Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Coverage for December 3, 2021

Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Summary for December 3, 2021

*Please note: I cover as much as I can of the summary as a record of the conversation. I do not provide my opinion but actual conversation that occurs during the AMA. This summary will have questions provided from the Discord and the answers given by the various Splinterlands' team will be typed by me. Please forgive any typos or errors; some may be from Discord or some may be my own.

Founders Begin the AMA, now called a Town Hall
Today's Town Hall included: @aggroed, @yabapmatt and hardpoint

Aggroed @aggroed (C.E.O)
Matt @yabapmatt (C.T.O.)
Hardpoint (VP of Engineering)
Nate @nateaguila (Creative Director)
Cryptomancer @cryptomancer

Update from Aggroed

• Chaos Legion was GREAT! Sold 1 Million packs in the pre-sale!
• It's exciting times, we're making new partnerships and will be sharing those soon
• Mav Chat in the test realm is on fire!

Update from Matt

• Has a little bit of a cold
• Chaos Legion has been great so far. In the past we've been scrambling
• Card Stats are NOT final until the release. Typically it's done more internally, but it's great to get more involved.
  • There are 91 new cards being balanced.
• The Focus is to make the new cards complimentary to the older cards so I didn't worry about the similarities and those older alpha/beta cards will always been valuable and they will really expand with the land expansion.
• How they create the cards and avoid power creep
  • We have really big spreadsheet with custom macros. It's the same exact one from the alpha cards and it assigns point values.
  • Each card has a point value, the mana of the card, the rarity of the card. etc.
  • That gives us a quick base. I can be assured they are generally in the same power range as the other cards we've made.
  • No obviously combinations of abilities and stats make things more or less valuable so we can't always predict everything; the points are just a baseline.
  • Matt then goes through and uses his own judgment, then he asks the team and asks the players testing to adjust those stats.
  • Matt has up on one of his other monitors all the other cards to see the splinters in this mana range and then makes sure to get cards in another mana range.
  • He makes sure there's tanks, backline damage cards,etc.
  • I spend hours and hours up late at night and go over each card really in detail and try to make sure every single card has a niche and hopefully it will shine and doesn't overlap.
  • I underestimated the recharge ability but in general I think we're relatively in line with these Chaos Legion cards.
  • I have to handle it to @cryptomancer , he's really handling everything and does a way better job than I do with these releases. We have to give props to him with these releases!
  • Huge shout out to the art team. The pack opening is amazing animation alone.
  • Official Launch is midnight

Update from Cryptomancer

• I'm feeling confident about the Chaos Legion release
• The testing is going well in QA. We've done some adjustments already, and it's great to have this chance to balance and play test to make sure it's extra polished when it opens to everyone else
• We're working on getting the Dr. Blight airdrop ready.
• We're adjusting the shop page as well.
• You can expect over the next few days some adjustments to QA
• And it will all be ready in time!
• Aggroed gave a huge shout out to Cryptomancer and all he's done to make Splinterlands amazing!
• Cryptomancer gave a huge shout out to Nate and the art team for what they are doing-- that it's really something special
• Cryptomancer provided a launch time for several different timezones

Update from Nate and His Eye Candy

• Creative Director for Splinterlands
• Tackles the narrative of what Splinterlands is and how that all fits together
• We are working on the lore, the story of all the characters that it makes sense with the stats and abilities
• With the launch of phase 2, we will have new stories to share and that will be posted on Wednesday

• Joey John has done an amazing job who has created the first story and it will be released on Wednesday. It's going to have more art, more NFTs and more goodness
• Here's the image we will share when we publish the story

• This is where the rest of the world realizes what's happening over there in Splinterlands.

• We are working towards 2D animations and we're barely dipping our toes in it yet, but it's getting better and better and some parts of the game may feel like you're immersed in an animated film. I can only imagine when we're in player mode and you feel more immersed like you're on a quest and it's all animated before your eyes. That's what we're working towards.

• Aggroed mentioned that the budget for animation, artists, etc has been doubled and we are getting more people applying for jobs and we're moving closer.

