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Proposal Benefits

This proposal has two key benefits:

• Make SplinterCoach free to use for all players.
• Continually add new features that the community wants, turning this into a robust data and stats tool, similar to what traditional video games provide their users.

What Is SplinterCoach?

SplinterCoach (https://www.splintercoach.com/) is a tool that tracks users’ personal win/loss stats with every card in the Splinterlands game.

By connecting their HIVE wallet and sharing their posting key, users can track their personal data and do custom sorts by lifetime record, current month record, record within different mana cap ranges and under each ruleset. And for monster cards they can also track by lineup position (tank, reach, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and anchor) and under each summoner.

This tool gives players unprecedented levels of data and insight into their personal style of play. With this data, they can learn which cards and combinations they play best with and where they need to improve. But more importantly, players can simply be entertained for hours combing through their personal stats and data.

We built and launched the tool in Spring 2023 and over 500 people have connected their wallets and either used the 7-day free trial or upgraded to a paid subscription. And that has been with very little marketing.

Here are some videos detailing the tool.
Featured on Splinterlands Town Hall ()
Intro Video ()
Top 10 Back To Basics Monsters ()
Top 10 Tanks ()

How Will Universal Access to SplinterCoach Benefit The Community?

The more Splinterlands looks, feels, and acts like a traditional game, the more likely it will be to attract and retain an audience of pure gamers who are more interested in playing the game and competing than they are with simply extracting value from the ecosystem. These are the type of gamers with whom business margins are built on. And we know gamers love stats. Particularly stats specific to their personal gameplay.

In addition to giving gamers another dimension to interact within the ecosystem, we believe that having access to their personal stats will drive incremental in-game asset purchases. We have received feedback from numerous people who have told us that once they started viewing their stats, they went out and made additional card purchases so they could either lean further into successful strategies or upgrade cards that were under-powered and not performing as well. As a personal aside, I can tell you I maxed Astral Entity and Lily Shieldpaw within days of seeing my personal stats.

We also believe that opening up this level of data will give content creators around the game more fodder to work with. We anticipate them combing through the data in an effort to garner unique insights and trends, and creating fun pieces of content around that. This could open an entirely new dimension around the game for the community to discuss, debate, and interact with.

Process For Adding New Features

While the current version of SplinterCoach adds a compelling new element to the Splinterlands ecosystem, we know it is capable of much more. And with a small consistent investment from the DAO, we can keep a team of developers on hand to add new features and help evolve SplinterCoach into a robust data-driven tool that is both valuable to the community and fun for gamers to interact with.

In order to be clear with the community on the scope of new features to be added at the current rate, we propose implementing a point system to track the scope of new feature proposals. With each new feature proposal from the community, we will assign a number of points to the proposed new feature to indicate the amount of time expected from our dev team to build. One point will equal one month – and each month that the DAO pays to license the tool will entitle them to one point of dev work.

Roughly speaking, simple features will require 0.5-1 point to build. Features of standard complexity would require approximately 1-2 points to build. While higher lift features would be 3+ points, depending on the level of complexity.

We have already received a number of suggestions for additional features from current SplinterCoach users. See below for a list, along with the number of points we would assign to each to build:

• God’s-Eye View (2-3 points): Aggregate all users’ stats by each card. This would allow the community to see which cards are performing best in the game overall, as well as within each mana cap range, ruleset, at each position and under each summoner. (Wouldn’t it be cool to know what the best overall performing tank in the game is? Or the best overall card in low-mana battles?)
• Add new sort features (2 points):
• • Delineate card stats by level (Novice, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond, & Champion).
• • Delineate users’ card stats by battle type. Standard ranked battle, guild brawls, tournaments, etc.
• • Note, adding new sort features requires a complete re-work and optimization of the database. Therefore, it would be most efficient to add multiple sort features at one time, so we would suggest making this change with a full set of requests, rather than multiple one-off requests.
• Historical Data (2 points): Develop a tracking system that archives each users’ stats by month (or season) in a historical graph so they can get a sense for their personal trends with each card.
• Expand The Leaderboard (1 point): Track and create a leaderboard of which users perform best in each mana cap range, under each ruleset, and with each summoner. (Wouldn’t it be cool to know who the best Little League player? Who’s the best low-mana player? Who performs best with Quix or Kelya?)
• Go Deeper On Card Combinations (2 points): Right now we track the top five cards each user pairs with each card, and the corresponding record of those combinations. Imagine going deeper, and seeing your record of every card when paired with every other card in the game.

