@clayboyn What I am confused here is that the issue I read are these:
- Early cancellation of the rentals.
- Possible exploit for delegation and rentals.
These are the two main problems, right?
Then how about doing these suggestions instead that will only target those issues and not everyone including those not having any issues?
Solution for Early cancellation of the rentals.
Let's combine both daily and seasonal rentals. To do that, let's do this rule. You can rent a card up to 365 days or more (like the usual daily rental). The new rule to fix it would be this:
Any rentals for the current season cannot be cancelled. If the current season has 5 days left (let's say) and you rented a card for 5 days, that cannot be cancelled. If you rent a card after the season, for example, 30 days rental, then the owner of the card can cancel the rental BUT the rental will only be cancelled at the end of the current season (like how seasonal rentals work). This way, people can still rent daily (2 days minimum) but can also rent for up to 15 days that cannot be cancelled (If you rented at the beginning of the season). The daily renters aren't affected and those who like renting per season can still do it. A compromise between both.
Soluition for the tournament exploit.
This one is simple to be honest. Why not combine both card delegation cooldown and rental cooldown? If the card delegation cooldown is 24 hours, then even if you rent it out, the one who rented still cannot use the card for 24 hours for any play. That's it.
What I hate about this proposal is that it seems they gave up thinking for a compromise. I understand though because as a dev, it's easier to press the delete button than to create new series of codes that would fix the problem for everyone.
Also, if I may rant a bit more, this just smells profit than quality of life change. I'm sorry but I really cannot see this any other way. This is more proven by the strong pass on the proposal despite a lot of people saying no because the majority saying no don't have the voting power to turn this proposal down.
The issue that spurred all of this is that rentals don't have any delegation cooldown and people can use them to more or less bypass energy limitations on an account. It creates a situation where it's more beneficial to cycle accounts to get twice as much energy/earnings via renting instead of owning cards. Making rentals not able to be cancelled would make for a better user experience but not close the exploit. One of the earlier discussions before creating polling and proposals for this issue involved creating a cooldown similar to delegation for rentals, but ultimately it was viewed as an ineffectual solution and problematic for card owners again.
For example, if you add the delegation cooldown to rentals, then owners would be renting roughly half as much, which could lead to cycling more card rentals throughout the duration of a season, but would ultimately be a net negative impact to owners that do want to rent and wouldn't solve the problem as people could then just rent someone else's cards for 2 days and repeat the cycle. There's no perfect solution here, but the season rental approach is the best that was presented during the discussion/debate leading up to the proposal and it seems like the proposal has a strong majority support from SPS stake.
While I'm not opposed to someone presenting a better solution, we've explored many of the suggested 'better alternative' lines of thinking and potential solutions before getting to this point and seasonal rentals are the best way we could figure out that closes the exploit while it also encourages card ownership and creates congruency in the rental system going forward as both land and survival mode will only work with season rentals. Having all card renters move to season only will hopefully create a much better overall price for season rentals as they become more competitive with all renters focused there instead of split between daily and season rentals.
I see I guess I did not think of it that well. I apologize.
No apologies need it, I get change is frustrating. This particular instance I'm actually hopeful will be a net win in practice. The area that I'm personally a bit concerned about is people that only rent for brawls. Hopefully we can figure out something there or the cost of season rentals will drop enough that it makes sense to rent for the whole season and play ranked/tournaments/brawls with the cards.
I also rent a few days a week and not whole season so I understand the sentiment of those who are only their for their guilds. It just seems and sounds like a price hike for playing the game rather than an overall better experience.
I do hope they can find a compromise between the daily and season rentals or at least, put this in pending and discuss this further before applying it not like a ticking time bomb that will be applied anytime soon.
Honestly, I feel bad because if this happened, like with what I told to the other person, the only compromise I can see is the daily renter like me, are the ones adjusting. I will be FORCED not to play on the start of the season and just play like 5 or 7 days towards the end of the season because the rental would be too high to rent it at the start of each season. This means the overall playtime of this game would be lower.
Lower playtime means it would also be harder to find investors outside Splinterlands to invest on collabs for this game. It's like lowering traffic on a website, which I think investors also check before doing any investment. Not a lot want to invest on a game where only few people play