In my opinion, during the months and now years after this post, things didn't improve at all. Too many aspects of the game developed into the wrong direction:
As important new players are without any doubt, the foundation of the game are these users which support the game since many years or even the beginning.
As soon as you completely depend on new players while at the same time devaluing old assets (beginning with the 'war' against alpha cards) and discouraging and losing long term players and supporters you cut your own roots, and will definitely fail sooner or later!
Furthermore, it's just naive to expect players which are seeing the value of their old cards decrease to buy new cards ever again (these new cards - with better and better abilities to create short term demand - will be old soon enough and then just another chunk of assets losing value). Sooner or later also potential new players will be aware of that mechanism and stay away.
Splinterlands has completely left its path to care about the value of the player's assets and instead creates a huge inflation of more and more cards, titles, assets and in-game 'currencies'.
Apart from devaluing old assets the biggest problem is that the game itself has become way to complex and complicated to attract these new players the team would like to join!
Simplicity should be the key! Chess and Go are brilliant examples of games with a minimum of rules which still lead to a maximum of complex game play full of deep ideas. It's NOT the number of rules, abilities and different cards which a player has to memorize ("Wild" nowadays is nearly unplayable for human players due to the vast number of selectable cards) what makes a game complex and fun!
In my opinion, the ranking system benefits players who play MUCH (and even buying energy) instead of players who play WELL! In additon, in my opinion it was way better to earn more rating points when beating strong opponents and less when beating weaker opponents (similar like an ELO system) than the flat 20 points gain per win system now.
Not only in the ranking system money wins over skills. Also when it is about which players are entitled to design their own cards, only whales with deep pockets get rewarded for buying countless of assets, but never players for an outstanding performance in the game itself.
Finally, bots and battle helpers should simply be completely forbidden, and if nothing helps I would be in favour of KYC. That might be against one aspect of WEB3 games but is simply necessary for the survival of the game. Then there would still be a card market and other traits which would differentiate Splinterlands from WEB2 games.
Last but not least, in my eyes it's just disastrous for the game to let players pay (enormous amounts) to unbind cards which they have already earned before by playing.
I agree. If you compare with Splinterlands, opening prep in chess are your cards. The rest are skill and talent. :)
... and the importance of opening preparation below international master level is overestimated. As long as you follow sound opening principles you can do rather well. Since many years (since I am not joining official tournaments anymore) I am not doing any serious opening preparations anymore and still easily keep a level between 2300 and 2400 rating in lichess.org.
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