• Here's a link to where you can view job openings: https://splinterlands.breezy.hr/

  • They are looking for a 2D Game Artist, UI Designer, UX Designer and Executive Assistant

• Wallpaper Drop
  • Chaos Dragon 14 Mana Card which is the highest card

And here's another of the Chaos Dragon

You can see Aggroed post a tweet during the Town Hall here:

https://twitter.com/Aggroed001/status/1466777282589122568

- Aggroed001

Go give him a re-tweet and some love if you agree that his game is cooler than the other crypto games!! Yippee!

Chaos Legion has been surrounded by an unusual volcano with a beam of light shooting out and crazy creatures that come out and based upon that, we created another creature.

Wow! What fantastic Splinterlands' Art! Amazing work!

Here's an Insidious Warlock Gif

Here's the Death Shadow Snitch with his creepy eye

And finally the Flying Squid Water

Hardpoint's Update

• SPS Governance Update
  • John (Homesteadhacker @homesteadhacker ) will talk about that
    • The Mod team is fully back online with roles and channel tweeks and security updated.
  • Head to the feedback website and upvote and downvote the ideas: https://feedback.splinterlands.com/
  • We've already seen these quality of life features enter the game so please give us your feedback on that note board
• We now have 13 exclusive Developers which is fantastic
• We're working on the few last details of the marketplace
• We have a small minigame on there as well
  • Orillion was introduced as a developer here at Splinterlands who has been working on creative development (like the minigame you may have seen). He's also improving the market performance.
    • The problem at the moment is the market is outdated for about 15 minutes so it doesn't show up immediately on the market and so it should be a lot faster now when you sell cards.
    • I would really like to see the markets on light updating that it's happening much faster. It's going to take a lot of work, but it's the goal. It should be possible to do but it will take some time.
• Aggroed jumped in to say we may have 100 people working on Splinterlands by the end of the year. We're so glad you're all here. Thanks for making this place better.
• We will have a Launch Party in Discord for Chaos Legion so please join us for the party in Discord! Here's the link to Discord if you're not in it yet: https://discord.gg/splinterlands

Land Update

• It's a huge project. It's not just another set of cards. [A set of cards] It's not even 100th amount of work that land expansion is.
• Where we are today is due to the SPS token and that's going to make land all the much better so it was a good purposeful decision to put the SPS launch.
• We didn't expect the growth so we have pushed back land because of those adjustments to scaling for the new players.
• After Chaos Legion is done, which includes the general sale is out and also the Modern Format is out, then kinda the main 100% focus for new features is the first phase of the land expansion.
• We know that it's very delayed, but we think the land expansion is going to be WAY Better than when we first announced it because of the team we have now.
• The initial plan for the user interface was going to be what we had in the past, some buttons, some sound, and we didn't have the resources to do the high quality we wanted to have but now that has all changed.
• The level of UI (User Interface) and design and all of that is much improved from six months ago and we're planning on growing that. It's going to be way better when it IS released than I could have ever envisioned it.
• Hopefully it will be worth the wait.
• I tend to focus on how can we build something really awesome that doesn't just make a really cool game, but takes the aspects in the cryptocurrency and block space .. how do we take that integrate that into the game. They are really world-changing. New ways of doing finance and take that and put that into a game environment.
• The land will be a way to create new types of cards and that will be above and beyond what any other game is doing.
  • The land will help the community and players to make money.
  • How is that going to work that the LAND will help the community and players to make money (NOT about making money in Splinterlands itself but for the actual players!)
    • This entire business is flipping that model on it's head; the players are the ones creating that value, not the company.
    • It's still very early and very experimental, and we're trying to figure out how to do that.
    • There will be new types of cards: Items and Spell Cards -- and you will pick your team like normal but then when you see the teams, you'll get to cast spells and equip monsters, based upon what you see on the battle to help you.
    • We will never sell these new cards or items; the cards are created by land holders. So the whole point will be to harvest your resources, craft your cards and build your buildings that are your own or rent or sell. It goes above and beyond what we've seen before. Here it mimics a real-life economy.
• So the delays on land will really just help push this more into the mainstream and compete more and more with other blockchain games and mainstream games.
• Matt says "I am a gamer" and he tries to think as a gamer. He's never been more excited for land. The delays bother him more than anyone else here, but it's going to be amazing!

