Long Year Ahead For Splinterlands. Some Thoughts.

in Splinterlands17 days ago

After missing one Town Hall meeting, and with lots of questions rising, it was normal this Town Hall would be pretty packed with information, and it was.

But before we delve into that, let's note that the 5-year-long COLONY airdrop for holders of staked GLX and SPS has started. As announced before, the airdrop is on an exponential curve, meaning fewer tokens airdropped at the beginning and more at the end. Here's the schedule, for those who haven't had the chance to see it:


Screenshot from support article here.

Back to the Town Hall, which has nothing to do with the previous information, but it was announced on all Splinterlands-related discord servers.

I'm expecting this year will feel very long for many Splinterlands users, especially if we start having a full-fledged bull run in the second part of the year, and Splinterlands doesn't move with the market.

I believe this period is both good and bad for Splinterlands. It is bad because long-term investors in the game will become more dominant as they pick up the assets dropped in haste by those who can't take it anymore.

It is good because it is a sort of "cleansing" period of the ecosystem, needed to get rid of the bad apples and "impurities". I prefer cleansing because of the game reference, but you can call it fasting... 😀

As Matt reminded us, we had the same kind of period in 2019-2020, before the 2021 craze.

It is obvious Matt is trying to recreate the same kind of scenario, with Splinterlands assets going up at the end of the bull market. But 2025 will be different from 2021, and I say that hoping it will be different, and not in a bad way.

Launching SPS in 2021 on BSC, the airdrop, and the lack of assets to buy sent existing tokens and assets to the moon, but also attracted the wrong kind of crowd, in my opinion. Most of them are long gone, but their main reason for joining was to pump their bags at the end of the bull market, not to stick around when things get harder through the bear market.

Users blame bots and want to see them banned from various places. The truth is bots are tools and everyone will use them at some point, maybe not in Splinterlands. It's the PEOPLE we attract we need to be cautious about. The kind of people who make/made the atmosphere in the Mavericks channel toxic for no reason, I hear (I don't frequent that channel). The kind that only sees rewards and likes nothing else about Splinterlands.

From that point of view, the focus on the new player experience before marketing Splinterlands heavily seems logical, and hopefully, it will attract more players than DeFi people. The timing of when NPE will be ready and marketing will start seems about right too, probably in Q4. People will have more crypto funds to invest, but it would help if they could attract people from outside crypto too, regular players. Fiat doesn't go through the bull-bear cycle and pays salaries.

A good piece of news Matt shared with us, in my opinion, was that he's not focused on attracting more VCs into Splinterlands. This was a mistake they've made in the past (in my opinion), but he understands very well the risk of bringing in VCs into the company and wants to avoid them. He also avoided saying how many months of runway the company has (which I believe is a good approach), but he mentioned that they are currently in no danger.

What I didn't like as a landowner, was the fact Land doesn't currently have a full dev assigned to it (but has 2 part-time senior devs from the team for Land 1.6 tasks, namely the Grain-DEC LP and prefix titles), and given the updates, I don't have high hopes for Land 2.0 launching by the year-end anymore. NPE is expected in early Q4, and probably the next core set in Q1, beginning of Q2 2025. So, Land 2.0 either goes out in December 2024 or, more likely, Q2-Q3 2025.


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I think Splinterlands stumbled a lot during the bear market. They weren't able to capitalize much on their success during the bull. But I do think they are trying to right the ship. I agree that it might take a while to see the results.

I think Splinterlands stumbled a lot during the bear market.

Yep, I agree. Quite a few mistakes were made. I wonder how many of them were at the advice or pressure of VCs.

I didn't even know we had VCs. I thought it was all the team's miscalculations. But that would make more sense since Matt wants to avoid VCs this time around.

Yep, Splinterlands has VCs, in a minority, but still, they have influence. One of them is on the Board of the company if I recall. But if I remember well, he also played Splinterlands.

I didn't know that. Thanks for sharing that info.

You learn a lot by listening to Town Halls, lol.

Haha, I mostly just read the summary.

I think this bull market will be different. I honestly don't think there will be a huge NFT craze because of how much people were burned. Let's hope things are good this time around and I think its good that he isn't focused on VC funding.

Good point that in 2021 there was the NFT craze and now it probably won't be. The difference is back and now Splinterlands NFTs have a use case, while many of the NFTs that generated the craze in 2021 had absolutely no use case. Pure "meme" craze.

for my point of view, splinterlands has rushed too much bad in the past, and now is doing nothing, basically the game is stuck in the same state

splinterlands has rushed too much bad in the past, and now is doing nothing

I agree with the first part. The second part may seem like doing nothing by comparison with the previous (apparent) speed or with newer games that haven't run into any major issues yet.

. . . the same kind of period in 2019-2020, before the 2021 craze.

I feel fortunate now to see the repeat of 2019-2020. I came to crypto in the third quarter of 2021.

Oh my, right at the top! Kind of like when I came to the roots of Hive, lol.

Yes, I feel the short cycle period in crypto is kind of a blessing in disguise, especially for those who understand and don't overreact to either extreme.

Same experience when I entered the stock market in 2015, the end of a bull market. And that's why I learned to love bear markets.

That's a good previous experience to have before crypto. I'm glad I had some too.

Greetings,
Thank you for sharing this information
Season finale is almost here, do you have any plan for use of your GLINT token rewards?
Also, nice tips on the situation in Splinterlands
Peace

Season finale is almost here, do you have any plan for use of your GLINT token rewards?

Yes. My plan is to max out the reward cards before the next set comes out this summer.

Powerful moves
Thank you