SPS Governance Proposal - Update Minimum Rental Price from .1 DEC to 1 DEC
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The purpose of this proposal is to increase the minimum Rental Price of a card from .1 DEC to 1 DEC. I suggest the 1 DEC floor because it is equivalent to the Listing Fee for putting a card up for Rent.
If this proposal passes, I believe it will have two primary effects on the Splinterlands Economy:
It will help reduce the Bot Horde by increasing the Rental Costs associated with them by 10X
It will help make Rentals more Profitable. Any card rented one time, will be a profitable venture for Card Renters:
With the current 1 DEC Listing Fee and a new Floor Price of 1 DEC, if a card is rented only once in a sixty day period for the two day minimum, it will return 2 DEC. With the current system, a card must be rented out for 10/60 Days to reach a breakeven amount.
Should this Proposal Pass, I would like to see the Floor Price increase on the Maintenance that occurs following our next Town Hall. This should allow the Team ample time to prepare and an opportunity to talk about it before it takes effect.
In addition I would like to see a timeframe of 60 Days (1 Rental Cycle) for all current rentals to stay in place. I do not believe it would be fair to those who just listed cards to be forced to pay another Listing Fee, especially if they're renting out Heatsmiths and the like.
However, after the 60 Day Window expires, ALL CARDS on the Rental Market that are listed at < 1 DEC, WILL BE REMOVED AUTOMATICALLY.
This would prevent Rentals at .1 DEC from lingering and unfairly undercutting the new Rentals following the updated Floor Price of 1 DEC.
If this section were NOT to be implemented, it would nullify the entire point of the Proposal. Bots would simply continue to Rent the .1 DEC Cards indefinitely.
I believe this will have a few additional effects on the market as well including:
A. Increasing the value of the "Playable Cards"
B. Due to "unrentable" cards no longer flooding the market - there should be a reduction in overall Transactions for Rentals but with an overall increase in RoA% for those that are worth renting! This will benefit everyone by reducing Server Load.
For those saying it will hurt Rentals... Let me use my collection of Max Level RF Heatsmiths, Conjurers, Deceivers and other Max Level RF Reward Cards as an example. They currently are NOT listed for Rent and should this pass, they shall continue to sit on the shelf unrented.
Why are they not Listed for Rent??? My Max Level RF Venari Heatsmiths, Gargoya Lions and others (Commons/Rares/Epics) went 60 Days without renting AT ALL at the .1 DEC Floor and were delisted automatically for failure to rent.
Therefore, if they are not renting at .1 DEC, this proposal won't change anything or hurt these rentals.
In conclusion, we must remember the business expression: "A race to the bottom benefits no one".
Please see my original draft here for more of my thoughts on this matter:
Thank you for reading my SPS Proposal, I truly believe this will benefit everyone! I hope you agree and will vote according. I look forward to the discussion below.
Cheers 🍻,
- CaptainDingus
I will vote against this. There are several maxed out cards that go for less than 1 DEC. Some of those are legendaries. Yes, we're talking about CL reward cards. However, some of them are pretty good cards. Player probably don't need Venari Heatsmith but they need Pelacor Bandit, Venari Crystalsmith, Djinn Oshannus, and several others. If they rent for less than 1 DEC, when you put an artificial floor for 1 DEC, there will be more people wanting to rent them out and less people willing to rent in. This creates a gamble where some will be lucky and win more and others will not get their cards rented and end up wasting the listing fee and never earning anything from the rents. Also, not all cards need to be maxed out to be rented. Many cards are rented at lower levels. There are several non CL reward legendaries at level 2 going for less than 1 DEC. The fiends are a great example. Most players don't need them at max level. Level 1 is enough. All of them are available for less than 0.4 DEC.
I believe in the free market and there should be as little restrictions as absolutely necessary.
