Splinterlands Town Hall for February 16, 2022

Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Summary for February 16, 2022

*Please note: I cover as much as I can of the summary as a record of the conversation. I do not provide my opinion but actual conversation that occurs during the Town Hall/AMA. This summary will have questions provided from the Discord and the answers given by the various Splinterlands' team will be typed by me. Please forgive any typos or errors; some may be from Discord or some may be my own.

Founders Begin the Town Hall (formerly AMA)
Today's Town Hall included: @aggroed, @yabapmatt and @hardpoint

If you wish to contact the team, here's some of the personnel:

Aggroed @aggroed Founder and (C.E.O)
Matt @yabapmatt Founder and (C.P.O.)
Hardpoint @hardpoint (C.T.O.) (Chief Technical Officer)
KBux @kbux (VP of Engineering)
Nate @nateaguila (Creative Director)
Cryptomancer @cryptomancer (Splinterlands Developer)
Chatter (Director of Marketing)
Homestead @homesteadhacker (Business Analyst)
Weirdbeard (ESports/Tournament)

Introduction from Aggroed

• Nate, Chatter, Weirdbeard and others here
• Modern and Wild we want to get out here in Q1.
• End of this month into next month hopefully will be ready but please realize you can't estimate production all that easily.
• Nodes, Land, etc. coming
• Introductions
  • Nate the "Rapper" oh and Creative Dirctor
  • Nate joked he is a rapper for Splinterlands. HA! This is on his brain due to the upcoming promotion.
  • Chatter (Liam) here trying to increase the Splinterlands brand
  • WeirdBeard: Here to do Esports and Tournaments. If you ever get absolutely destroyed in a tournament I'm the one yo ucan come commiserate with.
• Six Months to Now
  • We've grown from a few to over 100 employees
  • We've reorganized the entire organization, the software and "how you make the doughnuts"
  • We have Chiclet as a department head for product design, I am as well, then we have Nate and KBux that help with the creative and the development. We have Liam who helps with the marketing aspects.
  • I think what we've done really well over the last couple of months is get the departments set up. Now that I have my departments set up we can get product teams. Product teams might have many people on the team, but they are taking on how do we make sure the economics work, the digital works, engagement with the community. We have whole teams of people interacting with each other to go figure out some of these problems.
  • Recently we saw this come into affect with WakaFlocka. We raced to make this happen. It's not just one person that does this, it's a whole team together.
  • WakaFlocka came together quickly and I think it's showing by shifting to this product-owner style you get a lot of things done so we're starting to see what I think is faster development. There's not enough data points to fully track this but my first estimate in looking at this is it's quite helpful.
• We have two major feature development teams. Six months ago we had no major development teams because we were full on dev ops, but now we're moving to three major development teams and we even have some behind the scenes teams.
• So this is some of the progress. I just want to give you a progress report. We have are looking to hire another 50 to 100 people and we keep growing as an org, but as you're growing you have to shift positions around and how we make the doughnuts kind of thing. We have a lot more resources around and we're still looking for senior level product owners who can help with this process.

Nate Creative Director

• Originally we were so limited on time and resources. How we introduced this stuff was kind of just crammed through and now there's a lot more thought behind it. Waka was something already in talks and in the midst of trying to create that structure, we through it in and it speaks to the need for this.
  • There's a lot involved: terms are right, game balance is right, artwork, animations, back end dev and how it fits in with all the cool stuff we have coming up whether it's wild or modern so we can't look at how it affects the game right now but the ripple effect of how it will work moving forward. Make sure the end result is the players: get more, get faster, get better. The net result is the player wins.

