#splinterlands

Splinterlands Team: My Thoughts On Survival Mode

Dear Splinterlands,

You've built a strong community which has stuck by you because we trust you are doing your best. When pioneering a brand new world, we understand that you will make mistakes, then we expect you to learn from them and adjust.

We have some exciting new things happening on the horizon, so for the most part this is a great opportunity for us all ahead.

Battle Scars

However, we do have battle scars. These scars are a result of many battles we've had over the years, where the community was doing its job to helping you to decipher the inputs to reach a system that works. We got these scars not because we were weak, but because we were strong.

We got these scars because we did care and were willing to fight all (even you) when we felt changes needed to be made for the game to survive. Nobody wanted to fight, but everyone that did so believed it was to make the game succeed. Because we cared.

We are your soldiers and you are the Generals. We need you and you need us.

Learning From Mistakes

After watching the community reaction from the latest rollout of the Survival Mode, its clear to me legitimate questions have been raised which need to be addressed. These questions aren't technical in terms of how Survival Mode operates, but are theoretical in nature regarding intentions.

What are you trying to accomplish with Survival Mode, and where will this take us? Is automation the key aspect in determining future success within this whole game? Said otherwise, are we targeting humans for growth or reverting back to targeting money growth with automation and/or financial advantages.
Is this a reversal of mindset regarding bot play versus human play? Should we interpret 2/3rds of the payouts going to the players that use bots as an admission that human-only play can not sustain the game? If so, then this has implications for people that question our six year marketing strategies and what it portends for future success.
Is this a trojan horse way to get the SPS DAO to eventually spend more of its money to bring bot farmers back? Realizing that the team is only funding the initial rounds, its clear that the team is spending valuable dev resources in expectation that the SPS DAO will continue funding. Is this the right way to roll out such a large portion of our reward pool because its bound to cause division and negativity once the SPS DAO has to decide between possibly two unpleasant choices: (1) spending DAO money when times are tight or (2) having the team waste all their DEV work and killing the program.

I've seen the understandable variety of reactions from many over the past few days, and they range from super excited to absolutely against it. There's a ton of assumptions being made, in addition to conclusions being drawn based about the future of the game based on those assumptions.

We all realize you don't have all the answers and want to experiment, and that's even a smart way to do it as long as you engage and respond in a timely fashion. We can't wait months and months to make changes, and we can't hide from the motives either. Hitting things head on with clarity is important, so I hope the team is super responsive with such a shakeup to the system.

Great Leadership Requires Confidence, Trust, and Vision

Earlier I said you were the Generals and we are the soldiers. Soldiers are in the fight and want to see the mission succeed, they are individuals with their own minds and feelings.

The Generals have to anticipate and address issues that come up. They have to provide vision of where we are headed, and convince the soldiers to follow this plan. To do this, first the Generals need to be trusted, and then they need to make the soldiers confident of success.

I think most everyone still here trusts the team, but its clear to me that the vision for the future is blurry to many of our players with battle scars. As a result of this massive new mode, they are now questioning many things, so we need great leadership to address those issues and be responsive with clarity.

My Personal View On Survival Mode

-I don't mind experimenting, but to me its simply an experiment.

-If funding from the DAO was to be voted on as it stands, I'd be a "no" because I don't think it will work systemically to bring in a meaningful amount of new money, and the trade-off of negativity is not worth it.

-I will play it if I can win something, but I won't invest in buying more cards or rentals as a result of this (I'm afraid this will be the norm btw)

-I don't mind having an automated place where people can manage their collections to win (defi), however I don't think that Defi does much more than shuffle around assets to give an edge to certain people over others. So its not a super high priority given the current state of the game.

-I'm very worried about our ability to attract and retain new players, to me this is the only essential factor to determining our success. I've been unclear as to who we are targeting, and this mode is a bit scary as it seems to be reaching for another big bot buying spree (which I don't think will happen, and even more so, if it did then I feel that is still not a good thing)

-Finally, I feel that if we are going to have this battle again, which will create new scars on those that fight for something they believe in, then we must have great leadership from the team to listen and learn, in addition to being clear about the vision/purpose. If the team is responsive as things get moving, then we will all see how it works out together.