Timeline for Splinterlands (Of course this could change)

• Dec 8th - Launch for Chaos Legion (you can open packs and purchase WITH vouchers)
• Jan 17th - General Sale Chaos Legion (you won't need vouchers except for bonus purchases)
• Jan 17th - Modern and Wild Format should be released
• Land Quarter 2 of Next Year

SPS Validator (Oracle)

• Open source package available by the end of the year and we'll be testing the SPS validator system.
• You can read and track all SPS transactions/ balances.
• Players will be able to vote for top validators, for people who are running the software and the top X number of them will be responsible for implementing any proposals
• The binance blockchain or hive blockchain will have the proposals and the SPS holders can vote and if the vote passes, the SPS Validators will give their signatures and when another signatures are collected, the funds will be sent where they should be sent.
• It will make the system nearly fully decentralized. So that is super exciting for anyone who is understanding the ecos of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Plan is to test that by the end of the year.

Update on Support

• We've received about 4,500 tickets and solved 5,500 tickets this month. It's the first time we've resolved more issues than the influx.
• We are actively working to get ZenDesk live chat on the website to get support. You can do it right in-game. We'll have best in class response to those.
• We're working on an entire suite of support tools to help you guys get the answers you have to your questions to get your crypto.
• We have some tickets hung up because of security issues and we're getting there but we're wanting to be very careful how we handle this. It's different that a regular game; there's alot of money and value here with these tickets.
• Please give your love to the support team.
• We're working to get ready for this launch and we're building a solid platform for land to be built upon as well but the great thing is we have enough devs now for these ideas that you

Guilds/Call Me Tim Chat

• Aggroed says: the largest guild just buzzed him for a purchase. We are growing so much
• CallMeTim: Chief Architect for development organization.
  • He is improving the game, scaling, etc.
  • Working with Orillion on market improvements.
  • Response time has increased unfortunetly there were some issues with caching so we had to move back. If you saw problems, it was a view of the data, but not actually a problem. We're back to the existing performance that we had but we're looking to rolling that out soon.
  • Want to improve the rate of fixing features and enhances etc. into the game and bug fixes.
  • The pipeline of getting that code into the servers has to be very efficient and reliable and repeatable and so a focus for me is to change ultimately how we run the game so it will increase the pace and that should be coming soon as well.

Development Questions

• MATT: Assuming the first two airdrop cards are both Legendaries, then using the Untamed airdrop math, the chances of receiving them should be 1 in every 425 packs for the first one and 1 in every 450 packs for the second one (because they would be the 17th and 18th Legendaries in Chaos Legion, respectively). Is the airdrop math going to work the same as it did in Untamed? Or have the recent airdrop announcements led to modifications to the airdrop math in some way? I'm specifically thinking of:

  1. all packs purchased during Phase 2 being eligible for both airdrops and

  2. all packs purchased during general sale being eligible for all airdrops unlocked during that 24 hour period

     • Answer: Matt left so this wasn't answered at this time.

• What utility will titles have post the airdrop phase?
  • We're planning to incorporate that into land.

• After recent changes the printing of new Rewards cards has slowed down a lot. At this rate, we might still be printing the same ones in 1-2 years... is that OK with you guys? Or do you think that the max supply numbers were based on bots that are now defunct, so perhaps reducing it (burning half the max supply?) so that we can wrap it up before Rift Watchers might be a good idea?

  • I want the devs working more on the dev stuff rather than the reward cards. When we did it, we just 10X it and so I think we're done just fine with our growth. Honestly, everyone is earning more except those running entry-level bots. I don't know that we'll be changing the reward cards or curve.
  • We want to give SPS more utility

• Is there a reason why we can't challenge each other using Gladius cards? This would be super useful for some brawl training or just trying out gladius cards.

  • Yeah mostly because we haven't gotten there yet. That's a quality of life thing so put that up on feedback page.

• Could we have an option to level down cards that we have during battles? Quick example would be a chicken. If I want it to block snipe I select level 1 otherwise go with the highest level.
  • I thought we do stuff like that already. So in this you need different cards and I don't see that changing.

