Hello Splinterlanders, today another issue related to rentals was brought to my attention. @bulldog1205 and others are pointing out that card rentals currently have an unfair advantage over actual card ownership due to the nature of the 2 day cooldown combined with the roughly 2 day energy cycle. Currently players can get a higher return and more value for renting a deck for 2 days, burning the energy down entirely and then either not renting for 2 days or renting on another account while the first one recharges energy.
All of that said, let's gather stake-weighted feedback and see how the DAO would like to proceed:
How about a 3rd option, 7 day rentals? Being that SPS rentals are also 7 days.
I can't alter the poll after creation, I'd have to make a new one. The main reason for not going that route is that it would likely split the vote and make it harder to tell which way to proceed. If there's a lot of requests for something else entirely I'll make another poll afterwards.
Understandable, I also thought of another reason that 7 days might be a decent option: sps unstaking takes 7 days for 25% of whatever amount someone wants to unstake, allowing for those funds to be used to get dec to rent again in 7 days.
All rentals as season rentals seems steep...
I am actually more a fan of 7 Day Rentals than 14 Day Rentals
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...
I think each card should be playable by only one account per season. Anything else is really an exploit. Even though we're used to this system, it's essentially card inflation which brings value down.
IMO rentals should be something like this:
Owner sets total seasonal rental price
Price decreases based on the remaining days in the season
End of season all rentals go back up for rent
Very intuitive, logical, and practically impossible to exploit.
That makes sense. Functionally the same without mandating a full 14/15 day rental. Not a bad idea, but also not sure how much work it would be for the team to make a change like that.
I remember renting cards short term for certain tournaments, had no reason to rent them for 14 days. Maybe as some say,7 days might be better🤔
If that's what people prefer I'll set up another poll. Not possible to edit it once they start.
Make all rentals 14 days and what will happen to the playerbase that don't have enough funds for that long of an investment. What'll end up happening is the only people renting cards will be those with large amounts of DEC at hand. This proposal will probably cause more cards to go unrented. This will cause old cards to depreciate even more.
That's just my guess anyways, I could be wrong.
This is just a poll to gather feedback and sentiment right now, not a proposal. Seems like people are more in favor of something like 7 days at this point. We'll see how it shakes out and whether or not the DAO wants to do anything at all. Could be another "do nothing" situation. Maybe people will suggest a different solution entirely that could address the problem.
you are not wrong, this kind of change will make some people go away. As the change from 1 day rental to 2 days rentals did back then.
Its completely unnecesary to risk losing players right now to fix a non issue.
Delegate Tokens and HP to Fallen Angels to earn weekly rewards!
Delegate | Join to the guildThis post has been supported by @fallen.angels guild!
14 days really? i seriously dnt know why and why always try to increase the cost of playing this damn game? right now i am renting cards for like 1200 dec per day where sometimes i rent an expensive summoner just to try it out for 2 days and fnt renew if i find it useless and there are tons of cards like that. NOw it will be stuck with me for 14 days. ROfl. wake up from your delusion that this game is played by some rich folks.
The problem with potential exploits that are discovered is that they can be used at scale by automation to hurt the entire game economy. I'm pretty confident in saying that no one wants to find out these exploits are happening and have to think of solutions for them. I understand the frustration and hopefully the conversations that this discussion have sparked will help us find a better solution. This isn't a proposal, just a poll to figure out what people think of the situation and determine if, how and when we create a proposal to take corrective action. Currently we have some other approaches being discussed in Discord that may be better.
The proposed solution in this post is terrible.
You would kill an entire feature and make life really hard for a lot of people for literally nothing.
Lets find a better solution:
a) Modify TOS. Renting or selling to yourself through the market should not be allowed.
b) Add a 24 hour cooldown to any card that gets unrented.
Thanks for sharing! - @azircon
Hey guys, I do not support making all rentals 14 days / seasonal-only. The exploit that's being described needs to be quantified before we take an action that reduces utility and accessibility. It seems difficult to do that exploit, so I would guess it's not widely being used.
Personally, as I've said before, I think rentals are an important feature for accessibility, and frankly a cool feature as well (e.g. people can try different cards for fun, something I've done in the past with Alpha/Beta cards).
If we want to give greater rewards to owning vs renting, we could apply a negative rewards multiplier for rented cards (e.g. -5% per rented card used). That should be easy to do and would have immediate impact. It wouldn't, however, fix the loophole described above. However again I'd like to stress that we should quantify that loophole before jumping to try to change other fundamental things in order to fix it.
