot farms with thousands of accounts, however, this will likely be an unworkable expense every season which would make them stop running large numbers of bot accounts and possibly even consolidate into fewer accounts with more assets.
Additionally, a significant reduction in the number of accounts playing in Wild format will cause the SPS rewards for those that remain in Wild to increase dramatically (helping to offset the new permit cost). Wild format will also become more competitive as the average level of the remaining decks will be higher, which will hopefully encourage players to work to obtain more assets to compete and/or switch to Modern which will help with match liquidity there.
Some Numbers
There are currently around 75k unique accounts that battle in Wild format every season, with about 30k of them playing more than 50 battles during the season. This compares to about 3k unique accounts that battle in Modern format every season with about 2k of them playing more than 50 battles during the season.
At current market prices, the total value of the SPS reward pool in Wild format each season is about $20,000. Based on the proposed cost of the permit, you can see how this will drastically reduce the number of purely economically motivated accounts that currently play in Wild format. Additionally, if even a relatively small percentage of Wild format players move over to Modern then that can drastically increase the number of players there, most of which will have lower level decks which are sorely needed there.
It is important to also consider that if even 20% of the current accounts that currently play in Wild stay in Wild and purchase the season permit, that would lead to roughly 30M DEC (or 600k Vouchers) being burned every season.
SPS Governance Vote
Some people have asked whether or not this is something that even actually requires a governance vote. Since this proposal relates to the Splinterlands game and not the SPS or Voucher token mechanics, it does not require a governance vote, and is ultimately completely up to the Splinterlands team whether or not to implement it and how.
By putting it up as a governance proposal it allows us to get additional feedback from the community, both stake-weighted via the voting, and otherwise via the comments, before making a final decision. I also look forward to discussing this on the Town Hall call tomorrow evening at 7:00 PM ET / 23:00 UTC and I will also do my best to answer questions about this and other topics submitted in the #town-hall channel in the Splinterlands Discord Server.