Soulkeep has been running for quite a few months now and overall, I do feel like it's a pretty decent game. It's fast paced, offers a lot of different challenges, and even more different strategies of how to approach them. After a while, it does get a bit old, as you have figured out most of the maps from the (rather small) pool you get to play, and you also understand which towers to use in what situation, what spells to ignore, and so on. Still, that's to be expected during such an early stage of the game. So, all things considered, I think Double Coconout did a rather good job with the game overall.
The part I'm really not that happy with, though, are the tokenomics, and looking at their Discord channel, I'm certainly not alone with that. When Soulkeep was announced back in the day, it was meant to be an integrated part of the bigger Splinterlands ecosystem. It was to have SPS staking requirements and it was to have some form of card staking in order to enhance your towers. So far, none of this has manifested. While I do appreciate that plans do change and not everything makes sense in hindsight, I don't think that the current implementation can stand.
I do have to admit that they did some changes already, but they have been made reluctantly, and they only have been made after the community pushed for them. Tournament entry fees now burn 50% of the DEC spent, and the reward curve has ben flattened a bit. What hasn't changed, though, is that SPS is given out without players having to have any stake in the game to earn it. Now sure, it's only like 30k SPS a day, which is way less than all the other SPS faucets, but it's still 30k SPS or roughly $240 at current prizes that's paid out without any requirements to earn it. Let's have a look at some of the rewards that were paid out yesterday:
League 3:
League 2:
League 1:
That's a lot of SPS given out in these lower leagues to individual accounts. As you can see by their names and the random numbers added, a lot of these accounts are just multi accounts that are spread around the different leagues and just try to leech as much value as possible out of the system. And why wouldn't they, there are virtually no requirements to do so. The assets needed can be rented for cheap and/or delegated around. A lot of Splinterlands players probably earn less than these amounts playing ranked, all while having to have a much larger investment to get there.
The solution to all this is pretty simple really - implement SPS staking requirements to earn SPS and we'd be good. I'm not even saying have it for every league or require the same amount for every league. I do think that Soulkeep could actually help us to onboard new players to the game, especially when (and if) they do launch their mobile application and potentially a lot of web 2 players could get a glimpse of the game. We obviously don't want to confront them with all the web 3 stuff right away.
Looking at the distribution of rewards, I think we could keep league 1 as is, and simply flatten the reward curve even more. Of course you should earn more the higher you place, but we should avoid paying out too much free SPS to any individual account nevertheless. Starting with league 2, though, we really should have SPS staking requirements in place. It doesn't have to be as complicated as it is in Splinterlands with RShares and everything, just have a fixed amount of SPS that's needed to be staked in order to earn the full rewards.
So say in league 2, you need 10,000 SPS to earn your full rewards. If frieren had that much stakd, he'd earn the full 304.03 SPS. If he only has 5,000 SPS staked, he'll only earn 152.02 SPS. The important part is that this always need to be a percentage of the earnings, so the 5th place would earn 73.45 SPS instead of 146.9 SPS if he only had 5.000 SPS staked.
I also don't think that these staking rewards need to be super high, again, we are not talking about a huge amount of daily SPS, but it's quite a bit to a few individual accounts. So the numbers could look something like this:
League 2 - 10,000 SPS
League 3 - 15,000 SPS
League 4 - 25,000 SPS
League 5 - 40,000 SPS
League 6 - 60,000 SPS
League 7 - 85,000 SPS
League 8 - 105,000 SPS
League 9 - 140,000 SPS
League 10 - 180,000 SPS
That's a lot less than what you need for the higher leagues in Ranked, but it's still a relevant amount that would ensure that a basic level of investment is needed to earn any significant rewards. To be clear on that, I'd also would want this SPS to be exclusively staked towards Soulkeep. So you'd still earn Staking rewards from it and it would still be good for voting obviously, but it would no longer count for ranked rewards from Splinterlands directly.
Personally, I feel like this is something we should aim to do more anyway. Right now, depending on if you play Modern or Wild, the usefulness of having SPS staked maxes out between 500,000 and 1,000,000 SPS. So by providing multiple options to stake SPS towards, we would actually add additional incentives to have higher amounts of SPS staked and rent less of that out to other players.
But anyway, I feel like this change would help a lot to better integrate Soulkeep into the overall ecosystem and it would prevent (most of) the multi account abuse that is happening right now. If this isn't done within a reasonable time, I'm actually of the opinion, that the DAO should simply stop providing any rewards to Soulkeep until the issue has been remedied.