We need to escape purgatory
Splinterlands is in a very strange place right now. With the recently announced rewards neutering, the current voucher system and the upcoming release of Chaos Legion, the Splinterlands economy is carrying a lot of tension that could cause an explosion sending the project spiraling into new heights...or crashing and burning faster than Launchpad Mcquak.
Let's start with the rewards neutering and the current rewards system. While I wholeheartedly agree with the logic behind it, not discouraging bots, but requiring accounts to hold a certain amount of assets to take advantage of rewards is great. This keeps cards & tokens held by players, rather than rapid liquidation, as a form of "investment" against the rewards that are being farmed.
I beleived magic the gathering was referenced in relation to pushing people to acquire more cards. However I remember thinking at the time, that the key difference with Magic the gathering & Splinterlands, is that at any point in time, I can easily access relatively cheap booster packs for MTG, allowing me to easily expand my collection.
At the time of this writing, it is considerably expensive to expand your CP, even to get as high as silver III, which requires 15,000 CP. based on the current cheapest sold rewards cards which give 5cp, and at the current price which is about 18+ cents. This comes out to about 29-30cp per 1$. this means that the investment to reach Silver is at least $500 to participate in Silver, and about 170 - 180 to participate in Bronze I with 5000CP(However the rewards in Bronze I are paltry, and doesn't really make sense to play less than Silver III). These expenses are the bare minimum. Most likely you will also want to invest in summoners and better cards to win a good number of games in Silver. These will drive up your cost further as the cost of buying these cards will be less than the $1/30cp I mentioned above.
What about rentals? rentals are a much more economic way to participate in Silver Isn't it? I would normally agree, but card rentals are currently suffering similar issues in terms of price. Presently my cost of rental, exceeds, or matches the rewards I receive from Silver III. On my top account where I have funneled all my assets, I'm still short 7-10k cp. For this I'm spending about 60 DEC / day in rentals. Meaning If my rewards are on the low end 3 DEC, I need to win at least 20 matches a day. 12 if my Dec rewards are at level 5. This would normally be fine, as I count on the end of Season reward to make up for the grind, as in Silver III there's a higher chance of getting high value cards. Except that 24-48 hours before the end of the season, all my rental cards get recalled, and the price of re-renting cards in the market goes up by at least double. If you can get any at all. Despite cutting my bid in half, the Peakmonsters rental bot, was still unable to re-fill my account back up to 15k on the day of the season end. This is incredibly frustrating, makign me feel like the entire season's worth of work was for naught. This drives me towards wanting to make more card purchases.
Except that i'm hesitant to buy anything right now, incase the new Chaos Legion pack release drives down the price of the current untamed rewards cards.
The voucher system will do little to alleviate the issue
In principle the idea behind vouchers is sound. Use a voucher system to prevent pack hoarding, and give people an opportunity to get a hold of packs. Except that the execution rewards whale's more than ever. The more SPS you have staked, the more vouchers you can get your hands on. This once again becomes a money game, where those who already have wealth are in a position to gain more. Part of what makes this game enticing, and drives it's audience is the possibility of regular joe's and jane's acquiring some form of additional wealth. The current approach flies in the face of that. Rewards were hampered due to "bot accounts" getting a hold of too many assets. I fail to see how the SPS voucher system won't do the same with regards to whales.
The voucher system will also prevent to many packs being bought and released at once, managing the flooding of the economy (which might not be a bad thing as discussed below).
A possible solution might have been to have a whitelist system linked to brightID accounts, with a bid system. Each Whitelisted account can submit how many packs they want to buy, and a confirmation system, so that the SPS team can better control the distribution of packs.
Splinterlands is just beggining to find it's feet to be a project for the ages. However short sighted decisions favoring whales over the overall community stand to sabotage the potential this project can run.
The release of Chaos Legion stands to alleviate a lot of the issues, and bring some potential releif to the economy with a temporary dip in value/prices as all these new cards make their way into the economy. giving more opportunities for players who have been waiting to enter. This will eventually lead to an increase in prices, but the result will be that the overall community will be bigger, resulting in a more sustainable ecosystem.
These are just my musings, but what do you think? Are you happy with the current state of Splinterlands?