• Given the fact that the YouTube channel with the most subscribers has ~20k subscribers, that the devs chose to increase the chaos packs by a factor of 10 (15 million) compared to the untamed packs (1.5 million) and the fact that one year ago the active users were ~3000, is it safe to assume that the actual users (not bots) are in the range of 30k to 40k? I am trying to estimate the market dynamics for the upcoming sale. (30k people competing for packs and cards etc vs 300k people trying to do the same)
  • I think we're well north of 30k or 40k players.
  • If you go to peakmonsters dashboard to see how many players are going.
  • During July this year, we had 22K active unique players. In Nov in one week we hit 10.9 million unique visitors according to our statics on the website. That just shows you the growth. The project is growing, we're scaling like crazy. We're probably at 500K players now.

• Can you shed any light on whether the Land rarity will be likely based on the current rarity scale (78% common etc.) or a new one? And also can you shed any light on how it works regarding knowing which cards or card attributes will be better or worse for land, and will it vary from plot to plot?

  • So yeah the card rarities are sort of announced in the white paper for land but we'll have natural resources, magical resources and occupied lands and in those you'll have rarities and it's slightly more complicated than what you're describing. We don't have the exact answers yet.

• When will the new base cards be announced? What base cards will be removed and what chaos cards will be added? Thank you so much!

  • The summoners that you get are from Untamed, Chaos Legion and maybe the Dice too.

Credit Questions

• How solid is the credit-only rule for CL? pretty dangerous to get stuck with loads of credits instead of DEC. I‘d rather risk price fluctuation than to holdless useful assets

  • For credits, especially if you're doing it in one big purchase. We will allow you to refund your credit purchase and you get stuck with credits if you did 24 hours. We're not going to mess with the market though. We will give you back exactly what you gave us.

• In a worst case scenario where you buy a lot of Credits to buy Booster Packs in the general sale but you don't get any because they are sold in a moment's notice. Would you do a refund for the Credits?

  • Yes

• you have said you will refund credits if none have been spent. Given that these types of issues already spend weeks in the tech support queue, what will be the impact of lots of refund requests?
  • We'll have to have this ready. We'll do our best.

• Will it ever be possible to directly convert DEC to Credits?

Requests/ Suggestions

• Can we have a dev tracker for Discord please? For those that don't want to spend hours and hours each week reading Mav chat to see comments from the team, but still want to know about developments before they get posted on PeakD or announced in some other way. Discord has some functionality, but even searching each team member and jumping to comments to see the context of their comments doesn't quite do what a dev tracker would. It also misses any checkmark confirmations and such.

  • Great idea! We'll get on that!
  • Game Updates will be moving into the game. Discord will become less and less and things will move more into the game.

• I bought 1000 packs joining a chaos legion pool. In one of the previous AMAs you mentioned that you'll consider giving MAV status for having a title as well. It shows a financial commitment nonetheless. What is the status of that one?

  • It hasn't been a priority to fix that or change that. I don't know how we do Mav stuff and after land comes out I'll consider that.

• When is the splinterlands festival? If there is none then would it be better to have one

  • I talked to some people down in Miami, So I'm thinking Vegas, Miami, San Juan. We've been talking about it. I'm leaning towards Vegas. It's going to be about where we can get a big venue and some entertainment. And maybe we'll have a European one.

• Hello Splinterlands Team! Happy Holidays! We are so excited for this upcoming week with Chaos. Once, Chaos has been released on behalf of the Immortal Gods Guild, we have a Guild Brawl request please. Immortal Gods is designed for max level play, hence we have the most Champion 1 players in the entire Splinterlands. We are asking if you could please change the reward structure so other Guilds will advance and we can get some Diamond Level Frays? Thank you for considering this. ~Immortal Gods Guild!

  • Yes it's on the radar and it's something I'm working on. I've got to get through Chaos Legion and once that's done, we have more freedom and flexibility to add more stuff. I definitely want more SPS rewards. They're already in the white paper. I just need people to get to the point that they're free enough to do that.

