If you follow any of the stuff I usually talk about, you are probably already aware that I'm a big fan of Splinterlands. To me, it's by far the best game we have on any blockchain right now. It has an extremely deep gameplay, a strong economy, and it even allows you to earn some crypto while playing it. What's not to like? Well, apparently, a lot of new players don't seem to be as excited as I am about the game. I put my ref-link in all articles that mention Splinterlands and by now, I found dozens of referrals that bought a Summoners Spellbook. Sadly, many of these are no longer active and some never even came back after their first day of playing the game.
I always had my theories about what might cause that, but it was not until I've recently on-boarded two of my real live friends that I got a better understanding of the issues at hand. In this article, I'm going to discuss the most glaring issues and provide some proposals of how to fix or at least alleviate them.
In both cases, I first showed my friends some battles on my Champion level account to get them hooked. They obviously didn't understand a lot of what was going on, but it was fast paced, flashy, and I earned ~0.06$ worth of crypto with every win. That was more than enough to get them interested in joining Splinterlands. We then set up their account, I explained the basic rules and then let them play some matches on their own before starting to give some advise. Both of my friends got frustrated with it rather quickly and incidentally, this only changed after I started to delegate some cards to them.
In my opinion, these are the main issues the new player experience currently is facing:
- A lot of flees from badly scripted bots
- A lack of progression
- Not enough cards to choose from
- Too soon facing opponents with better/leveled cards
The first point might seem a bit odd, it's a free win after all. The thing is, especially as a new player, you want to play your cards, learn the game. Sitting there, waiting the full 3 minutes for the bot to fail submitting a deck is really annoying. This is amplified by the fact that these games are initially going to be the only wins a new player gets. Truth is, they mostly don't know what they are doing themselves, so they'll loose most of their games against opponents that actually submit a deck. This was especially painful for one of my friends who completed his first daily quest and advanced to Bronze III from wins against fleeing opponents only. I just tried with my banking account and had the exact same result:
There's a player initiative trying to fix this by introducing more bots to the lowest leagues that actually manage to submit decks and thus give the new players someone to play against. I think this is a great move and I'm grateful to everybody assisting with this project! On top of that, though, I feel additional measures need to be taken. If a player fails to submit a team two times in a row, give a fair warning on screen telling that he will be stopped from being able to play if he fails a third time. After that, if he fails again, prevent him of looking for another battle for an hour. Then if he flees again after that, make it 2 hours, 4 hours, and so on. Basically, anybody trying to set up a bot should do so in practice. If you try to run a non functional bot in ranked, you'd be soft-banned by that. It's important to show the warning in my opinion so you don't accidentally soft-ban new players still trying to figure out what's going on.
The other three issues are more or less connected to each other and I feel like they could and should be adressed together. Basically, if you are a new player you won't earn enough DEC to even buy a single Common after day 1 of playing. At the same time, though, you'll progress far enough to face a lot of players that run cards you don't have access to and, quite possibly, even players with leveled summoners and monsters. This creates a quite frustrating situation where new players will feel forced to spend additional money if they ever want to progress in any meaningful way. Obviously, a lot of players will not be willing to do that at this point and they'll just quit. This sadly is made worse by the beta bots meant to help new players.
Especially Alric Stormbringer and Malric Inferno are way more powerful than the Untamed summoners. One of my friends had three battles in a row against bots using Malric and was eaten alive by the +1 Attack buff he gives. Hadn't I stepped in and delegated him some cards, that would have been the moment he would have just quit the game, never looking back. Once I had delegated them some cards, things changed a lot. They had a lot more fun playing, asking me for more and more cards until they both pushed to Silver III in a rather short amount of time. At this stage, they were seeing actual progress, earning enough DEC to eventually buy a common or two every day. Both are pretty active up until now and they seem to be really hooked up now. So the question is, what can we do to bridge that initial gap and get players more involved?
The following will be my idea of changing the new player experience. Please note that this is just one idea to make things better. My most important point is not that we should do it exactly as I say. The most important takeaway should be that there are real issues right now and that they need to be addressed if we want to improve new player retention. I'd happily discuss different options and if we come up with a completely different solution in the end, I'd be more than happy with that!
