Hello everyone! We have a bunch of updates and new additions that we are excited to share with you, including more details about the upcoming replacement for the sold out Essence Orb packs and a new blockchain / crypto wallet software integration that we hope will help promote the game to a significant group of new cryptocurrency users! As always, please let us know your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.
ΛZMΛRÉ Dice
We have been hard at work on the new mini-set of cards to replace the sold out Essence Orbs and we expect them to be ready within the next few weeks to a month. The new types of packs will be called ΛZMΛRÉ Dice and are planned to initially contain 20 new cards including 6 new Summoners (one for each Splinter) and 14 monsters featuring 3 new abilities!
Like the Essence Orbs, they will be purchasable in the shop with DEC only (no Credits), so make sure to stock up on your DEC ahead of time! Additionally, just like with the Untamed edition booster packs we plan to release new cards to the set via airdrops to all ΛZMΛRÉ Dice purchasers each time a certain number of them are sold. This provides incentives to players to get them earlier rather than later.
The ΛZMΛRÉ Dice cards will be categorized in the Promo edition, along with the Essence Orb cards, but will have the same combine and DEC burn rates as the Untamed edition cards. Legendary and Alchemy potions will be able to be used to improve the odds of receiving Legendary and Gold Foil cards in the ΛZMΛRÉ Dice packs as well.
Additionally, guild discounts will apply to the purchase price of ΛZMΛRÉ Dice, purchases will not be eligible for affiliate payments (since those are only applied for purchases using Credits), and all DEC spent to purchase ΛZMΛRÉ Dice will be burned.
One of the most peculiar characters to pass recently through the great Coral Gates of ΛZMΛRÉ into the Inner Sea is Jyitu Burudo. While new to the Splinterlands, Jyitu was a deep sea explorer of great fame in his former home on the other side of the world. He has developed submersible craft that can last longer and swim deeper than any other the world has seen.
Jyitu has discovered, deep beneath the waves, a lost treasure trove of monsters and summoners. These forgotten essences have been waiting by a secret mana well at the bottom of the Splintral Sea. The essences are trapped in small cubes, engraved with strange and ancient symbols. In his favorite personal submersible, Jyitu Burudo has taken several dives to this secret mana well and returned with loads of what have become known as ΛZMΛRÉ Dice.
The monster and summoner essences within the ΛZMΛRÉ Dice are ancient and powerful. Jyitu sells the dice in the air markets of Anenon to buyers from around the Splinterlands. Any worthy mage or wizard can free the monsters and summoners, and all will soon appear on the Mount Mox tournament grounds. The mayhem will truly begin when at last the dice are rolled.
Collection Score / League Leaderboards Update
We wanted to take this opportunity to provide a quick update on the new "collection score" mechanism and separate league leaderboards that we originally announced in this post. We have had MANY discussions about these changes both internally and with a number of players, and have received a LOT of feedback and ideas as well. As a result, we now feel like we have a solid plan for the initial design of the collection score mechanic - which we will be referring to as "Collection Power" going forward - and the new league leaderboard system and have made good progress towards implementing them.
We plan to release the changes in three distinct phases. The first phase, which we hope to release as soon as this week, will simply begin calculating the collection power for each player and displaying it on the website. This phase will not include any changes to the game at all, but will allow us to ensure that the collection power is being calculated correctly in all situations in the live game environment and to fix any issues before the second phase.
The second phase will require players to achieve certain pre-defined collection power levels before they can attain the next league or league tier in ranked season play, and the third phase will add the new leaderboards and prizes for each league.
The primary goal of the collection power is simply to require that players have a certain amount of cards (either in their collection or delegated to them) in order to be eligible to earn higher levels of rewards. You can think of this as being similar to staking mechanisms present in many existing cryptocurrency systems.
As a result, the collection power will be calculated simply as the sum of the DEC burn rate of all of the cards that a player owns (that are not delegated out or listed for sale on the market) and cards delegated to that player. Cards on "cooldown" will still count towards a player's collection power.
Some players have pointed out that this means that a player could simply have a few gold foil Legendary cards or a large number of a single type of card in their collection and not much else and still be eligible for higher leagues. This is true, and it is intended.
If a player has a high enough collection power and rating, they will be able to reach higher leagues and earn the associated rewards; however, the league leaderboard system will be designed so that these players are unlikely to be competitive there compared to players who have a more diverse collection.
We will release additional information about the second and third phases as they get closer to being ready. Please keep in mind that we do not expect to get everything perfect on the first try with these changes. We will keep a close eye on how things go after they are released and listen closely to player feedback and make adjustments as necessary.
Disabling Potions for Reward Cards
One additional change that will go into effect immediately is that Legendary and Alchemy potions will no longer be able to be used when opening Reward Edition cards from quest and season rewards. We understand that some players may not like this change, but it is necessary for us to maintain a sustainable reward card economy and is part of a larger redesign of the reward system in the game which includes adding new rewards for the individual league leaderboards in the near future.
Please note that players will not need to do anything as a result of this change. Legendary and Alchemy potions will simply stop being used when Reward cards are revealed and no potion charges will be deducted from players' inventories. The potions will be able to be used as normal when opening Beta, Untamed, Essence Orb, or the new ΛZMΛRÉ Dice booster packs.
Team Creation Updates
We have been working on some tweaks to the team creation screen to allow more fine-grained control for our advanced players. To start, it will be updated to show a lower level version of a card (if one is available in your collection) if the higher level version is not able to be played in the current ruleset.
For example, in the "Keep Your Distance" ruleset, which does not allow Melee attack monsters to be used, previously it would not show cards like the Furious Chicken at all if you have a higher level version which has a Melee attack, even if you also have lower level versions which do not have a Melee attack. Going forward, it will check all versions of each card in your collection and show the highest level version which is allowed in the current rulesets.
We are also working on adding an option for players to choose a specific card from their collection if they do not want to use the highest level one shown by default in the team selection screen. That is still in progress but we hope to have it ready in the near future.
Tournament Currencies
We have also been working on an updated system for allowing external tokens to be used in Splinterlands tournaments for both entry fees and prizes. This change will allow us to much more easily integrate new tokens and token protocols, such as ERC-20, which we believe will open up a lot of potential for new tournament sponsorships. This change will also include support for Hive Engine tokens.
To start, we will be removing all tokens, except for DEC, from the list of available tokens to use for tournament entry fees and prizes, and adding them back in one at a time as we update the associated processes for the external blockchain integrations.
Anyone that has a custom token currently listed for use in Splinterlands tournaments will need to reach out to @yabapmatt on Discord to ensure that the token is re-listed under the new system.
EOS / Wombat Wallet Integration
Last, but not least, some of you may have noticed that we have recently started accepting payments in the game in EOS tokens and that we are also offering an EOS account login option. This is part of a new partnership / initiative with the Wombat Wallet group to help promote the game to their userbase and to start tapping into the broader EOS market.
We are first testing the integration with the desktop version of the game website, and then we will also be releasing it in the mobile web app in the near future as well, at which point Splinterlands will be added as a featured app within the Wombat mobile wallet app store which boasts a large base of crypto users.
Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!
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NOTE: All rewards from this post will go to @steem.dao (the Hive Development Fund account) to support the ongoing development of the Hive platform.