Chatter (Liam) Head of Marketing

• This [new process of product owners] is much quicker, Waka isn't the only project. The speed of deliverables has doubled with this new system. This whole processing line with every time allows marketing to get up much faster and be hands on in the whole journey.
• We are able to give feedback a lot faster to dev. Everything has been tremendously better and I've been super happy with the process so far.
• Aggroed jumped in to say things weren't working very well with communication before and Matt said we need these product owners and now things are working so much better. Just having a lot of people isn't enough. One of the best sales guys I ever worked with said no matter what you're doing it's not enough. You have to come back and see if they are interested and come back again. You land the sale, great, but you have to come back to them. In that process nothing was ever fast enough, working enough, etc. We needed to get more people communicating and iterating faster and so far so good. So far we have more people and they aren't sitting on the sidelines waiting for work but everyone has objectives and goals in mind. I'm personally mission-driven and there's a sense of urgency and there's a lot of bad things happening in this world and play to earn and crypto can help and we have a long way to go. I'm hopeful for this.

WeirdBeard - Tournaments and Status Update

• What's going on with the stalled tournaments
• To bring back tournaments as they existed and with some tweaks, they are ready to roll and be out today. Not only delegation and specificity and jobs. We are now ready to get tournaments as they existed out the door with SPS requirements, more beginner-friendly.
• We're also looking at a roadmap over 3 to 4 months that the community has been advocating over and over and over again. We now have people specifically able to put an eye on this and see what will work best.
• Some of the biggest findings from survey: The survey was really interesting. 600 responses. The main things we're trying to address are paying points. People don't even know that they (tournaments) kind of exist. They stumble into them. So like visibility of the tournaments itself is going to be important moving forward. But what's the thing that's the pebble in everyone's shoe that keeps them from joining? We need to readjust. Disparity of players also an issue. They either had big players come down and overpowering or people just not realizing their cards need to be stronger. So what we want to do is have the tournaments be more upfront about if you think you should enter into this particular tournament but also effortless in knowing when they are running, starting players early in the tournament system (showing you don't need a ton of cards to get going in these tournaments). So the new player will start off with the smaller tournaments and moving up that ladder of competition and interjecting more players into the ecosystem.
• We have this road map that I"m really excited about. I never want to count my chickens before they hatch, but I've talked with streamers, high level players and low level players, so if you want to know exactly what's going to happen go to my calendar and you can meet with me personally just sign yourself up on the tournament.
• We are working on streamer mode for tournaments that will hide match results. It doesn't change the actual tournament competition but we need to have it not only how does it feel to play in it but how does it view for the streamers. Those streamers are the evangelists. Splinterlands can only say how great their game is before people say "well yeah they are gonna say that because it's there game" so we need to improve streaming to help them share Splinterlands.
• There's other aspects as well but I don't want to say too much.
• The Streaming Plan that we're looking to do. Chatter and I have had some interesting conversations with different groups and people. Hey there are some big names that are out there and very interested in Splinterlands so we need to get a good way for them to interact. We want those big name streamers to see how easy it is for them to understand the game play and say "holy crap I need to play this game"
• We are looking at doing a ghost card where everyone has the deck so people can get in and understand what the game is because it's just... not overwhelming but it's sooo much for the new players. So that it doesn't impact the traditional tournament system we need the starter tournament that gets people wanting to play more

Marketing Update with Liam (Chatter)

• In terms of results, how do we get new players and spellbooks in. We've made it harder for bots, but we're looking to update that
• We're getting ads out there and seeing results
• We're looking for brand recognition on twitch which will be great
• Ron is going out with stream team and that will kick off soon. That will be around the clock streaming service.
• Waka Flocka is super awesome in joining. I don't think people realize it's not a one-off promotion, not so much with Waka but how do we let this be a stepping stone to do these promotions in the future. Who we do next is TBD but we have sold out with Waka in how long and we can go to other people and say this is what happened.
• Working on retention as well to keep people in the game and staying.
• We have exchange talks going on and looking to scale that.
• New merch coming soon
• Working with guilds to get them into the game

WafflesKitty (event cordinator) and DYGYCON

• Has a terrible cold and has no voice.
• Bi-monthly virtual convention and you can win swag.
• March 18-20 is the next DYGYCON