Comments · 23

@hivebuzz(74)· 616d
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@costanza(78)· 633d
To get back to this topic, I think there is a far better way to do Survival Mode

Players pay a fixed entry fee to enter a round of Survival mode, for that entry fee they get a set of random Max Level Monsters and Summoners they can use in Survival mode. With those cards they need to make decks based on the game rules and face opponents with a similar win-rate. Each time they lose a battle they lose all the cards from that battle and they can continue to the point where they no longer are able to field a team or to a max number of wins. The cards that they play with are supplied by players who own the cards by locking them on land and in return they get part of the entry fee as 1-click passive rental earnings. After each run players get some rewards based on how they performed and at the end of the Day / Week / Season there is a leaderboard to give extra rewards in a fair way.
I made a full breakdown of the current flaws and the benefits of doing it differently here
@hivebuzz(74)· 637d
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@pardinus(75)· 638d
Great post, spot on in all these questions. I do admire how constructive can you stay during all these moves; for me, and reading all the comments I'm definitely not alone, it is just frustrating at this point: we have an awesome game, a "new player experience" is taunted as the priority, and it seems almost every change seems to go the exact opposite direction.

-I'm very worried about our ability to attract and retain new players, to me this is the only essential factor to determining our success.

Do hope we have a REAL change of focus. I wouldn't mind a new mode at all, even though this one will unlikely do anything to atract new players; even so, I would see it with good eyes, more diversification is always better... but seeing as welcome the automation that nearly ruined the game (and in my opinion, keeps ruining it), is a straight NO from me.
@joshman(74)· 638d
Great post Dave!
@pero82(69)· 638d
I just want to say - well done, sir. Most of the comments were also well put, and I hope this "experiment" gets put on hold (forever would be fine by me).
@jarvie(75)· 639d
Instead of creating a menu option called "Survival Mode" we should have an entire section called SplinterLabs or Splinterland Labs ... where the whole idea is to give people the option to play really easy to create adaptions like Survival mode.

Queue up for games every 5 minutes. Maybe let people have challenge rooms or lobbies. Something.

While this may not be a game for the masses... If we're being honest with ourself we can't keep playing the same mostly luck-based-BLIND-drafting game for 6 years where you don't even know what you're going up against just kinda playing by yourself (with a vague idea of the meta) until you hit the button ... "oh wait there was someone on the other side, i didn't even know". I mean i guess you could keep going with it... if people were coming in droves to play it... but like you said...

Let them cook... it's not a huge project... I personally hope that it becomes the first step toward a non-blind-skill-based turn by turn game. But a boy can dream. Let's put it in a LAB and see how people respond. It's mostly UI on the same results engine.
@unitmaster(66)· 639d
Dave, I agree with you and thanks for sharing this. I hope the Splinterlands team responds to your post.
@eldon1(49)· 639d
I’ve expressed my thoughts on this subject many times before, so I’ll keep it simple here:

I stopped putting money into this game a while ago, but I still haven’t sold my assets or left yet. The truth is, I still believe this game can succeed under the right conditions.
Whenever a new asset is sold by the company, I ask myself: "Hmm, should I buy that?" Lately, the answer has been a clear NO.

What the company needs to do is change my mind. Prove me wrong. Let’s remember, I’m just one of many players. My individual opinion might not matter, but if these feelings are shared broadly, they’ll start to matter.

If you’re telling me that the rewards for my efforts and time playing the game will be reduced by 33%, you’re not motivating me to invest in new sets or assets. In fact, quite the opposite.

So, who is this update really for?
Definetely It’s not for real players like me. But its not only that is not for real players, this update actually HURTS real players.

Do you truly expect whales and bot farms to buy the new set when the time comes?
Honestly, @yabapmatt, you need to stop basing decisions on the thought process of "What would Matt do?" What you would do as a player doesn’t matter since you’re not a regular player.

If you keep making decisions from that perspective, only whales will remain in the game. Whales might hold a lot of assets, but they don’t sustain the game or make it grow. Only real, small players will.

Anyway, great post dave, I agree with most of what you expressed.
@javiss(67)· 639d
I agree with your thoughts dave. I think if we want we could pass a vote to instruct the splinterlands team to not release any new modes where bots are allowed But it feels crappy that we have to do that.
@fatjimmy(62)· 640d
Thank you for writing this Dave. As usual, you hit the nail on the head. My main concern is that this feels VERY similar to Aggy's 'new mode' distractions when he pulled devs off of vital SPL work to focus on the company's new games. We have had focus issues for years, and we need to feel confident that the team is learning how to focus, finish what needs to be done, and not get sidelined with new ideas before finishing those that are much more important.

We have very limited resources and very limited time to catch this bull run. We need ALL of our focus on attracting and maintaining new players. If we are going to spend dev time on a new game mode, it should be a mode that NEW PLAYERS can enjoy, not a mode specifically meant to target 'players with large collections' which has ZERO chance of new players participating. In fact, if a new player were to accidentally play this mode and suddenly find their cards on cooldown... man, there are so many things to consider here that are not even on the table. I fear this is a whole Pandora's Box of unseen consequences that are not being considered.