The technical side and fairness also have their issues. Even with your idea of allowing cards to stay on the market for 60 days and being removed after doesn't solve anything. What if someone is renting a card of mine for 0.1 and they keep it rented for longer than that and also keep renewing? Will they force cancel it? Even if they don't allow more renewals after that, there will be many cards being rented for a period of time. It will be difficult and costly to keep making "stops" to anything that goes back to the market after rental to force remove them. And why do I have to pay again a listing fee for a bunch of cards that I already paid a listing fee and they were renting just fine and I was happy to get something out of them instead of nothing?
If this passes many cards will be on the market for 60 days and never be rented. Some will be rented just very few days. If your card is rented the whole time for 0.3 that's 18 DEC over 60 days. If it's rented just 6 days over that period for 1 DEC it's 1/3 of the profit and more risk to pay the listing fee again.
Valid point, but you have the same effect right now at 0,1 DEC - it doesn't make sense to rent out some cards since nobody wants them anyway. With a higher minimum, that would change to a higher value. Also, if the target is to have bot farms struggle - that might be a good way. Even if this proposal is not perfect, I think it's worth the while to think into that direction to tackle bot farms.
As we discussed previously on the draft of my proposal
I disagree with your view because I have a TON of currently unrentable cards that fall into that category.
Please remember, if a card IS rented at least ONE TIME in the 60 Days, it renews the 60 Day Window.
L4 Djinn Oshannus and Djinn Bjilka are a prime example you provided. The both rent for less than 1 DEC per day... but since they are playable cards, they will continue to rent and BENEFIT from the increase.
The L1, L2 and L3 versions rent for less naturally but if the proposal passes, there are only two probable outcomes:
A. The L4's rent for 1 DEC and the L3's and below fail to rent...
B. The L4's rent for 1 DEC but people realize they could list the L2's for 1, the L3's for 1.3 and the L4's for 1.5 DEC or something like that, making them all more profitable.
The benefit to option A is, if the L4's rent out at the Floor and the Lower Levels do not... this is a HUGE incentive to LEVEL UP THE CARDS.
With the removal of Card Level Caps in the Ranked Battles, this isn't a good thing... it's a GREAT thing!!
"Unplayable" cards simply won't rent and they won't clog up the servers with useless Tx's
That is why I see no downside to what you are saying.
I think the main positive effect could be saving server costs, maybe, would like some input from the team. Did you talk to them?
I am not buying that bots are renting tons of cheap cards, they mostly play with soulbound reward cards and just happily play each other in wild bronze to gold. If you dont believe me make a new account and play wild. I did it for science and to see how bad it is and I haven't faced a single non-soulbound card until 2200 (where I stopped out of boredom).
Mainly this will push the price of CL rentals, after all you can rent some useful CL cards for under 1 DEC, even at max level. Whether this is a good thing, who knows. I would be curious how much DEC is burned by listing unrented cards. Effectively people stopping to try could mean less DEC is burned, whether this is worth the saved server costs, I can't tell.
I actually created the account @pointonedec and fed it a ton of Single BCX CL cards and others that rented consistently for .1 DEC
The ROI was bananas but as things are changing it started coming down so I added in some RB cards to bolster the falling ROI.
Eventually I abandoned the project and I am simply waiting for the cards to come off rent so I can transfer/combine/sell them.
By doing this and renting these ultra cheap 1 BCX cards I saw most of the rent names were obvious bots with names like abc123, abc124, abc125 etc vs my other accounts where I rent Max Level CL/RW/RB cards and the names were JohnnyBoy69 or TomBombadil1975 - as in actual players :)
In the end, this experiment and data gave me the idea to make this proposal which would then force the Bots to rent at 10x their costs.
I think the pros far outweigh any cons and for the actual players who rent cards 1 DEC, even with DEC at peg is still only a tenth of a Penny or $.001 😄
I know you disagree but I still think everyone will be proven wrong if this passes. The whole economy will be negativily affected. I just wanted to comment this in the official proposal post.
Thank you for asking, I welcome and genuinely appreciate all feedback on this matter 😊
THIS.
You are so obviously right... It's like the main reason people shifted to this kind of economy is because their economy was deteriorating because it was like... well what are turning this into.
