OK my first post here, want to share some of my thoughts on Splinterlands and its future, and hopefully present some useful comments.
A bit of a background: I am a long-time fan of trading card games, played and had a lot of fun with quite a many different games, and still play Magic casually (old-school, using only pre-2003 cards) to this day. I learned of Splinterlands relatively recently, and am enjoying it a lot. A shame I did not learn of the game before.
One aspect that I particularly like is that, when compared to physical card games (e.g., Magic), Splinterlands makes it much easier to find people to play with/against. These days, quite many years past of the good, olden times of playing card games at school during breaks, now also a father, it becomes ever more difficult to find time/opportunities to play card games. Splinterlands is thus revolutionary, in a good sense, in allowing busy grown-ups to indulge in long-cherished hobbies. I grow ever more awed with the power and possibilities opened up with the blockchain technology. It is so unfortunate that most politicians only see crypto as an extra opportunity for taxation and/or as a threat.
That all said, I am very optimistic about the road ahead for Splinterlands, provided the dev team keeps delivering as they have been doing so far. It will be interesting to see the land mechanics integrating with the rest of the game. The SPS launch is an important step towards decentralisation and governance, and I hope to see the token having multiple use cases, in order to maintain a healthy demand factor. By the way, multiple and diversified use cases is critical for the health of any game tokens, and I am satisfied to see you can do many things with DEC. Hopefully both DEC and SPS will keep rising in value! And in a sustainable way.
Now, I see the Splinterlands community is growing rapidly, and card prices have risen considerably this year. I think it is inevitable that, as Splinterlands becomes bigger economic-wise and cards remain limited in number (as they should!), cards will become ever more expensive. This is of course good for those already on the boat, considering that any blockchain game is not only a game but also an investment (never forget that!). But, on the other hand, more expensive cards makes the entry of new players more prohibitive. It will be interesting to see how the Splinterlands devs will deal with this issue. Ultimately, the long-term success and survival of the game will depend on those decisions.
In any case, any decisions that would make the price of existing cards drop (e.g., minting of cards from previous sets) would be disastrous, for card holders would feel betrayed and lose trust in the game. I have seen this type of thing before, it's disastrous, I trust the Splinterlands devs won't do this. Trust is the most valuable asset for any project, blockchain games included.
And now to the main point of this post. A number of trading games adopted a strategy of printing ever more powerful cards, as new sets are released. This could seem like a good idea, considering that it would force existing players to always keeping purchasing new, more powerful cards. But this policy ultimately corrodes the spirit of the game, as players understand that their cards are obsolescent, withering assets, that continuously depreciate in value owing to more powerful cards being minted. I very strongly hope that this is not the view the Splinterlands devs have for the game, and that the game will never follow this course of action. I have seen many good games wither and die due to this.
These are my thoughts on the game, will be happy to hear your own. Comments, constructive criticism, all very much welcome!
Do you think that reprinting existing cards in new sets is a bad thing? This is common practice, all card games that I know of do this to some extent. I agree with your views on card power balancing though.
Glad to hear we agree on power balancing for new cards. Regarding the reprinting of old cards in new sets, no, I absolutely do not think it is a problem, provided each new card printed is clearly identifiable as belonging to a set different to the sets in which that card was previously printed. With "minting of cards from previous sets" I meant printing more cards under an already-existing set. E.g., if Splinterlands were to create more Alpha cards. That would naturally ruin the game, as I think anyone would promptly agree.
Hello @gustavhaas! This is @indayclara from @ocd (Original Content Decentralized) team. We saw that you already posted your first post here in Hive! Congratulations and welcome!
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