I will not vote for anything that nerfs rentals. It's too shortsighted. Since the goal here is to target bot farm accounts that only play SB cards, why not simply remove rewards for SB cards? The SB conundrum was a team creation unfortunately... in the past reward card sets were MUCH more limited in scope. Meaning you could not possibly win playing only reward cards. There were too few and only a few from each splinter. The SB reward set was TOO BIG and also unfortunately included summoners, allowing bot farm accounts to rent for a short time and then play using SB cards exclusively.
Yes rentals are cheap right now because of both overprinting and fewer accounts playing, but RB rentals are much higher than other editions due to scarcity (which is due to excessive cost imo but that's another conversation).
The narrative has also shifted from 'new players should play modern so they don't have to face older expensive/powerful cards' to 'new players should play wild because there are lots of low level bots that are easy to beat'.
New players will NEED To be able to rent cards and earn otherwise they will never buy. Modern is basically hell for new players right now and I believe SB and Glad cards will unfortunately only perpetuate/maintain that scenario. Nerfing rewards for rentals goes against core principals of the game.
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I 100% agree with the issue with SB cards. It should be impossible to reach/earn on a level higher than Bronze 1 or something with only reward cards. When I started in Sept 21 the prices were prohibitively high for existing cards (i.e. as a new player who was used to putting 50-60$ on a game I was not about to put thousands of $ into an unknown game...). This was before CL edition came out, so my only option was to rent, but I still got the rewards for playing, although back then we got like 1 chest daily and I think 10 season chests in Silver :).
I wanted to get involved in crypto and gaming felt instinctively right for me so that is why I checked out different games. I landed on SPL because the game in itself felt easy enough to understand but at the same time really challenging to win consistently. I trudged through all steps to set up HIVE accounts etc. and get some money in the game to be able to buy some single cards and later on rented some key cards (hello Yodin...) to get going. My point is that I would never have continued to put money in the game if I hadn't gotten hooked on the game itself which led me to having bought a bunch of packs and continuously complemented my collection with card purchases. (Don't think I wanna know how much I've spent on this "game"... :D)
To @bronko, well done for re-working the proposal so it wouldn't just die by the roadside. I am very encouraged by the way the SPS community can vote on these issues, no matter the outcome. I like the CP "soft limits", that is not restricting anyone from moving up but simply capping them from extracting more than fair value from the game. I believe that Matt and co. have taken many prudent steps during these years such as the energy requirement to make it prohibitive to play 24/7.
From my perspective I think rentals are an important category for many thousands of players so it should be empowered rather than nerfed. I understand that you fully believe that it would raise prices, but perhaps the drop in turnover rate would fully negate any earnings for the renters. On the flip side, should the CP be heavily reduced or even nullified for Soulbound Reward cards then the CP requirements put forth would in theory increase the demand on rentals again, and possibly then push up the prices. Even if it won't be the ultimate solution it could be one step in the right direction without alienating a large share of players.
Last point about Modern, I used to only play in Modern but since a few months back the lack in liquidity has made it horrible to play with my Gold league-ish collection. I mean, I get whopped by max-decks in Bronze... I used to float between Silver and Gold but now I just hang out in Wild and are enjoying the game so much more again. I play against really good players with awesome decks one game, and next one against an even-levelled player and then against some low-level bot. I love that! I think it gives a sense of suspense in the match-making to see what you might be up against. I don't buy for a second that bots are better than me, my statistics are probably 2/3 wins against bots if we have similar deck strength, especially with the Tactics part from Rebellion.
I say the rent will go up. We even have evidence that shows this is very likely to happen. let's look at modern. Because the bot farms there can no longer cause rating inflation, it is much more competitive there and people rent a lot more there.
or another scenario when the modern bots had to go wild.
The number of bots in wild has almost doubled.
what has happened there? The wild rents have fallen because they have increased the rating inflation and therefore required far fewer cards for the same rating.
in the proposal 50,000 cp are required for silver.
But only one cl core set at silver level has 83,200 cp.
So if it becomes even halfway as competitive as modern, then even the entire CL core set won't be enough to survive there. That means there is a lot of room and need for additional rent.
and to the new players. the proposal has no requirements for bronze there can still be earned without own cp.
my goal is to give the cards and therefore the rental market more value again. if you think it's okay if 1bcx accounts can play up to diamand because it's great for the npe, well then i don't know what to do, i'm sorry i couldn't convince you
and the principles of the game are that ownership is rewarded and that card maximization is encouraged. the current state of affairs has the opposite effect. and pointing to rebellion?
do you remember the untamed rental prices when they were in modern? my prebuilt deck cost 14-20k dec a day to rent there, since it's in wild it costs 900-1500 dec a day. so if the few hundred players in modern had more influence on the rental prices than the tens of thousands of accounts in wild. then sorry then i have to tell you the wild rental market is already dead!
I do NOT think it's great for 1 bcx account to play up to diamond, that's putting words in my mouth. But that's something the team needs to address since they caused the problem. Too many things are getting changed too quickly to realize the actual EFFECT on the game and the ecosystem. We need to understand what every single thing does and the chain reaction it causes, and personally I do not believe the current setup of eliminating league limits is correct or good for the ecosystem, let alone the NPE.
I have been around here for a long time, and a major part of the OWNERSHIP thing is the ability to RENT cards and earn by doing so. We have no idea which way new players will be directed at this point... first it was modern, now the narrative is wild. As I said, I see nerfing rentals as another step that will damage the ecosystem in the long run. There are better solutions to the same problem, such as removing earnings by SB reward cards.
well, we now have liquidity bots in modern, i think this will ease the situation there again. and as i said, even if new players choose wild, they can earn there as normal, for novice and bronze there is no cp requirement. they can even play up to champion without having cp and earn glint as normal. only the sps reward would then be calculated as if they were in bronze 1. do you think that would be different from now? now they wouldn't even earn 2 sps in diamand. by proposal that many extractor botfarms will only earn sps at bronze level instead of diamand and champion as they currently do, the pool will be emptied much slower, which means that new players can at least earn something again. currently they can't if they choose wild.
and remove income for sb? how do you envision that? we all use soulbound cards. will we all be penalized if we use one?
In wild, sure. SB cards are loaded with problems that were not fully predicted by the team when implemented (some oversights, like including summoners, are mind blowing to think about).
Remove the rental nerf and I'd support this 100%. Being able to rent and earn is a vital part of the core of this game and ecosystem, and ANYTHING that nerfs rentals is a terrible idea imo. I do not believe rentals will go up for legacy editions if you do not earn rewards in wild with rented cards.
The core problem is that, in wild, if it were related to rent, we wouldn’t be able to solve the issue. Bots have no time limit, so they can infinitely multiply themselves without investing. Some even have tools that precisely calculate how expensive the rent is and how much I would earn. Then they determine the minimum profit required to activate accounts. Consequently, they automatically mine SPS without any financial or time constraints, and without any investment or risk. As soon as the SPS price rises, more accounts are automatically activated to rent, and mine sps from our pool. This continuous siphoning ensures that SPS and rental prices can only increase temporarily, as they are immediately absorbed again by the automated process 😔
I mean, back then we had CP requirements that could be rented. Did it help against bot farms and extractors? No, they even had a boom. It would be an improvement to the current situation; we now have other measures that would restrict it a bit more. But only restrict. The core problem would still exist; we would just slow it down but not stop it.