While above is a short list of additional feature ideas, we are open to any and all suggestions from the community, and will prioritize which new features the community wants to see first. The process for submitting proposals and aligning on new features will act as follows:

• Users can submit new feature ideas on our Discord, in the “splintercoach-new-features” channel. Link to Discord is here (https://discord.gg/n3syqw2NZ3).
• When it is time to align on the next feature to be built, we will put all new features up to a vote within that Discord channel, along with an estimate of how many points they will require..
• It will be important to include the time estimate, so the community can be strategic in which features they vote for. If they want a more complex feature that will take longer to build, they can choose to do so, knowing that will utilize all of our dev resources in the process, thus limiting our ability to introduce additional new features.
• If they prefer to introduce multiple “low lift” features before moving on to more complex features, they can choose to do so as well.
• Voting will be open for seven days, and at the conclusion, we will move forward with building the feature that gets the most votes.
• The core SplinterCoach team will vet all new feature ideas, and only include the features that we know we can build in the voting.

The goal will be to have our team continually building and launching new features. So once one new feature is complete and launched, we’ll open a vote for the next new feature to be added.

**# Proposal Details **
This proposal is for staked SPS token holders to vote for the DAO to pay a monthly fee to the SplinterCoach team. This payment will open the tool to all Splinterlands players to use, free of charge. We are asking for $5,000 USD on a month-to-month basis, to be paid in ETH. Payment can be sent to the wallet address: 0x09A272C9d2830Be20Df12776014831460379C5Bf. The amount of ETH will be determined by the value of ETH on the payment date.

Note, if this proposal passes, we will pay out of pocket to give the site a design upgrade as up to this point we have been laser-focused on getting the functionality right, and not concerned with design.

Cancelation Terms

DAO members can vote to discontinue the service at any time by submitting a proposal to terminate payments and end community-wide access to the tool, which will take effect on the final day of the month that a proposal to terminate passes. We would propose that only 50% vote would be needed to terminate service, so a small ⅓ minority cannot keep the service in place if the majority of the community does not find it valuable.

What Will The Funds Be Used For?

First use of funds will be to cover out-of-pocket hard costs for server and database usage. We are confident that the proposed amount will cover all fixed and variable out-of-pocket costs, but we are unsure of what the actual costs will be as we have not opened up to usage at this scale. After one month of using the service at this scale, we will have a better sense for this cost best on community-wide usage.

Beyond out-of-pocket costs, we will use any remaining funds to pay developers to maintain the tool and build new features as requested by the community. And to pay UI/UX specialists to design and implement new feature components.

Disclaimer

The SplinterCoach team reserves the right to propose a fee increase if community-wide usage proves to drive monthly costs exceeding our monthly fee. Simply put, if this is the case, we’ll make a proposal to the community to either increase the fee to cover the actual hard costs associated with servers and database management. If the community votes to accommodate these new costs, we’ll continue to offer the service in the parameters defined above. If the community votes not to accommodate, we’ll discontinue service and go back to a paid subscription model for users.

We also reserve the right to propose a price increase after twelve months of service to account for inflation and any other cost drivers. Lastly, the SplinterCoach team reserves the right to discontinue the service at the end of any payment period.

Our Team

Our founding team is fully doxed and highly experienced. In addition to building SplinterCoach, we have built or consulted on web3 projects for many big brands including Anheuser-Busch, Saks Fifth Avenue, Amazon, NASCAR, and more.

• CEO Jamie Davies (Splinterlands IGN: guyfromajax)
• CTO Kiran Rao

In Conclusion

We believe the terms of this proposal will add immediate value to the Splinterlands ecosystem by providing a new dimension to the game that is standard for most video games – giving users the ability to track and comb through their personal stats. This will be another step in making Splinterlands feel like a traditional video game and further drive incentives for gamers that go beyond simply extracting value. And in turn, we believe this will help drive the value of many assets in the ecosystem, and make the ecosystem stickier for the cohort of traditional gamers who join our community.

And we're excited at the prospect of giving the entire Splinterlands community access to the tool and partnering with them to add new features -- firmly engraining SplinterCoach as an exciting component of the overall Splinterlands gaming experience.