From my point of view, we need to give players a sense of progression, something to aim for. I'll give a brief list of proposals before explaining everything in more detail:
- Make Novice League into a real 3 tier League like the rest of the leagues
- Add ghost-cards as rewards for progressing through the tiers
- Make quest reward chests in Novice always contain a ghost-card
- Add Minting-Potions to the chest loot table in Bronze and above
The idea is to give new players more time facing only level 1 cards while at the same time providing them with a sense of progression. Since the rating system in Splinterlands doesn't use real ELO, moving everything starting from Bronze III higher in terms of required rating wouldn't be an issue. This would allow to introduce 3 tiers of Novice League. I'd set them up like that:
0-499 -> Novice III
500-999 -> Novice II
1000-1499 - Novice I
Afterwards, the usual leagues with their 300 rating steps would follow. This would give players enough time to battle through the three tiers before they advance to Bronze III. New players would start at Novice III with ghost-copies of all Untamed commons and rares, just like it is handled at the moment. Once they hit Novice II, they'd receive a ghost-copy of all Beta commons and once they hit Novice I, they'd get all Beta-rares, once again as ghost cards. This system could also be used with future sets, so you always start with the current set and then earn ghost-cards from the previous set as you move up the ladder.
Additionally, all quest chests would always contain a random common or rare ghost-card randomly taken from all in-print reward cards. I'd even go ahead and add an algorithm that makes sure that the player gets a ghost-version of a card he doesn't already own. At the same time, I'd completely remove DEC earning from the Novice league as the amounts you get are more or less negligible anyways. Consequentially, the Summoner Spellbook wouldn't be needed until you want to advance to Bronze III so I wouldn't even sell it before players get to that level. In a way, we'd introduce a prolonged, completely free to play experience that still allowed for real progression that way.
Buying the Summoner Spellbook would introduce the following advantages:
- Enable earning of DEC
- Allow players to advance to Bronze III and beyond
- Enable Minting-Potions as rewards
As their name suggests, minting potions would allow you to convert one of your ghost-cards to a real NFT. The exact drop rate as well as the amount needed to convert the different cards to a NFT would need to be discussed, but it could look like that:
Untamed Common -> 1 Minting-Potion
Beta Common -> 3 Minting-Potions
Untamed Rare -> 9 Minting-Potions
Beta Rare -> 27 Minting-Potions
Obviously, getting enough potions to mint all your ghost-cards from your time in Novice would take months if not years that way. This is intentional as it would give new players a long term goal while at the same time this should limit the impact on card value. It could also be debated if players are guaranteed 1 Minting-Potion per completed quest or if it should just be added to the loot-table. Either way, this would give new players something to show for once they progress into "the real game". Because of that, I'd also disallow players to move back down to Novice once they hit Bronze III. There needs to be a clear disclaimer about that but I don't think it would be an issue.
We'd need to set up enough bots to accommodate new players in Novice until we have enough real players active there, but I don't think that would be an issue, especially since the accounts down there would be completely free.
All things considered, I think this solution should fix all the major problems we are facing right now. New players would fight on even terms longer while still having that sense of progression. At the same time, players interested in the game could test it longer before they'd have to actually spend money. Yes, this might reduce the percentage of people buying a Summoners Spellbook a bit, but I think it would be more than compensated by those actually buying it being way more involved with the game already.
On top of that, I don't think these changes would be too taxing on the value of cards. Yes we'd introduce more copies of common and rare cards, but at a rather low rate and many cards given out would most likely stay ghost-cards forever. We could also decide to not allow for the minting of Beta cards if people are afraid that this would reduce the value of these cards too much. What ever route we take in the end, I hope we can get a discussion started and ultimately fix the new player experience to get more players involved with this amazing game!
If you made it this far and are still reading - thank you very much for taking the time to go through all of this! Please let me know what you think about the whole proposal. What would work, what is a stupid idea? Is there a better solution I did not think of? Once more, thank you all for reading and see you next time!