My previous "a sh*t ..."-series post suddenly got one (a single one, I mean) comment. Don't take me wrong, it was a good comment overall, I really appreciate the guy who went so far as to give me a feedback.
Among other things he wrote: "Make a Hive post on how cool it was to get that card. People like me will give you a vote sometimes and you get some of that money back from blogging about the game." Well, agreed. I wish I only could create such good positive posts only! Unfortunately, sometimes I'm too much eager to rub a pussy the wrong way, as we say in my country (in my country we mean these words literally and absolutely not the way you probably imagined).
Well, I actually wanted to make some more posts about how SPLINTERLANDS economy actually works and what new players should expect for their 10 bucks investments. However, I feel kinda burnt out and kinda very short of free time, again.
So it's my last "a sh*t" series post and I would only like to point to one very important change in the game -- namely, a Collection Power system.
Currently, the Collection Power is a mere DEC burn value of all your owned and delegated cards. But when the system will be launched, your Power will limit the league you can reach. If your deck is low-level cards only -- you can't play in higher leagues, no matter how good a player you are. And playing in low leagues will not allow you to get high-level cards fast.
Let's look at some numbers.
For example, the Gold-III league will require the Collection Power of 100K (i.e. the total burn value of all your cards must be 100K DEC or higher). In the Gold-III league you will get probably 15-30 DEC per battle (depending on what win-streak, gold-foil, guild, etc. bonuses you have), like 7 loot boxes for a daily quest and 22 loot boxes at the end. Half of those boxes will probably be some potion shit, and a quarter -- some common reward cards. In other words, in the Gold-III I would reasonably expect to get like 20-30 reward cards per season, common and rare cards mostly.
Also there's a nice table of burn values for all kinds of cards:
The table might be slightly outdated (since neither Splinterlands devs nor community ever bothered themselves with creating and maintaining a detailed list of all rules), but it's still trustful in general. And from it we see that a common reward card will bring you 15 DEC of the Collection Power.
Now imagine how much time you have to play to collect another 50,000 of power to move from the Gold-III into the Gold-II...
"When I get a gold-foil legendary card, my power will get +75,000 at once!", you might say. Yes, that's right -- but a legendary card (let alone a "gold-foil legendary") is called "legendary" for a reason.
It's said that the Collection Power system was introduced to overcome bots that can play 24/7 and thus can reach high leagues even with poor cards thus watering down the prize pool. The funny thing is that despite being locked in, say, the Gold-III, a bot still can play 24/7 with poor cards watering the Gold-III's modest prize pool down even further.
Shortly, now there're different opinions on how this change will influence the game. But in any case, the game will evidently become even more "pay-to-win" as it used to be.
My personal opinion is that at first many old players will rush to the market to buy more cards, the card prices will go up and will stay there. Then the fresh players will discover that in addition to the 10-dollars starter pack and their playing skills, they must also spend either a hell of time or a ton of money to get enough Collection Power to get into higher leagues, where all the real fun happens. In this situation will Splinterlands be able to attract 20 million players as another Magic: The Gathering, or will it become a "closed club of elite champs" slowly degrading due to inbreeding? I suspect the latter...
However, I wish I'm wrong -- simply because I also have my inwastment share in the game and I don't want it to die. So let's wait and see.
Now it's over with my "a sh*t" series. Sorry if I rubbed your pussy the wrong way for too long. Next time I will try to make a more positive Splinterlands post.
"Disclaimer" here.