Chaos Legion Questions / Wild vs Modern Questions

• Just want to know the airdrop details for the phase 2 pre-sale. Will it have guaranteed an airdrop for buying several amount of chaos legion packs? And for other airdrops (total 13), the airdrop rates is 2% per packs? Thanks.
  • Generally Yes, but that's typically what we do. And no, the airdrop rate is different depending upon the card. 2% is for a chance to be gold. It will change and after it changes it will change again because it's based upon rarities.

• When Chaos Legion releases, will there be a fray slot added for Chaos Legion only cards? Or will the alpha/beta only be replaced with Chaos Legion only frays? I feel like additional frays for Chaos Legion should be added if it's undecided, as keeping the Alpha/Beta only frays would help those cards retain their value.
  • I don't quite know what we're going to do but that's highly likely the phrase will change as we do it.

• Will there be any guaranteed cards drops for purchases of 50 packs or more during phase 2? ( like there was in phase 1 with Dr. Blight)
  • I can't tell you yet, but we'll let you know so you can get your airdrops.

• Does bulk buying include a 5% discount? The article on bulk buying only mentioned potions (unless I missed something)
  • The 5% discount switched to potions. The 5% turned into legendary potions and the 10% turned into legendary and alchemy potions. When the discounts is potions, then it really gives the value to them. This makes sure that the people getting the benefit are still part of the ecosystem (because they are not transferrable).

• In the Town Hall it seemed like bulk buys should not be done in credit(game currency) but recently a post was made about all packs going forward sold in credits. If we decide to do a bulk buy, do you want it in credit or some other crypto (or just message you directly?)
  • Message me directly

• The latest post talks about buying CL with credits only come general sale. Are we going to be able to buy Credits with DEC?
  • Yes you should be able to buy with DEC at market rates.

• Can you confirm if the promo cards issued alongside Chaos Legion will still keep the CP equivalent to Alphas?
  • No they will have a collection power with the reward cards.

• If I'm buying packs on an alt account to reap the 5% affiliate bonus is this against TOS? Will there be any limit on transactions/dollar limit of packs I can buy on this account? I don't want to get caught bag holding credits
  • Keep in mind we'll refund them. You can buy cards with them on the market.

• Bulk buys have been introduced as a way to provide a discount and incentive for large buys. To help streamline the general sale, would it be possible to "pre-order" for buys of 2,000 packs or more? No incentive but the assurance you didn't buy $10,000 worth of credits and not get packs
  • No that's not going to be available. I'm not sure we'll have the dev resources ready for that. If you want that, go join pools.
  • That's why we have the vouchers out.

• Can we have an update on packs sold via bulk sale?
  • It's probably 400K packs but the big thing is we want this done by the end of the year. I've got the biggest guild in the world coming.

• With the introduction of wild format, will old cards and more importantly gladiator cards still affect the modern league power requirements. Or will gladiators only affect wild collection moving forward?
  • I'm not sure that gladiators impact the format for tournaments.
  • Gladiators do contribute to Collection Power.

• Is it really possible that season end rewards can stack-up and receive new set of season reward cards if we open them after CL cards has been released on Dec 08?
  • That's a good question. We'll research that. It's probably going to take a year before you'll get new season reward cards. That's a lot of airdrops to miss out on.

• Will there be a 1% chance to drop CL packs in Chests starting 8.12. And if so, from which Pool / Supply do they come, how big is it, and in case the general Sale in January would instantly sell out, will they stop being dropped?
  • I think so. Otherwise it's the general sale. Yep they stopped being dropped.
  • Chaos Legion packs won't be available in reward chests on Dec. 8. Not sure when they will be added to chests.

• To me personally some of the new cards look pretty powerful compared to some similar older cards, will Power Creep be introduced with CL? And if so, won't that have a negative impact on the long term sustainability and state of game health for SPL?
  • Sorry guys I just don't believe you when you say Power Creep is brand new. It's just not happening because we use the same spreadsheets.

• will more 10+ mana cards be added to chaos, currently giant killer ability is very anti untamed but pointless in a chaos vs chaos game?
  • Yeah I wouldn't be surprised.