Proposals like this keep passing because most people have already left the game when they had profit.
I think it's an interesting way to tackle the bot farm problem, and definitely worth thinking about. The proposal might not be perfect yet, but I'm pretty sure that this idea has a good chance to become a nice tool against the bot farm problem.
From the renter side, it's not so much a good thing - but it would drive people a little more into becoming owners of cards, which might help the ecosystem and stabilize prices. Also, the cards that are cheaper in renting, are also cheaper to buy.
Hey Captain! I support this concept.
Also I think there are 2 more things that can also be done, they don't have to be done in this proposal, but I also think they are important too:
the price should always be limited to a "whole DEC" amount. So after 1 DEC, the next lowest price would be 2 DEC (no fractional pricing allowed). If I had my way, people (or listing bots) wouldn't be able to beat out regular human players by listing at any increment below a whole DEC. No more .00000001 changes to jump in front of the line, which gives a terrible experience imo.
I would like to see only season rentals. The experience for human renters sucks because machines are trying to min/max every single cent and what that has done is chase people like me away. I don't bother to rent anything because I don't want to check my account each day to see if a card is still there (or if it was pulled) - what a waste of time.
So I think this is a good step forward, and I will be voting for it.
Whole DEC seems a little much, but yes, a visible 0,1 step would be great to prevent that.
Seasonal rent would require a higher starting capital for a player to even consider renting. I think that would be too much to do at once, raising the minimum to 1 DEC is already quite the hike :-D
Both are valid points. My additional steps are more of a wish list and a destination I'd like to get to, but I recognize there are other ways to achieve the same objectives.
While I am not certain on the first point, I think the second point could work with a small modification:
A. It will terminate on the 7th day, or run until the contracted rental length expires - instead of terminating at the end of the "2nd Day".
B. It will be removed from Rental Market or Price Changed (per current system) at the end of the Rental Period or after 6D23H59M59S have expired.
I think that solves the issue without the need for only Season Rentals. If we moved to Season Only, then Brawl/Tournament rentals go out the window and players can't "test" an expensive card like Yodin without being locked into paying 200 DEC/d for 14 Days.
I definitely think that would be a good modification but perhaps for another proposal down the road :)
Working back to the first point, I like what Beelzael said about .1 DEC increments :)
Thank you, as always for sharing your thoughts and input!!
(You too @beelzael :) )
I like that solution too! :)
Randomly stumbled upon your comment and going to share my 2 cents. As you maybe remember I don't really play the game so what I suggest can be totally wrong 😄
I really like your suggestions and to make those even better I would add a 3rd one:
3.After implementing point 2 we should change how rentals are priced. Instead of a daily price we should just have a "season" price. If you can only rent for one season there is no point in having a "daily" price.This will also greatly help with your 1st point as the "whole DEC" increment is going to be easier to accept if applied to the season price.
3a.Expanding on this even further you can decide that the minimum season price is actually 5 DEC. Still up compared to what we have now, but not so drastic as 1 DEC/day.I would definitely support your revisions @asgarth ... Thanks for weighing in and making it better!
My biggest issue is I rent a certain number of cards for brawls or specific tournaments and I have no use for them otherwise.
I can't justify renting something for a season at 250 DEC/d or more, just to use it in 2-3 Brawls or a single tournament.
Season: 250 x 14 = 3500
6 Days for 3 Brawls = 1500
I'd literally make that account dormant if we lost the daily rental option.
My suggestion of changing how daily rentals and cancelations work, would solve the issue vs scrapping daily rentals altogether...
But that is for a different proposal anyway 😅
Do we really need this ? I think 0.1 minimum price for rentals is rather fine, what if the market goes up and people would like to rent for example level 1 or level 2 epic chaos legion cards, 1 dec per day would be way too much for them
That is what I thought myself. I want the market to be inclusive for as many players as possible. Small players engage in a lot of low value Rentals. I want them to be able to continue. Being able to earn passive income with Cards is one of the big selling points we have compared to many other blockchain gaming projects. I'm not sure if limiting the market would automatically make the prices go up. What matter the most is bringing in new players.
