Splinterlands | Future Reward Card Solutions

costanza (69)in #crypto • 2 years ago

One of the problems right now in Splinterlands is that the print of the reward cards is so high while an army of bot accounts are looking to farm and sell them that the prices are extremely low. Here is a potential solution.

Current Reward Cards

Basically the devs went overly optimistic about the growth of the game and printed way too high reward card numbers. Since every player is getting them from the rewards, there is not that much reason to buy while many are pumping which makes the supply extremely high and the demand extremely low with as a result dumping prices. Some of these prices are even lower compared to the DEC burn value when counting DEC at the peg it is supposed to be.

The entire situation also made it so that the concept of Collection Power has to be thrown out of the window since it's extremely cheap for everyone to get enough collection power in order to enter higher leagues.

Proposed Solution by Devs (Soulbound Reward Cards)

The idea for as far as I know, is to make reward cards Soulbound similar to Gladius cards making it so that they can't be sold on the market and on top of that they also can't be burned for DEC unless a player reaches a point where they have a max level copy on their account. I'm not sure if it will be possible to put these cards on the rental market but I guess not since that still allows bot accounts that only have the intention to extract value to get something out of them.

I'm personally not the biggest fan of this as it makes it harder for everyone to get on the same level as it will be impossible for newer players to catch up. It also cuts into the rewards.

My Proposed Solution

So the main issue of the reward cards is that they are too easy to get for the bot farms to get a ton of them and dump them on the market to extract value from the ecosystem. At the same time, the game can always use more real use cases for things such as SPS / Vouchers / Titles / DEC. If anything a new reward card system could act as an incentive for those and there are many possible ways to do so.

Example

Cards by default are SoulBound but similar to how there is a % chance for them to turn into gold foils, there could be a system where the card turns into a real reward card based on how much SPS the account holds. Or a system where a certain amount of SPS is needed in order for all Soulbound reward cards would be real reward cards. I'm honestly not exactly sure how the numbers for this would look to make it work properly since higher leagues have higher rewards.

I guess something as 100k Staked SPS to be required to get a 100% chance at all levels could be reasonable (especially assuming that the price of SPS right now is really low). Every 100 SPS could stand for 0.1% chance just to even things out. Someone with 2000 SPS Staked has 2% Chance for each Soulbound reward card to turn into a real reward card.

Something like this would actually give good reasons for players to stack their SPS and keep it staked. It would almost totally remove the ability for Bot farms or even alt accounts to farm reward cards making it so that they should be worth more on the market. Instead of having a maximum print rate, reward cards could have a fixed timeframe in which they can be earned.

Other Examples

Something else that can be done is that by default reward cards are soulbound but not for players that get some kind of title from buying a certain amount of packs. This gives much more incentives for players to buy packs aside from the airdrops. If for example each 500 packs bought by someone, a title is given which can be sold or even rented out. That would make it so that in total a maximum of only 30k accounts can get real reward cards.
Maybe an idea would be that in order for players to get the reward card as a non-soulbound card, they are required to burn the DEC amount that is attached to it in a way that works with a pre-paid amount where the DEC is taken from. That would not only burn a lot of DEC, it also requires accounts to have enough on the side in order to actually get the cards. It would need to be a system where it's all or nothing not allowing players to chose which card gets converted into a real reward card by burning the DEC attached to it.
Vouchers somehow could also be put into the mix since there are way too many of those in circulation right now.

Conclusion

While none of the ideas that I put out are foolproof or worked out completely, the main takeaway is that a new reward card system could have a system that gives SPS, Vouchers, DEC, Titles extra use cases while at the same time making it much harder for bot accounts that aim to extract value from the system to do so through the Reward Cards that come from chests. It would be a shame if reward cards completely would disappear by making them fully Soulbound.