The wizard has spoken, and I've come around. I'll support testing out moving to just season rentals. Ideally, the conditions should be (1) that it's easy to implement (therefore probably should do the 14-day rentals rather than actual season-level, which anyways I think is fairer as people won't try to time their rentals based on where we are in a season), and (2) we should be open to reverting the change if we feel it's caused unintended negative consequences.
For other folks who were against this change, here's a summary the pros and cons of moving to only season rentals:
PROS
(1) Fixes the various exploits that have been discussed above
(2) Ensures a rented card cannot be used for significantly more energy than an owned card, thus giving value to ownership
(3) Potentially improves user experience by ensuring there are MORE cards available for long rental periods (i.e. 14 days), so players don't have to worry about having their rentals cancelled or having to re-rent every few days
(4) Reduces transaction volume and server load significantly (per Matt)
(5) Helps mitigate concerns around minimum rental prices (per Matt)
(6) Removes confusion around daily vs season rental in Survival Mode (per Matt)
CONS
(1) Increases up-front cost, reducing accessibility for users who just want a taste
(2) Reduces flexibility (e.g. wanting to only rent for the weekend)
(3) Increases cost for those renting for brawls/tournaments (however I'll point out this ensures you'll be able to rent BEFORE a brawl/tournament and not have to worry about getting cancelled on, so there's an upside to this one too)
I didn't realize the season rental system already adjusted based on how many days into the season it was. I never really deal with rentals, so that was interesting to find out. So far it seems like either "season only" or 14 days flat has strong support.
Ah gotcha, didn't know that. Oh well, I suppose that should work. I still think 14-day is better though as it's easier to understand and more predictable, in addition to preventing weird "lemme rent only the last 2 days of the season" types of rentals.
Cons: 3rd parties like peak monsters will make their own rentals daily using delegation, what going to do when that happens?
Hmm, I don't think that'll happen to be honest. Especially not with PeakMonsters who have the best interest of the game at heart. It'd be a more complex system. Also, delegated cards incur cooldowns when swapping between players, so there's less of an "exploit" there.
That would come with a 2 day cooldown to run a makeshift system via delegation. Probably more expensive that way, but who knows.
even with the 2 days cooldown, the renter takes the card for 2 days still and the owner instead of having the card sitting in the ethernal season rent would get something... i mean you never know what will happen when you touch stuff...