In taking a look at the new player experience in my head, I think that @splinterlands might be able to accommodate more variations of pack options for various player experiences. Keep in mind that this is not supposed to be a 100% flushed out idea with the math or pricing, but a loose example of a construct that could be modified and adopted by the team.
The general concept
Allow a streamlined way for packs to be a gateway for users to acquire assets when joining the Splinterlands ecosystem and provide existing users choices of packs options accommodate their desired experience or risk/reward scenario.
Offer something like the following:
Core Set
- Starter packs
- Contains 100-500 BCX (some static reasonable number)
- Priced ~$20-50 range
- Draw chances are lower for rarity and foil chances.
- You are guaranteed 10 common or greater summoner BCX
- Optionally: Each pack, when opened, also contains some RNG for HIVE/HP
- The quantity should remain very low with the rare jackpot option.
- Pulled from a pool provided by the @sps.dao and staked to the user account that opened it as HP.
- Helps the user on their HIVE and Splinterlands learning journey.
- Reduces the need to allocate HP to users and empowers that user to interact on HIVE.
- Brings awareness to the HIVE ecosystem and more closely ties Splinterlands users to it.
- Semi-exclusive common and rare promo card jackpot chance - only in this pack type and the Promo Store
Core and Mini Set
- Booster Packs
- Contain 5 BCX
- Similar to the existing pack setup
- Price these in the ~$3-5 range
- Semi-exclusive epic promo card jackpot chance - only in this pack type and the Promo Store
- Premium Boosters
- Contains 4 BCX
- Higher Rarity/Foil draw chances.
- Potentially: The only commons that draw out of these are Gold Foils
- Price these around ~$4-15
- Semi-exclusive legendary promo card jackpot chance - only available in this pack type and the Promo Store
Edition Promo Cards
- Have a much lower draw rate than any of the other cards in the packs
- Print run is balanced between the packs and the store with a burn mechanic.
- Store prices should be set at a premium rate of burned DEC.
- The jackpot inclusion of promo cards into each pack type will hopefully give each pack a uniqueness that makes it valuable to new and existing players.
- The Store front option will allow users that desire to mint the card without opening packs a way to burn a significant amount of DEC to mint the cards outside of the packs.
The mechanic where the DAO pays for the set and the DEC used to purchase the set and promo cards is burned or returned to the DAO is good, but the total expected DEC burn value for the set or the minimum it will generate in DEC burn value should always be burned as a minting mechanism, so that DEC does not ever really inflate from the cards, or it is reduced greatly if the balance is not percise. The burn values of the Promo cards should be increased to a higher level to ensure that the supply and card value is increased by burning for DEC, since it will trigger earlier and reduce supply even further, making the card more scarce and potentially valuable for that reason.
With a setup like the one described above, the pack offering would better reflect some of the traditional CCG pack offerings, where a user can get a starter set of cards built up by investing in a single (or multiple) starter packs, which will contain a larger number of lower rarity BCX to start to level their collections. In contrast, they currently rely on the card sales and rental markets to target some cards or open a number of booster packs, when they could be able to target a fun gamified way of getting a larger number of card draws in a single offering, but it comes at the forfeit of better rarity and gold foil chances for those cards.
My hope with this is to get the information out there and hopefully some parts of it may inspire @yabapmatt and team to implement some of these mechanics moving forward, if they make sense. If @clayboyn or anyone else wants to run some proposal on it, go ahead. I think the pack mechanics and similar would sort of fall under the DAO, considering the DAO is paying for the development of the cards in advance of a set, but I also think that the Splinterlands team might only see a proposal of this nature as a suggestion, even if it would run and be passed, but I am not fully sure how these responsibilities are determined and I am not sure it really matters. If there is support for the idea from the team and community, it might just be something to do.