New People introductions

• Kal Jerico (Dan is his real name) - narrative designer, been playing the game since September and working for Splinterlands since November.
• I did the work on the Waka card and the story coming up with that.
• Currently working on a story that will introduce the wild and modern format
• What is narrative design? Basically, we do the history and background of the characters. We write a lot of lore and background on the characters. Not all of it is seen, but it's the building blocks for the characters. We do the little story snippets, which is effectively flash fiction and that kind of moves on as well to short stories. It's all great fun and great fiction and creating characters and the backgrounds.
• What's the goal of narrative design? I think narrative design-- writing the lore-- because what you've got essentially is just a game, but the lore gives it extra depth. Not everyone likes to read about the lore, I understand that, but it just gives extra depth. And as you start writing and gives little bits, it can open up stories and creates new characters and it's never ending. I'm a big fan of a little hope with a bit of darkness.
• Nate explains Dan adds the hope with the darkness.
• Aggroed stepped in and said gamers spend about 10,000 hours playing games by the time they graduate high school. So what are they learning? They make a face when they are about to win... pure intensity.. .epic focus and it's a common face among gamers.... something about gamers leaves them very hopeful. I personally like the dark and grungy with hope. The gamer aspect of bringing in some hope is a nice piece of the narrative that we can add so thanks for doing that.
• Nate said one more thing about Dan: Dan is usually the first to volunteer for the hardest, most challenging stuff.
• Here's the latest lore for those who haven't read it or watched it:

https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/these-strange-gods-tome-of-chaos-story

Tamer "Defolt" Oukour - Graphic Designer

• From Sweden and graphic designer (creating a professional look for branding things).
• Graphic designs for the game and social designs.
• Being creative and unique is a big part of my role to make the game more fresh and more professional.
• He found Nate; He has worked with games before but not crypto games. He worked for the Esports teams. He made banners and advertisements and designs, thumbnails and more stuff.
• What made Splinterlands a good fit for you? The most exciting thing about Splinterlands I get to try and do new things. I like to help improve the design for something high quality.
• Nate said when there is a new air drop we have these banners that are at the top of the screen and need to catch the eye and so Tamer helps with those banners.
• Character art with the transparent background? Tamer is nearly done with that! YAY! He adjusts the hue, contrast and brightness and exports it out and because of his efforts you'll have access to all the character art without all the backgrounds on them.
• Currently you can pick up pictures here: https://splintercards.com/

Nate Update

• The countdown has begun to who is going to be able to obtain the Waka Cards. It's going to be in high demand

Here's some animations!

We are working on a way to make sure these animations will work for mobile devices as well as just PC. We don't want our game to suddenly need high specs to run. This animation above is a GIF so then that will work out for the mobile player.

Here's a Waka Wallpaper!

And here's a first glimpse of Imagine Dragon that will appear.

And this is another image that will be animated.

• We will hopefully possibly have new league badges that will represent Wild and Modern. There's a lot going on with that. You won't get all of this when it first launces because our first and foremost importance is to get the Wild and Modern format as fast as we can and we'll add visuals as we go. We have cool visuals and animations coming. You will see week after week after week coming to what's already there.

• If you haven't been reading the lore, you will want to check that out.

https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/these-strange-gods-tome-of-chaos-story

You'll get great artwork there even if you don't want to read the lore so do check it out!

Update on Land

• We have the full team of people, the developers, the product owners, where are you with land and creative assets
• The asset production has been ongoing for the past year and some of you have seen in previous town halls the eye candy landscapes. All of that has been produced well in advance because there's so much with all the different types of lands.
• As we get past all these other things, and the product teams, we've got more coming. We recently had a product team meeting specifically about land at a leadership level and so we're moving towards it.
• We're taking this work and saying "what are we doing with this now"

Closing Thoughts/Trivia

• Chatter Trivia game will happen on a weekly basis. If you keep up with the lore, you can win! It's another reason to join the Town Hall LIVE.
• Imagine Dragon ads running on the tours. We are able to get some of the tickets so we will have a giveaway contest, free to enter, and can win some Imagine Dragon tickets if they are in your area.
• WeirdBeard: We cannot say names of some of the conversations we've had with some of the big names. It seems like people want to know and as an audience, even as a starting point... if your entry point is Imagine Dragons and Waka Flocka... you are already at a stage people will never get to. Things announced in the future here will ONLY GO UP so it's CRAZY to think your starting point is Imagine Dragons! From where we sit today to six months in the future is gonna be absolutely insane.

