Hello @clayboyn and other Splinterlandians,
With everything going on to "combat the bot army", one solution that had never been brought up was to make it more expensive to rent the "bottom tier cards".
Currently, it costs 1 DEC to list a Rental... but the floor price for Rentals is only .1 DEC.
There are two main issues I have with this floor price and after that, I will list what I think will change should we choose to move forward with this and turn it into an actual proposal:
A. I have an alt account: @pointonedec I have filled it with cheap "trash" or 1 BCX cards that I can list for .1 DEC and The Bot Army will rent them out almost indefinitely.
This means I never need to relist them because a large majority stay rented. In addition, as long as they rent for 10+ days, I am profitable. The downside to this is account is, if they don't rent at least once in every 2 Months "cycle", they are de-listed and I must pay 1 DEC again for another 60 Days...
But let me ask this: "Who am I trying to rent these cards to"? Is it Players? NOPE... I specifically made this account to rent to the Bot Horde, to test the feasibility. Which brings me to my second point.
B. Why exactly did we leave the floor price at .1 DEC? That doesn't make sense... for humans. Furthermore, it isn't very profitable for renting out cards when you need to rely on 10 days of Rental Returns to equal the Listing Fee.
So why isn't the Min Rental price the same as the List Fee: 1 DEC? 🤷♂
What effects do I foresee, if we change this...
First, it will 10x Rental Revenue from every card rented at Floor Price.
Second, it will make every single rental profitable... Since the Rental List Fee is 1 DEC and the Floor Price is 1 DEC x 2 Days... this makes EVERY RENTAL PROFITABLE.
Third, it will NOT affect the casual players - If they had 1,000 DEC to spend on rentals, with the new system, they could rent 500 Base cards for 1 DEC at 2 Days each... There aren't 500 Unique Cards in the game though.
But they won't... they'll continue to rent the Playables not the trash. So it won't have a negative effect on those players.
Fourth, every Bot account is now faced with a 10X increase in COSTS to Rent. This makes it less profitable for Bots... which would hopefully deter some, without having to change a bunch of "Gameplay Stuff".
So there you have it! My concept of a proposal draft to change the Floor Rental Price from .1 DEC to 1 DEC!
It should:
Make Rentals more profitable
Makes Bots less profitable
Negligible affect on actual Players
This seems like a Win-Win-Win to me but I'd love to get community feedback!
Bonus: if rentals are more profitable... my guess is that Card Values will go up too 😁