Sad to see the rental market pulling back. It was always going to happen when you drop 10x more cards onto the same amount of players but they really cut off the newer users with their latest changes.
When there is no hope of climbing the ranks without putting in more money then you lose interest very fast.
I do think that they will keep growing steadily with the new cards, new leagues and new tournaments but they stopped momentum.
When the new packs fly out next month we will see another big fomo from the crypto sphere after 50m in sales for the week.
A lot of it will be recycled money but the narrative will look good and the economy will hopefully rebalance.
The thing is, even before Chaos Legion there was about 3x too much inventory on the market to do anything but drive down prices a little every day until they hit zero. If there are 1000 customers and 2000 products all competing on price alone and there are no fixed costs to the people renting out their cards, there is no reason to not keep undercutting and no limit to how low they'll go and that what we've been seeing. Unfortunately this isn't a pullback in the rental market but just a chart with lower lows and lower highs since August on its way to zero and that was before Chaos Legion.
The biggest problem is that even with that much inventory on the market, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what is still sitting on the sidelines waiting to enter the rental market. Daily I see people with much larger accounts than me resolving to finally get serious about the rental market.
Splinterlands has a math problem right now around cards. Everything they do from here on out has to be bigger than before if this current system stays intact. If there are 400k active users and you want the packs you worked so hard to create and get to market to not sell out in a few days and send you back to the drawing board, you can't put out a few million packs anymore. At the same time, there is no ability to absorb the inventory that comes with those packs with only 400k players. We probably now need about 4-5 million players to absorb everything we have out already plus chaos legion and if we got 5 million players, how many packs would have to come out next time? 150 million? how many players would it take to absorb that?
They need to change the structure of everything they are doing when it comes to card releases. The 5 card pack is great in in real life cards that get damaged and lost and put on display and lost and forgotten about but in the digital world, ever single card minted is still there and accessible and competing to be used. The answer should be combining them but the cost to do so for most cards is prohibitive.
I think Splinterlands answer to the card inventory problem was that whales would just sit on millions of copies of cards and diamond hands them and then the rental market would encourage holding for income but that brings us back to the first problem which is the rental market being competed down to zero long before all the inventory hits the market.
As that happens, the economy shrinks and the exponential nature of DEC does what it does and plummets its value until the game isn't worth playing and assets aren't worth holding. You'll have some self correcting cycles along the way but the direction is a stair step down to nothing if they stay on this path and this way of doing things.
Answers? Do everything humanly possible to reward new members until you have a base of a few million users. Stop encouraging whales to buy everything with recycled capital (while the narrative looks good it creates faulty structure which will collapse under any financial distress or even one whale who's diamond hands get chipped), curb the rewards for account size as they get larger so people can catch up, stagger much smaller card releases on a set schedule (like 1 million packs every 6 months with new cards) and reward at least half the vouchers based on actually playing the game instead of just asset ownership, encourage combining cards by increasing the potency of the power rating as the card become higher level, increase the card reward drop rate for new players and decrease it for higher levels, ban bots, completely rework DEC.
Basically the exact opposite of everything they are doing to deal with these problems.