One other thing that would fix the loophole would be to implement a cooldown on rented cards (i.e. can't be used by other accounts). That wouldn't, however, increase the value of owning vs renting, although it should slightly increase the cost of rentals as it will reduce availability.
After discussing it in the Discord, I see that the reward penalty on rentals wouldn't solve this (though it would give a boost to ownership) and that the cooldown also wouldn't entirely resolve the problem.
@eldon1 put forth another interesting idea which is to reduce the energy cap to 25 (from 50), which I think is creative.
All that said, at the moment I'll be honest and say I'm not a fan of any of the ideas. I maintain that I think daily rentals are a utility that we shouldn't kill. My preference right now would be to not change anything.
What I'd love is for the company to look at this in more depth, with the data that is available to them (e.g. on rentals and NPE) in order to suggest a solution (if one is needed at all).
Reducing the energy cap is also not an ideal solution, I was just spitballing ideas but I really cant think of anything else. We are open to better ideas.
Or the team has to come up with an redesign of the way the energy and rentals work.
Yeah, I just brought it up here because I thought it was an interesting out-of-the-box idea.
I still think rented cards should have a cooldown to deal with this type of concerns:
I know is not directly related to the exploit we are talking about but its a concern for some people.
I really don't think we should be reducing the energy cap to 25 as it puts a bigger strain on players. As much as I don't agree with changing the rentals, this would have a worse effect in the game. We aren't a gacha game nor I think we want to be. I think it's great that players can play more in one day and not worry about Splinterlands on the next one.
I've updated my position on this: https://peakd.com/hive-104500/@bravetofu/re-clayboyn-sr38gm
I disagree with changing rentals. We've already made a huge impact 10xing the rental cost of many cards.
I don't even consider this an exploit or a bug. It's a feature. It's part of the strategy. There are benefits to owning, other benefits to renting long term and other to renting for 2 days, take a break and rent again later. When card prices go up, it's good to be a owner, which isn't what's happening for the most part for the past 3 years. When card prices go down it's better to rent. If you find a good deal it's better to rent long term or if you don't want to keep looking for cards to rent. If you want to spend an extra effort to improve the efficiency, it's better to use that tactic.
However, I would support a change that would make rentals tied to seasons. The problem with my idea is that it would require a lot dev time (I imagine) not only on rentals but also on other things. My idea would be to have every single rent last until the end of the current season, no matter how much time left (you could auto renew for more seasons). Player A puts up 2 cards for 10 DEC for rent. Player B rents it at the start of the season and pays 10 DEC for 15 days. Player C rents it at the end of the season and pays 10 DEC for 1 day. Cards could only be used by 1 account per season. It could even work well with survival mode, but I would have that cards on cooldown would get back to playable for the next season, even if they had cooldown left.
Other changes that would be needed for this to work properly would be to have tournaments and brawls star and finish during the same season.
Given all of these difficulties, I can't see it being implemented for a long time. Since my vision for these truly seasonal rentals is not possible for now, I prefer things stay the same.
Right now I'm not seeing a solution outside of season rentals to properly address the various loopholes and also push the benefits towards card ownership. Different forms of exploiter also seem to be pretty commonplace. If people want to try out cards for a lower price, they could try to rent them in the last few days of the season or persuade a guildy to delegate a card to try it out. They could also consider buying and selling cards too.
Season rentals also align markets and demand for cross-game mode usage: ranked, survival, land, tournaments & brawls. The one loser is people specifically renting wild cards for brawls, who play ranked in Modern, but value could be obtained via tournaments.
Another reason to not go this route of minimum huge number of days is that 3rd parties could set up their own rental systems using regular delegations (which don't have any time limitations). What this does is create a new way to delegate, possibly without any burn mechanisms involved. The end result won't be the intended one.
Delegations come with a 2 day cooldown which rentals do not. So while yes technically they could, I think there are other opportunity costs that would prevent it from being as appealing to renters. Who knows though, maybe people will pay a premium for delegation rentals that offset the 2 day down time.
Rentals don't have any cooldown? I had the idea that they had but maybe it's less. Still, even a 2 days cooldown is easily less of a downside compared to a forced 14 days rental. I believe we could have a better system but that better system would take too many resources (I've explained in my other comment). I'd rather stay at 2 days than make it 14 days. Honestly any nerf to rentals means a nerf to owning unless it's something very subtle like a 1% penalty per rented card.
Not if you only enter brawls and tournaments for the Ranked mode you play in. But tournament payouts can easily cover rental costs