This is the #98th edition of the "Week through Adrian's Lenses" weekly Hive and crypto news roundup.
Let's see what we have for this week. We cover:
Hive
- Splinterlands
- Survival Mode
- Rally Car / Value Plan
- Inleo
- Blocktrades
- HBD Stabilizer
- V4V.App
- PWR
- Twitter Posh / Snaps
- Holozing
- SoulKeep
- Genesis League Goals
Crypto
- Gensler
- Saylor / Microsoft
- SUI
Week on Hive
15 of 21 tracked posts made it to this week's issue of the "Week on Hive" roundup.
In the Spotlight
Splinterlands: Survival Mode and Tech Modernization
I generally like to vary spotlights from week to week, to not have the same project in the spotlight in consecutive weeks.
But things happen on Splinterlands that deserve the attention. This week the team rolled out in production the upgraded battle and tactics screens, which were the most complicated ones from their Tech Modernization process, which started more than a year ago. If I remember well, they might be the last ones remaining, and now, after feedback, bug fixes and minor changes, this process may be completed. Take it with a grain of salt, I am not sure.
However, it has been a huge project, a blocker for other projects and for someone working on it for the long term. Now the mobile experience (in a browser) should be ok for playing Splinterlands, which was a major prerequisite before attempting to bring in many new players. If it is not completed, it will soon be.
Details about this upgrade came with this week's release notes (from Tuesday, they did another update yesterday).
Survival Mode
Then, a fresh announcement sheds light on what was promoted as a new hardcore mode for Splinterlands some time ago. It will be called the "Survival Mode", it will be a new gameplay format, without restrictions on the sets used (like Wild), without a ban on bots and battle helpers (like Wild), and without a seasonal fee (like Modern)
The novelties consist in:
- energy is not consumed to play
- every card that dies in combat can't be used in ANY other battle for a while (including in Modern, Wild, Brawls, or Tournaments)
There will be a revival potion to remove a cooldown from any card.
This will be a collection management game, rather than a game to optimize teams for each fight.
Rewards will be similar to the ones for the other two formats, but provided at first by the Splinterlands company. They hope this will be picked up after a while by the DAO or from existing SPS inflation. Glint will start to be added after a few seasons.
The new format, in its MVP form, is expected to be added in a few months.
This topic was almost certainly a big focus of yesterday's Town Hall, but I haven't had the chance to listen to the recording:
Marketing / Awareness / Branding
Old Rally Car Sold
From ValuePlan's post regarding a bridge proposal and discussion we find out that the old rally car was sold for 40k Euro. Alongside other details you should read if you are interested, Value Plan also asks what is your the opinion regarding "plug-in proposals" (proposals suitable to be standalone, but which would instead be run or connected with Value Plan). Personally, this feels like going in the opposite direction of what people who expressed their opinions say...
Inleo Started to Test In-Person Onboarding
From my understanding, they started with an event they sponsored where they expect to test their stickers, and see if they can scale it from there. This is a clip from a recent AMA where Khal talks about this topic.
Governance / Development / Dapps / Education
Blocktrades Talks About "Wens"
He decided the best course of action is to break the releases coming up in two parts. First, to release the API node upgrades ("HAF API node software suite") and non-consensus changes to HiveD in December, and then, Hardfork 28 in Q1, next year. The first one is the most complicated to manage, because they need to be tested against every app to see if there are any issues.
The second one, HF28, doesn't include many changes, so he doesn't expect issues. But exchanges will need to upgrade then.
About that and the status of every project in his post.
New HBD Stabilizer Proposal from... @arcange
The HBD Stabilizer proposal was about to expire, and not being able to contact @smooth to see if he will create a new one, @arcange created one instead. Otherwise, nothing changed. He does propose in the post that the code for the stabilizer bot should be included at the chain level to avoid centralization and potential issues that come from it. Read more here.
Update to V4V.App Max Transaction Limit and Fee
V4V.app lowered the max transaction limit from 250,000 to 150,000 sats, and increased the fee from 1.5% to 1.7%. Here are the details.
PWR Introduced Upvotes for Holders
Holders of a minimum 100 PWR, liquid and/or in LP, may be upvoted at most once per week, by the project account(s), with a weight based on their holdings. It isn't clear to me if the liquid and LP holdings add up to determine the weight, but that seems logical. Here is the announcement.
Revitalize Twitter POSH Using Snaps?
@acidyo proposes a way of using snaps to share Hive related tweets that would draw attention to them, including the attention of the HivePOSH community curators. He also discusses a potential con if these snaps get over-rewarded.
Games
Holozing Updates
We had a number of updates about Holozing this week. In this one, Acid talks about their focus on the creatures part of the inventory, and regarding the game, their work on adding a buffs/debuffs section in the game, so that players can keep track of them after battles would have ended. He also discussed the status of the 3D animations, which are behind the schedule. In another post, Acid mentions they found a team to continue work on the 3D animations.
One new achievement and 3 more creatures were also officially announced.
Acid also discusses gameplay balancing decisions in this post.
SoulKeep SPS Rewards Will Be Back...
... next week, says Double Coconut.
The rewards structure will be updated, everyone will start from League 1 again, there will be seasons (seasons are expected to be VERY long, since new season is announced with a few months in advance), and there is a SPS stake requirement from level 2. There are other granular details, which you may consult from here.
Genesis League Goals without MLSPA...
In a last minute announcement on Discord, Matt told us that the contract with MLSPA has been terminated, and as a result player names and pictures won't be used in GLG anymore. Aggroed will provide further details about how will the game change going forward without this collaboration.
Week in the Crypto World
Gensler Will Leave the SEC in January
He confirmed the news on Twitter yesterday, and now we can better understand why everything felt so... festive in the crypto verse yesterday, with BTC pushing close to 100k and alts soon turning green after being mostly red in the morning. Read more here.
Michael Saylor Will Make an Elevator Pitch Presentation of Bitcoin For Microsoft Board of Directors
Michael Saylor has 3 minutes to convince the Board of Microsoft they should buy Bitcoin... Ready? Go!
Read more here.
SUI Took a... 2-Hour Forced Break
The downtime was caused by "a bug in transaction scheduling logic". Wasn't unexpected downtimes something Solana was used to? Since they get compared a lot, I mean. I haven't heard of any unscheduled downtimes on Ethereum recently... And yet, they were both considered, by some, Ethereum "killers". I don't think the confidence is lost in SUI, or price action would have been much more violent. But I preferred to get out, while still in decent profit in a very short time, since it wasn't a conviction investment anyway. Here are more details.
List of Older "Week through Adrian's Lenses" posts
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I love how well SPS is doing the new features recently introduced, the game gets more interesting by the day. Also the HBD stabilizer proposal from @arcange is a good one. I commend all that are doing their best to sustain the ecosystem. Thanks for writing.
Yep, I just saw the Town Hall recording. The team finally seems more than excited over there. They have lots of projects coming out in Q1 2025.
I've lost track of what Splinterlands does these days. I still have a load of cards, but may sell some as I'm not playing.
Cheers for the news.