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