Rewards

• What do you guys think about reducing DEC rewards for skipping battles and giving DEC rewards to those who don't skip?
  • There's an entire rework so stay tuned!
• Would you ever consider reinstating new player rewards to incentivize growing the player base?
  • Matt always talks about it's not just new players. We can't just be giving away free money to brand new players so we have to be careful with the ways we want to do this. These are some of the basics of what we put in. Hopefully we'll have new chests because it's not satisfactory for the new player.
• What is the ETA on the revisions to the rewards system? Any additional insight into what the actual changes are going to be?
  • Not sure. Maybe at the end of next month.

Marketing

• Who do I need to reach to get a Splinterlands poster with my QR code?
  • Chatter: I will post a visual with that. We are giving away QR codes and poster images to put in your town and it will have your referral link. DM Chatter to get that made for you!

Here's the poster you can put in your town.

• Can we get signup numbers from any of the Imagine Dragons concerts? If we can track it, it would be a wonderful metric to know how effective this marketing campaign is.
  • Give me some time I'll try to give you numbers (Chatter)

Upcoming Features

• SPS Validator
  If I set up a validator node for SPS, am I guaranteed some SPS rewards or do only those who are upvoted get them?
  • It's like a witness system. We have been heavily influenced by the Steem and Hive Blockchain. We are making it if you run a validator node, and you're a top one you'll earn rewards and then in theory there should be backup validator nodes that will also be rewarded.

• Mobile
  Can you give a status update on the development of the mobile app?

  • Still in flux as to what we're doing here. We've talked about coming up with a mobile development team.
  • Considering Unity App at this time, it's just talk and internal discussions and perhaps if the players want to immerse themselves in the game, maybe that's where to do it.

• Land
  Any thoughts about how neutral cards will be used in land?

  • Claiming the land is one phase, producing resources (still further out), we're having the idea that summoners and monsters working your land that will help you speed up that production.

• How many Tracts are waiting to be formed into Regions that still have a chance of finding a Castle instead of a Keep?
  • I don't have those stats off the top of my head.

• Do you think Tract owners should have a higher chance of finding a castle than a single plot owner (versus no guaranteed chance)?
  • So all of that was defined in the whitepaper when we put it out so you can't just... even if I thought yes or no it doesn't matter because we already sold the stuff. Unless there's a bug or exploit, we will stick with the whitepaper as much as we can.

SPS/DEC

• According to the SPS Whitepaper, some SPS were allocated to Brawl Battles, ranked battles, etc. Where are those SPS stored? And can we get a look at how big each of those pools currently is?
  • They are still in the primary contract address for that. There's nothing... Matt and I aren't revising that or changing that. Part of getting those validators up and running helps with that but it's all still in the works.

Waka Spiritblade Sale

• Is Waka Spiritblade limited to one per account? I think that would be a good idea.
  What happens to the vouchers and SPS from the SPL Waka sale? And by extension, the proceeds of the wax sale. Can you guys please elaborate on if its income for SPL, burned, put in the DAO, given to Waka, etc? Thank you.
  • No it's not because you can make infinite accounts. Yeah there's 3 teams involved in this. The Waka team, our team and a middle group so profits are being split between 3 to 4 different entities.

• How are you ensuring the bots don't buy up all the Waka cards the first few minutes they go on sale?
  • There's a voucher system so if they choose to spend their vouchers immediately it will get sold out so if you're feeling FOMO you're not the only one and it's really good for the game if you don't get the card and really wanted it, I know that can be frustrating we just can't mint enough for everyone and hope it has perfect distributions. You've gotta have some scarcity to draw crowds. It's good for all of us and for the game. If it's totally broken then maybe we'll do a raffle system, before assuming everything is doom and gloom let's see how it goes.