As mondroid points out, this mode just gives a bigger piece of the pie to legacy whales with ZERO benefit for our most important demographic, new players. I can't wrap my head around the stated belief that those with large collections have been neglected, which is the stated reasoning behind this mode is being launched.
Land has consumed SO much of our dev resources and will consume so much more before we even get to actual spells and items. Land is exactly what Matt claims this game needs, it IS that asset management mode he speaks of. And the promo cards being marketed to whales (Matt's own words - "we needed something for whales to buy" hence the pricing of the promos), and the auction card... these are ALL new things that are pretty much 'whale exclusive' regarding community participation.

It's the most important demographic being neglected once again, the bronze and silver players. And at a time when these players need to be considered our MOST important asset...

If the goal here is to bring value to cards by creating demand, it's missing the mark. The only real long term way to create PERMANENT demand for cards is to CONSTANTLY GROW OUR PLAYER BASE.

This mode is an incredibly dangerous gamble at this point in time, as it has the very real potential to drive even more existing players away at the worse possible time. This again points to the issue of TIMING, a lesson the team is in desperate need of learning!! If this mode was proposed a year from now after a successful marketing campaign that brought in a lot of new players, if our NPE and tutorial was finished and successful, if ranked was 'working' as intended regarding levels/matching, and a new game mode or two had been launched that focused on ALL players, or even just one for the little guys, THEN this mode would likely have been embraced as one more cool thing in the ecosystem to add variety. Instead, because of the timing, it's a wedge issue and a distraction from what we really need to focus on right now.
@costanza(78)· 640d
I agree, it took years trying to fix the sins from the past making sure that bot farms can't milk the system while reducing the SPS inflation. Now with this game mode, bot fams will be able to farm again while the extra SPS inflation likely will put pressure on the price. All while nothing about the game mode brings in any new players.

At least it's good to see that an attempt to create a new game mode that increases the utility of old cards is made. It's the same old problem though that economic incentives are prioritized over Fun & Gameplay.
@synist3r(67)· 640d
Well said, Dave. You've always approached Splinterlands and the Community with a level head, an open mind, and with the game's future success and sustainability as your north star. Never.Change.A.Thing. There is a reason why you are so well respected in this Community. Keep fighting the good fight! 💪
@pizzabot(60)· 640d
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@danzocal(60)· 640d
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@mondroid(64)· 640d
Thanks for taking the time to write this post Dave. I think if you asked any splinterlands player we would all agree that attracting new players to our game is by far the most important goal the team should be focused on and time is of the essence...

It's deeply concerning to me that we're paying CM to develop land... a passive income / staking platform for Legacy players... Wild is almost entirely played by bots and legacy accounts... and now we're spending even more dev time and resources on yet another passive earning place that BOTS and Legacy collections will have a massive advantage over humans / new players in.

When I look at where the team is spending their money and dev time it's clear the focus isn't on new players, it's giving the legacy players a pay day / subsidy.

As a fervent anti-bot player of the game... at some point I just have to realize this game isn't meant for me. I have to stop hoping the game becomes X while clearly they want the game to be Y.

It's their product, they can do with it what they wish so it's on me as the customer to stop buying it if I'm unhappy with it's state / direction.

I have stuck around because I believed the team had learned from their mistakes and fully understood the severity of bringing new PLAYERS to the game but it seems we have quite different ideas of what is going to be appealing to new players.

I have some decisions to make...
@michealb(67)· 640d
Good write up Dave. A heap of fear, a heap of worry… but let’s give it a go anyway 😊
@azircon(79)· 641d

I'm very worried about our ability to attract and retain new players

Me too.

I am even worried about the experiment, because there is nothing to learn from this. We already know if we let people exploit they will exploit. We have tested this hypothesis so many times that we can seal this as a law and write it just below the landing page where we say:

Powered by hive.

The DAO proposal will be a strong NO from my end. I am not willing to spend a single SPS for this. I will also lobby so that other stakeholders see reason and vote NO when the proposal comes.
@star-shroud(66)· 641d
Wow. This is a really well thought out, and well written article. Thanks Dave 💪 some soul-searching is needed here.
@discovery-it(69)· 641d

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@libertycrypto27(82)· 641d

-I'm very worried about our ability to attract and retain new players, to me this is the only essential factor to determining our success. I've been unclear as to who we are targeting, and this mode is a bit scary as it seems to be reaching for another big bot buying spree (which I don't think will happen, and even more so, if it did then I feel that is still not a good thing)

I, too, have expressed my doubts about this new mode because human players are sidelined, and it should not be that way. I am glad that I am not the only one who sees these issues !discovery 30 @tipu curate 2
@steemmonsters(76)· 641d
Thanks for sharing! - @azircon
@splinterboost(59)· 641d
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