Hi everyone!
Back for day 2. I've been experimenting with the game a bit, and managed to make it to the bronze rank III yesterday just before the season ended, and so earned 5 chests. I also spent my daily $2 for yesterday and today on a few more packs. I didn't receive anything that seemed too amazing so far, but I did end up with 2 Flame Monkeys. Since it seems like I would need 5 of the monkeys to combine to make a level 2 monkey this seems like a good opportunity to figure out how to sell one of the things.
Flame Monkey
I headed over to www.PeakMonsters.com , and had to figure out how to create an account. This was a bit more complicated than I thought it would be. The site asked for my Username and also my Master Password/Private Key, which I didn't know. I thought this meant that I needed to create a new Hive account, so I headed over to www.hiveonboard.com which then prompted me to download Hive Keychain, which I also did. I then tried to create an account, only to find that my username (Brucolac) was already taken. I ended up creating an account with another name, connected it with Hive Keychain, and then logged into www.PeakMonsters.com using the new account.
This all seemed to go fine, except then I saw that my Splinterlands account wasn't actually connected to the new Peak Monsters account. I figured out that I had, in fact ALREADY created a Hive account when I created the Splinterlands account and didn't need to create another. This explained why the Brucolac name was already taken - it was me! I felt mildly stupid, but at least I had the name I wanted.
I still had a problem though - how to link the Splinterlands account with my Peak Monsters account. After a bit of googling I found that I could get my keys for the account via the Splinterlands menu. So I did that, got the keys, and was finally able to log into Peak Monsters.
This whole process took 30 minutes or so, which isn't too bad, but it definitely didn't seem intuitive to me. I wonder how many prospective users get confused by this process and give up (although I suppose I also could have tried to sell directly through the Splinterlands market).
In any case, I was now able to access my card collection from the Peak Monsters account, and was ready to sell my Flame Monkey. I checked the market and saw that Flame Monkeys were selling for a whopping $0.018 (almost 2 pennies!). I didn't want to wait around, so I set my excess monkey to a sale price of $0.017. Within 15 minutes or so, someone had taken me up on my generous offer and the DEC hit the account. And just like that, my first card sale was completed.
I finished the day by messing around in-game a bit. For some reason I had a whole streak of people resigning. Not sure why, potentially this had to do with the start of a new season and people are trying to tank to get down into a lower tier? In any case, I was happy for the free DEC and was able to complete my daily quest quickly and easily.
Answered Questions
Yesterday, I posted a few questions that I wanted to look into. After reading this post from @Costanza I now have at least partial answers to 2 of them The other 2 remain unanswered. I'll keep a running list of the unanswered questions at the bottom of each entry.
Card prices - is it likely that the value will remain high over time? What has happened to the value over the last year or so? The charts only go back a month...
Coztanza mentions that the card have maintained their value over the last year. This gives me at least some confidence that money put into the ecosystem will have some value moving forward. I'm still sticking w/ my $2/day max though!
Am I better off spending my daily $2 on packs or on individual cards?
I found the below chart at Peak Monsters showing that in fact the packs are worth less than $2 on average. This begs the question, why would anyone purchase the packs when they could get more value just buying the individual cards (and also get to specifically choose cards that are useful to them)? Does this have to do with the airdrops that would seem to slightly boost the value of each pack?
This would also seem to imply that there may be upward pressure on the price of individual cards.
Pack Prices
How popular is this game? How many people are actually playing it?
Again from Costanza, the player base seems to have roughly doubled in the last year, but is still far below a mainstream game (even an indie one). It is now hovering around 6,000 daily active users.
I think the relatively limited popularity is actually a good thing, as it implies that there is a lot of room to grow if the game were to become more popular.
Unanswered Questions
How does the leasing market work - is it actually possible to earn returns on these things, or is the amount so low as to be meaningless?
What incentive is there for anybody to buy a pack vs individual cards?
What is Steem versus Hive? What caused Hive to split from Steem? How does Hive relate/power Splinterlands?