Vouchers

• What was the reasoning for removing the 1M SPS cap for vouchers rewards?
  • That was initially put in for voucher rewards you stop getting the benefit of so many vouchers. When we first launched there was 60 million SPS so if you had a whole million it was a pretty sizable pool so if you have 1 million it's not as big of a deal but just having that distribution was important. It was good when we first started but not necessary forever.

Brawls/Tournaments

• Are there any issues with anytime tournaments where a player submitting cards second can see the cards of the player who submitted them first?
  • Didn't we change that setting internally? Answer was it's being worked on. We will check on that.

Suggestions/Requests

• Is it possible, or could you make it possible to download a high-quality image of our cards? I have some really cool cards that have great utility in-game and are worth a lot. They also look incredible. I’d love to have a higher resolution copy of them to get them printed, or even to show off on my walls within the different metaverses. They’re not just cards, they’re art, and status symbols too. I want to be able to show off my cards more!!
  • Yes we're doing that.

• How much work would it be to build a bridge to OpenSea?
  • We had a bridge to OpenSea and we closed it because gas fees got so high but we have been talking about maybe opening it up again.

• Does the team have any plans to add more skins/cosmetics? What are your thoughts on something like a battle pass with seasonal skins that players need to pay for? Or completing missions to get limited edition skins?
  • "Skins are gonna be the bane of my existence" -Nate. It's hard to motivate the team when we haven't had many sales. Nate shares his answer: It is something that seems to be a recurring request. The main challenge is we haven't quite planned things out strategically to make it scalable for what we're doing here. When battles 2.0 is out, we need to make sure those skins would then work for that now as well. We have these plans for what to do with the game as it changes down the road. If we just throw skins at the game, then what happens at that phase of battle because of these skins.

• Could there be more ways to earn vouchers? Such as brawl rewards?
  • Unfortunately no... well technically you could do it if people want to stake and make pool. The whitepaper is out, now we can do this with the validator system and you can get votes there.

Rapid-Fire Questions

• Question: Does the team have a view or ideas why the recently already done marketing is not converting into new users and spellbooks being sold? Brave marketing, billboards, Waka tweet, mall arcade and any other marketing that is supposed have gone live has not really seemed to have expected results?
  
  • Answer: The bear market and bot plays have played alot into this. Everything is ramping up and so it's gonna take multiple touch points and likely a few weeks especially in this bear market one just to push them into crypto. We need to solve the bot problem. WeirdBeard mentioned "turning the titanic doesn't happen in a week" It takes time. This is where I step in and tournaments have to be better for the new player. We want to encourage them to say "I play in three tournaments" A lot of those new players have to be onboarded. New players are a process to get them into the game. It can never be addressed with one solution. Aggroed added: If things were more bullish then I would be concerned. 80% of this is just being in a position to succeed. Right now we are preparing to be ready for another straight up type thing. It sounds like counter-intuitive but you can't force people to just come in and latch onto the game, you have to be prepared that when they DO COME, they have a game they can interact with.

• QUESTION: what made the team decide to sell WAKA at max instead of singles so it can cater to all sorts of player?
  • They wanted a limited collection and so we had to sell them as singles to meet what they were looking for.

• Question: Can we bring back the old system, where can you play with your friends for packs or now we could do DEC SPS or vouchers?
  • Yeah I would put that on feedback.splinterlands.com

• Question; After tiered chests are done, could there be a market for them if made tradable?
  • They are still fungible.

• QUESTION: Does the SPS Airdrop resets after 365 days & is there any plan to use Voucher for the land
  • No it ends. Yes vouchers will be used for cool features with the land.

• Question: Can we get an Iron Maiden partnership?
  • Slipknot is a possibility.

• Question: On the shop front page the first thing you see now is waka instead of packs - do you think this is good?