@tsnaks @vimukthi
Let us not forget, that even with DEC at Peg... 1,000 DEC = $1.00 so 1 DEC is ONE TENTH of a Penny or $.001 :)
I do not believe that to be expensive by any means and will still allow every human to rent to their hearts content while at the same time forcing the bot Horde to pay 10X their current Rental Costs, which may be a large enough incentive to shake some of them out.
Furthermore, since we are no longer Card Level capped in Ranked Battles, this will be a huge incentive for those renting out cards to level them up and at the same time give those renting in cards a higher level card to play with, possibly allowing them to achieve a higher ranked level :)
I genuinely appreciate your thoughts, feedback and discourse on the matter!
What happened with me is that I stopped doing anything with low BCX Cards because I ran out of funds to invest. When I buy Cards it is to improve my near Max Levels. I fear some users may dump what they cannot use/rent sending prices even lower.
The big picture problem we are facing is a lack of players. Until we see mass onboarding back, telling existing investors to rent their Cards can be a way to keep them invested in the game. I have talked to few small investors who liked the idea of earning passive income with NFT. Being more inclusive there could create a stronger price floor. Once the prices start going up, I will be more favorable of a 10X increase in minimum prices.
Thank you for your comments.
`Interesting proposal. I've never rented any cards at .1 DEC. How is the cost/reward ratio for people renting for bronze (sorry I haven't played/rented for a long time.)
Great question!
I can't give you a concise answer but one of the other considerations I had was the recent change in how Ranked Battles are done.
Renting for Bronze doesn't really exist any more since there are no Card Level Caps.
Currently, the "junk" Legendary cards in CL rent for .1 DEC for L1 and top out at .49 for Grandmaster Rathe.
However, the "junk" Legendary cards start at 1.7 DEC and go all the way up to 85 DEC for Immortalis.
With that being said, the Top CL Legendaries would effectively "double" in rental price.
The cost to a Player who rents one of these cards is 1 additional DEC or 1/10 of a penny at peg, over two days.
Similarly, the CL Epics:
All L1 Epics rent for .1 DEC but the L2's (Bronze) range from .1 DEC for the trash to .585 for Nerissa.
However, you can rent a L4 Gem Meteor or Insidious Warlock for just under 1 DEC currently...
Effectively, what I believe will happen is players will be able to rent the "junk" Epics, like Insidious Warlock or Gem Meteor at a higher card level than the more expensive , Playable "Bronze" cards, for the same 1 DEC price as the cards like a L2 Nerissa...
Ultimately, I believe this will benefit the players renting those cards because they will get more "bang for their buck" since we no longer have Card Level Caps tiered by League and the L4 Gem Meteor will be usable alongside the L2 Nerissa in Bronze :)
Since I believe it will benefit them to do so and also cost Bots 10x more to rent those L1 cheap cards, I believe it to be a win-win-win solution all around!
More profit for those renting out their cards
Better cards for the money for the players renting them in
10x more costly for Bots to operate
Thank you for asking that question! I hope this reply helps :)
Yes - very useful. Its also made me think I should combine all my low bcx cards to make them desirable for renting.
I haven't combined mine from @pointonedec just yet
I am considering selling a lot of them but may keep them to combine.
1 BCX > Max BCX for $/BCX when selling
Max BCX is mostly > 1 BCX for RoA% when renting.
With pointonedec I saw a great opportunity to hit 50%+ RoA with the playable 1 BCX CL/Reward Cards and I tried it - it did exactly what I thought and the majority of my rentals were to bots lol
100% will vote yes. I think what many people don't get is that rental prices for cards that are sitting at under 1 dec (especially high level cards) are not being driven by the demand side at all. Price has nothing to do with the value of having a card in your deck. It's 100% the supply side. If there are only 50 people who want/need to rent a maxed Djinn Biljka but there are 500 on the market, they are going to the lowest possible price no matter what players find the value of the card to be. Is having access to a maxed pelecor bandit really only worth $0.0001?
