It's been a minute since I've did an article on Splinterlands, but sitting at home all week thanks to a flue I caught, and thanks to @thepeoplesguild coming up with their cool Episode Challenge, I thought why not, let's give it another go and so here we are, the topic of the week is the new player experience and how it could be improved, preferably through some quick and easy to implement wins.
I started playing back in early 2020, and while that feels like an eternity by now, I still remember how terribly lost I was when I first started playing. I'm a seasoned TCG player, having played MTG ever since 1994 and trying god knows how many card games over the years. The main issue was that combination of having a lot of cards at my disposal and at the same time, having very little time to actually figure out what each of them was doing, what the different abilities did, and so on. Once I had that figured out, I was faced with a second, now probably even bigger issue - I was making barely any progress with my collection.
Now keep in mind, this was back in the Untamed days when you would earn chests from the daily quests without concepts like collection power, staked SPS, or ownership of cards. So it was very much possible to win a card or two every now and then, but it took a very long time to do so. I was actually pretty lucky early on, opening a DEC jackpot chest with I think about 11,000 DEC which then allowed me to buy more cards for my deck, quickly ensuring my addiction to the game and keeping me entertained ever since.
The thing is, hadn't I won that chest and/or hadn't I been somewhat accustomed to learning new TCGs on the go, I might have very much left the game before I really ever got to know it. So in short, in my opinion, there are two major issues with the game as a brand new player:
- There are way too many options to begin with
- There's only very marginal progress once you've figured out the game without spending money.
The Glint shop is a, at least in my opinion, great solution to remedy that whole thing a bit, but yet still, without spending additional money, for a new player, it's going to be pretty hard to get things going.
So what do I propose to fix those two issues? Well, do what most of these other, successful web 2 card games do - shower new players in rewards early on! Now before everybody loses their mind, let me explain a bit more. Thanks to the soulbound system, it's now easier than ever to hand out tons of rewards to players without actual monetary value, and especially without being abusable by bots.
So how would this whole thing work? When a new player signs up to the game, he goes through a simple tutorial showcasing the general gameplay and giving some high level explanation of the rules. On completion of the tutorial, he gets to choose one Element and is then awarded with soulbound copies of all common, rare, and epic cards from that Element (other than the dual Element cards) in the current edition. He then starts fighting bots and every time he wins a match, he randomly earns either one soulbound copy of the neutral cards or one of the legendary cards (but not the legendary summoners) of his chosen Element. This goes on until all cards from that element and all the neutral cards have been unlocked. For context - in Rebellion, that's 13 cards, so 13 wins needed.
After that, there's some kind of boss fight, aka another bot that is for the first time using one of the multicolor summoners and thus playing two Elements at once. This could be a best of 5 match or something to make it a bit more interesting and the bot should field considerably better decks than before, yet still being reliably beatable for new players. Once the new player wins that challenge, he gets to choose one of the matching dual Element summoners for his first Element
After that, he starts facing bots again, this time playing a little better than the first iteration, and he again earns one card of the newly chosen Element for every battle he wins. That's another 13 wins to score before the second Element is completed. With that, the fight against the bots ends and the player is released into the Wild... uhm Modern world and starts to battle in Bronze III. At that point, he has full access to all cards from two Elements and should have a somewhat working understanding of how all these cards work and interact with each other. On top of that, he'll know most of the other cards from the bots he faced.
Also, from there on, for every win that he achieves, he will unlock one more of the missing cards from the base set (excluding the legendary dual color summoners) until he finally has a full, soulbound 1 BCX collection of the current set. Together with the common multicolor summoners and the dragon cards, we are looking at another 49 cards in total, so a lot of games to win until the collection is complete. The good thing is, until this happens, he will also have earned some glint, maybe advanced a league or two, and thus have earned some additional chests. So in other words, once these initial rewards run dry, he should naturally start to receive other rewards from playing the game, thus helping him to grow his collection even more.
In my opinion there are several key advantages to doing something like this:
- Players are eased into the game card by card, so they aren't overly confused at the beginning
- At the same time their collection keeps growing with every win
- This all has an extremely low effect on the actual economy, it's only 1 BCX of soulbound cards after all
- The tech for soulbound cards is already there, as are the company run bots, it thus shouldn't be that much work to implement
Now granted, this isn't the lowest hanging of fruits and yes, it sure would need some work to get it implemented. But I'm quite sure that having something like this would keep a lot more players entertained for longer and make them a lot more likely to stay around after that initial phase ends.
I'm looking forward to any feedback and/or ideas you might have. But anyway, that's all from me for today, been fun doing a Splinterlands related article after all that time. Thanks a ton to @thepeoplesguild for coming up with that awesome initiative!