  • That is a UX decision. The shop redesign is still underway. The idea is when there's an ultra limited edition but short time, then as a default that is the initial experience. We do intend to add a tab called Premium where you would need vouchers to buy things.

• Question: if money from Waka sales are to be split with, Waka, middleman and splinterlands, will this SPS be sold? - I don’t imagine Waka want to be paid in SPS
  • We'll take it in as SPS and just hold onto it.

• Question: How fare are we with the arcade games? i like the idea a lot specially for streamers to have some more gameplay.
  • Still in the works.

• QUESTION: When will the shop be implemented in the mobile app? What obstacles are in the way?
  • Google is in the way. It's play only right now and not many are playing on mobile so we'll get more done on mobile later on.

• Question: Any hints on what 'one of the largest companies on the world' wants with little old SL?
  • There are very few companies who know how to do this and we are. Everyone is still trying to figure out how to do it, and we are.

• QUESTION: i asked a while back, but now that nate is here i'll ask agian, will we ever get a Khymia card? she has art work and lore but isnt in the game. also will will we be updated on what she's doing or thinks about the CL? lastly is there any ool/uul card, or carnage titan info?
  • We created a lore book that was in a kickstarter and there's a pdf bouncing around and we probably should make more accessible but something you should be aware of, the Chaos Legion, the Chaos War, it's gonna upset the overall balance that came before... it's going to change the world in very dramatic ways and the landscape and geography and politically speaking and the kingdoms and shaken out and when the dust settles all the stuff that came before still impacts how the story goes but once the Chaos War is over if it is ever over and the Chaos Legion takes over there are a lot of moving pieces here. Things are still coming.. carnage titan it's coming...

• QUESTION: Isn't the Season Rewards based on the latest level and not the highest are discouraging playing Splinterlands? I have not played the game for more than 24 hours to keep my position.
  • Yeah potentially that's what we're looking at with the changes.

• Question: would it be possible to implement an objective system throughout the season where a player selects/given at random a summoner and the summoner gets levelled up throughout the season. This would encourage players to get levelled monsters. The chosen summoner resets every end of season.
  • IDK put that up on feedback.splinterlands.com

• QUESTION: is the SPS gonna be listed in Binance!
  • You guys should be asking Binance not us.

• question @nateaguila wen ewok,space penguin,jawa themed cards partnership?
  • We have these D and D sessions as a family so we're very involved and we recently had a campaign and "I'm the Moth" so we transferred over to Star Wars RPG setting and I'm obsessed with jawas right now... so someone is talking to my wife !

• Question: The quest potion has been abandoned for a long time, Is there any mechanism to use it as reward?
  • No not coming back anytime soon.

• QUESTION: Regarding land, What sort of rarity guarantees are region/tract holders expected to see (asides from the castle/keep)? Like 2 Legendary per tract (1 magical/1 non magical, 100 plots), 4 Epics (2 magical/occupied/non magical/occupied, etc) and 12 rare?

  • No plans.. would be luck of the draw.

• QUESTION: Can we get any other use case for the NFTs sold on splintertalk?
  • That will be awhile if ever. Don't purchase them with thought they will have it. You should be checking out splintertalk.io.

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Here's the Link to the YouTube video from Splinterlands' Official YouTube Channel if you want to see the Town Hall as well for a reference.

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If you enjoyed my post and want to try Splinterlands, please use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=rosiew

Please remember my post is not meant to be financial advice and is just my opinion.
Follow These Folks:
Splinterlands: https://peakd.com/@splinterlands/
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1Up (#OneUp): https://www.1up.zone/

Here are some great links to join as well!
Splinterlands Discord: https://discord.gg/Tw7KjNsQGs
Monster Market Discord (Monster Curator): https://discord.gg/DR3J9rfRFV
PeakD Discord (PeakMonsters as well): https://discord.gg/7mQmzZeugE
NFT Studios Discord (aka 1UP Discord #OneUp): https://discord.gg/4VYBcNuVQd