We are about halfway through Q1 2025, and we know Splinterlands had 6 major projects slated for this quarter. Here they are, as they were presented last year:
- SPS Validator Network Mainnet Launch
- Survival Mode
- More New Player Experience Elements Rolled Out
- Mobile Apps
- Land 1.75
- Glamour and Cosmetics
I haven't heard anything this quarter about Glamour and Cosmetics, so either it was pushed to the end of the quarter, or to later during the year (more likely).
Otherwise, I've seen progress on all the other 4 main directions.
Cryptomancer provides weekly updates for Land 1.75 in discord, which is practically ready for internal QA.
Survival Mode has been on the Mavs QA server for a while now, for public testing.
We see quite regular elements for NPE rolled out. I have also noticed some improvements for mobile, but not the mobile apps themselves. I do believe their development, updates and testing may go hand in hand at this point.
The SPS Validator Network has been in test net for a while.
And now, let's see which were the major updates from this week, in my opinion.
Major Updates from this Week in Splinterlands
SPS Validator Network Mainnet Launched
The SPS Validator Network Mainnet was launched yesterday and SPS operations and management have been taken over by the validators from Splinterlands. Validator rewards have stopped on the Splinterlands side and will start again on the validators end, once they set up their nodes and stake licenses, according to the discord announcement.
License holders can stake licenses from the License management page.
Matchmaking and Team Creation Overhauls
If you played some games today, you've already seen it. I still need to get used to the new team creation screen (I lost 1 or 2 matches because I got lost in the interface, lol), but once we do, I think it will be fine and an improvement over the old team creation screen. Plus, the way it is done now, it is easy to extend it to add other filters or other elements, which was almost impossible on the old screen.
They also say the matchmaking screen have been changed to make it non-modal (i.e. allow you to minimize it and continue your activity on Splinterlands while they search for a match), without having to load a different window/tab of Splinterlands. At least that's how I interpret what they say in the docs, but haven't tested it.
Creating Card Sets
This is a prerequisite to launching the Survival Mode, from my memory.
Cards in a set can only be played or rented. Cards on land cannot be included in a set (currently). The way it was explained when card sets were discussed in a town hall meeting, one would need to create a set (or more?) with the cards they don't want to be played in Survival Mode. Every other card that is not in sets or locked on land (or in cooldown), can be played in Survival Mode. Why would anyone want cards excluded from Survival Mode? To have them always available for Ranked/Brawls/Tournaments, otherwise if they die in Survival mode the cooldown is activated (or for Summoners if the battle is lost).
Of course, if you won't play Survival Mode, that doesn't really matter.
Personally, I started creating my custom set. It's going to take some time to find and add all cards from my play deck to the set, because I do it one by one. I have seen some strange anomalies reporting cards that are unlikely to have been played (or even moved recently) as played recently, so I can't trust the automated fill process to create my custom set automatically.
Other Changes
There are other changes included in yesterday's update, some of them interesting. You can consult everything in the docs.