Splinterlands Updates - Soulkeep and Tournaments

Hello there.

The long awaited release of SoulKeep has finally arrived, and a lot of players were excited for it. The sale of the Nightmare packs for the game were sold a long time ago, and there were delays in the release. Double Coconut, the developers of the game, bought it and continued working on the game, and here we are now. Similar to Land, the Soulkeep game can be accessed in the Splinterlands frontend. You just need to click the S in the top middle of the page:

With this, there are a lot of new things added throughout the site. I'll try to go over them quickly. First, is the Nightmare packs can now be opened:

I don't have any nightmare packs so I don't know if the Legendary and Alchemy potions also work on it. If it doesn't, then they should also update the information text beside the potions to exclude the Nightmare packs similar to Alpha and Gladiator packs. The next one is the market:

I'm actually pretty impressed that the market and rentals are already available upon release. Looking at the cards available, there are already a lot of them to choose from, but I noticed that there aren't a lot of leveled cards yet. And finally the Items:

I haven't jumped on the SoulKeep train yet, but I am keeping an eye on it. I tried the game in my PC and it was running a bit slow [I have a lot of tabs open], so I'm not too keen on playing it until it gets better. From my understanding, SoulKeep rewards are distributed to the leagues, and there are 33,321 SPS distributed daily. Yep, daily, so for those of us not yet playing it, we seem to be missing out on a lot of rewards. This is also why there is some contention upon the current setup. Previously, staked SPS would be required and would determine the amount of rewards earned, similar to Splinterlands. This wasn't the case upon release, and players are able to earn based on just their skill and league.

The DAO is now coordinating with Double Coconut to find a solution. Some argue that this isn't what was approved in the proposal, although some counter that the proposal happened before Double Coconut purchased the game. Others are more sympathetic and think we shouldn't cut off the rewards on a game that just released, since it might dampen the onboarding. They add that Double Coconut is already working with the DAO to make things right, and are keen to working with the SPL assets which could be good for SPL overall. There is an ongoing proposal related to this issue.

For me, I think 33k SPS is a lot. This amount of SPS going out into the open everyday, to accounts that doesn't even have SPS staked can't be good. I can see people taking advantage of this, and that could hurt us a lot. I think we should at least halve the rewards until the correct system is in place. I've been looking at the SPL discord and I don't know if the numbers are correct, but the top 10 players get a large amount of the SPS:

I guess this makes things look a lot better, since to be able to get the top positions, one needs to have invested a lot in the game and have good cards. League 2 has 74 players, but to get to League 2 one must have a minimum of 38 epics, and a lot of common and rare cards. The rewards being this top heavy is an interesting implementation though. If these players all have high SPS staked then it would be better, but I saw a screenshot of a bronze account in SPL getting third place. I just hope they get things fixed soon.

If you've been playing tournaments, you might have noticed that it has a newer, more modern look. The buttons have a cleaner look, and tournament pages looks a bit different:

I like the changes, but this seemed to introduce a few bugs/problems. The biggest one was submitting Tactics. Initially, players were unable submit their tactics for their Tactics Summoner. There was also the issue of Gladiators not appearing in tournament team creation when the rules allowed them. There were also some visual and redirect issues. From the latest tech updates, most of these should now be fixed.

For those playing in the Bronze/Novice tournaments, how have your experience been. I noticed that a lot of high ranking players have also started playing in the lower tier tournaments, and even in the Novice ones. I think this has shifted the meta a lot, and as an example I faced 5 Lorkus out of my 10 battles in the Modern Novice tournament. These players are Champ in Wild, with Ghostlybg almost champ in Modern. So the competition is significantly harder. Goodluck in your battles.

That is it for my Soulkeep and Tournaments update. Are you playing Soulkeep? After knowing how high the rewards are right now, do you plan on checking it out? How has your SPL Tournament experience been? Don't hesitate to let me know what you think, and if you have suggestions for improvement.

And as always, these are Not Financial Advice, and Do Your Own Research.

If you want to start playing Splinterlands, you can use my link:
Splinterlands Referral Link