Other Questions

• The town hall building lowers all costs made in DEC by a %. Now that all purchases are made in credit will that same discount still apply(maybe it always did and the description hasn’t been updated?)
  • It doesn't impact everything. It's the quest lodge that does it. It gives a reduction for some of the things in the shop.
• When is the next Town Hall? (Friday, December 10th at 7:30 p.m. EST)
  • Dec 10th 7:30 pm

Rapid Questions

• QUESTION: Does participating in the group buy guarantee our packs in the case of an instant genera sale sell out? If we have one person paying for our group buy will there also be a way for them to transfer potions to the players who put money into the buy?
  • ANSWER: Nope

• QUESTION: Is there any ETA on when land will be buyable/sellable on the market?
  • ANSWER: We're trying to get it done as soon as we can.

• Question nate do you have any preview of the next airdrop cards?
  • ANSWER: We don't have that yet.

• Question: What if I buy credits in separate transactions. can I get them refunded if I don't get to buy packs?
  • ANSWER: Yeah we will refund them.

• Question for @nateaguila can you make a drop box of all wallpapers please, when I download from discord they come at low res
  • ANSWER: Absolutely

• QUESTION: Is the card Adelade Brightwing a reference to the city of Adelaide?
  • ANSWER: Get back to you.

• Question: Possibility of rewarding Guild owners? Currently it seems that other players think that putting up a guild is cheap.
  • ANSWER: It's all on the block chain.

• Question: When we convert SPS/DEC to credits to buy packs what happens to the SPS/DEC? Does it burn, go to the foundation, developers? If it goes to the developers is there a lockup period?
  • ANSWER: It goes to the corporation. For DEC we have to give away DEC so we hold it for as long as we can then we give it back.

• Question - Can we now buy Credits using our mobile phones?
  • ANSWER: IDK where that's at but I know we're working at turning that back on.

• QUESTION: do any of the company that have reached out to splinterlands currently have video games out right now that have micro-transactions? and is there a Khymia card coming out closer to land or is being saved for something else?
  • ANSWER: I've been working with large companies but not sure how to answer that. I'm sure they have something.

• Question!! When are we going to fix the ECR decreasing in Novice to bronze 3 even we are not getting DEC??
  • ANSWER: IDK put that in the quality of life requests with feedback to Splinterlands.

• Question: The interface of the game is really bad on iPads. Is the team working on fixing this?
  • ANSWER: Yes we have a whole strategy around using mobile first design.

• QUESTION: Does game design team think about some changes in the gameplay, such as make it more interesting? I also played Gods of Unchained of Immutable X. They don't have a good tokenomic like us but in general, I prefered their gameplay than Splinterlands, it has more challenges and more mechanisms.
  • ANSWER: Yeah we want to add items and spells. Items will add another round of difficulty. We're working on that. Items and spells is really going to balance that out to make the most people happy.

• Question: When will you allow back the use of G-cash to buy credits? This is for players in PH
  • I don't know when we got rid of G-Cash. I know it's had problems. I'm sure the DEV team is working on something. We just want to make sure what we use isn't causing more problems.

• Question: are the airdrops only for packs purchased with vouchers from first presale?
  • Answer: The airdrops will be for everybody. Anyone that purchases packs has access to the airdrops.

• Question!! When are we going to fix the ECR decreasing in Novice to bronze 3 even we are not getting DEC??
  • ANSWER: Well, you gotta put that on feedback at Splinterlands' website

• Question: Can i check why Gargoya Scrapper new life CL card does not have any improvement on stats from level 9-10 as a common monster? or will there be further adjustments to these cards?
  • ANSWER: It's an oversight.

Quotes of the Day

• "Ironically, chaos legion has been the least chaotic of any new set release we've done so far" -Matt
• Link to YouTube Video:

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If you enjoyed my post and want to try Splinterlands, please use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=rosiew

Please remember my post is not meant to be financial advice and is just my opinion.
Follow These Folks:
Splinterlands: https://peakd.com/@splinterlands/
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1Up (#OneUp): https://www.1up.zone/

Here are some great links to join as well!
Splinterlands Discord: https://discord.gg/Tw7KjNsQGs
Monster Market Discord (Monster Curator): https://discord.gg/DR3J9rfRFV
PeakD Discord (PeakMonsters as well): https://discord.gg/7mQmzZeugE
NFT Studios Discord (aka 1UP Discord #OneUp): https://discord.gg/4VYBcNuVQd