Welcome to another article where I write about my journey playing Splinterlands! It was mentioned on the games Discord channel, with little fanfare, that at the end of the current season the Glint shop reward cards will be cycling over to a new set of Rebellion era cards. This is in slightly less than two weeks from the time of this writing, and so far there haven't been any reveals of what the new card set will contain.
The only teaser was that there will be these 7 new abilities.
Since there's not much else to say about the new reward cards yet, I'll focus on following up on the proposals from last time. One proposal was to have the Splintershards (SPS) D.A.O. pay the Splinterlands company for the development of five promotional events and to take over the payments to the contractors developing a SPS validator program. The promotional payment is 500 million Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) to the company, and in exchange all proceeds from the promotional sale will go to the D.A.O. The other proposal has the D.A.O. making 40K a month payments in US value of cryptocurrency to the JPTR company for a year, to build out an SPS blockchain essentially.
The contesting proposal from PeakMonsters got essentially quashed by Matt commenting about the issues he saw with another company taking it over. They withdrew their proposal from going to a full vote, even though it had handily passed the pre-proposal voting stage. The proposal to remove all Voucher discounts for purchases, and instead add a Voucher only item in the store also passed. There's no clear deadline on when it will be implemented, but it has been stated that the company plans to move ahead with it.
There are really a lot of proposals to cover! The proposal to the Hive foundation asking for funding briefly got enough votes to get some payouts, but was soon pushed out of passing by people voting to raise the bar on what is considered passing. On Hive they don't have a simple pass/fail vote, but instead proposals need to maintain a certain level of upvotes. There is also a proposal raised for the SPS D.A.O. to stake the Hive tokens that it owns and vote for the Hive proposal to give funding for marketing Splinterlands. This wouldn't be enough additional upvotes to get it above the passing line, but would at least help get it closer.
Finally, there is a proposal to make the new reward set of cards immediately unlockable. I guess I should mention for anyone unfamiliar with the state of things in the game, the current reward cards are currently locked to your account and cannot be traded or sold. The plan is that the old cards will be able to be unlocked for a hefty fee, and only for a limited period of time, once the new reward card set comes out.
I'm a bit dubious that this will get honored, even if it passes. The proposal to raise the minimum rental price to 1 DEC seems to have gotten shot down by the company, even though it passed. This seems like something not really under the control of the SPS D.A.O., and Matt has seemed pretty resistant to suggestions that the unlock cost is too high or that having cards you can't buy isn't necessarily a good experience in a player-versus-player game.
One thing I may have missed writing about in covering the state of the game is the impact of the Wild Pass being added to Wild. The number of accounts playing seems to have dropped drastically, and is now similar to Modern format. The mass bot nets seem to have mostly packed it in, with it now being unprofitable to run massive numbers of accounts with very low-end cards.
Also there was an update since my last article! The long talked about 1-Click rentals were finally added to the game, although it currently only features a set of Chaos Legion era cards with what used to be Bronze levels. Only a few people seem to be using that system right now, but hopefully it will lead to a better experience for any new players who might come into the game - where they don't need to try to figure out what cards to rent to start playing.
The other main feature from the last update was that the game now automatically submitted your currently selected team if you run out of time. Previously you would just surrender the match if you didn't get your team in on time. I'm not sure how many people it will end up helping, but it's better to put in an almost finished team rather than just give up the match if you get distracted.
The Rest
As far as this past season went, I ended up getting into Gold III near the end of the season in Modern on my alternate account. On my main, I got up to Diamond I for the majority of the season. With the new reward cards coming up, I haven't spent any of my end-of-season Glint rewards.
I was originally planning to buy the 1 million Glint title on my main account, of which I am finally close to hitting. But, now I'm thinking maybe I should spend it on getting the next reward set. I'm also thinking of unstaking all of my Rebellion packs and opening them, as I have had no luck with any of the Conflict airdrops.
That's probably enough rambling about proposals for this season update. Thank you for reading. And, I'll at least be back at the end of this season to cover the new reward cards. I might even manage to get back to a mid-season article, but we'll see how busy life is between now and the 15th!