Raising the floor price is just a way to get price a little closer to the value of having the card in your deck. And if anyone thinks changing the floor price is manipulation, you're right but we already have an arbitrary floor price so its already manipulated. This is just a different arbitrary floor price. Also let's remember that .1 dec is $0.0001 at peg. You could rent a card for almost 30 years for $1 usd at that price. What's the incentive to own a card when you could rent it for 30 years for a buck? Does changing it to 3 years for a buck really put it out of reach for anyone?
The change in Floor Price wasn't arbitrary, I chose the List Fee as the Floor Price 😭😭😭
In all seriousness though, you nailed it. I believe it will cause low BCX "trash" rentals to Bots to decrease greatly in volume and due to the Card Level Caps being removed in Ranked, cause a large number of Low BCX cards to get combined to have enough utility to justify renting at 1 DEC.
Thank you for this comment, I greatly appreciate it!
instant good idea!
Thank you for your feedback :)
Yes, I vote "yes" for this proposal. There is no change to list a 0.1 or 1 DEC without the need but it can reduce some bots. And frankly speaking, I don't want to list any card at 0.1DEC because it's not worth doing it.
I read another comment from @davemccoy, I agreed with him on point 1 but each adjustment step to be 0.1DEC instead of 1 DEC. 1DEC each step seems too high in my opinion.
Best proposal so far to reduce bots, while encouraging players to buy cards depending on the price.
One of the problems with the Listing Fee being 1 DEC was that it was better to never change the prices of cards below 1 DEC, thus making everyone set a low price and leave it there, thus making the price drop more and more.
The difference between List Fee and Floor Price was always curious to me.
I created an account to rent out 1 BCX cards that I could scoop up for cheap and then rent out... the primary renters were bot accounts... LOTS of them.
Make the costs higher to the bots = reduction in profits = less bots?
That was my line of thinking anyway lol
Very good idea, I'll vote yes 😊
Thank you for the feedback and support :)
Thank you for participating in SPS DAO Governance @captaindingus!
You can place or monitor SPS Stake Weighted votes for and against this proposal at the link below:
Link to this Pre-Proposal
Updated At: 2024-06-13 00:23 UTC
NO.
I play manually I still have a lot of rentals under 1 dec.
Bots are gone with the wild permit, theres no need for this. This will only affect players.
This will further discourage new players from investing in the game.
SPS continually loses value every month.
The little rewards we get for playing will equate to even less now.
It's a catch 22 for this game to thrive.
Though, if you can see the benefit to owning cards it may spur people to invest into the game. Thus, people would spread word that investing in this game is worth it.
I have been around since august 2021 if curious. And, here is a snapshot of where a player with about 200 dollars of assets is at. (I put about 300 dollars into the game, account value peaked at over 1,000 dollars, then has steadily fallen over time)
I tried to break even on seasons and gain glint/cards.
I recently saw my rewards go from 55,000 glint and a 55,000 season chest. So, 110,000 glint a season total in wild.
I joined modern now and rent 50-60 dec a day worth of cards like always. I will only receive about 20,000 total glint this season.
-but the bonus is that I did not have to rent any SPS.
-Soo, I saved having to convert SPS into 2,400 DEC a season.
I am working to find the breakeven point again of renting cards / SPS in order to gain Glint. I fear my Glint rewards will be much less than in the old system of wild.
I feel the Glint rewards in modern need to go up 50-100% to make up for the season pass debacle in wild.
Then my rental fees will go up by about 25-30 a day from this 0.1 - 1 dec rule.
So that will eat at how much I can rent each season.
Let's increase how much rating you gain from matches in modern to try and match players with silver league cards to players using silver league cards. People playing gold league summoners to a gold league rating.
Start by doubling the rating you gain then adjust from there each season/daily until each players cards somewhat match with the league they are in.
I mean silver league is layered with max level summoners every other battle in silver 2. Silver 1 you face max level cards in nearly every match. I don't even want to think about gold league in modern. I believe you would need 5+ max level summoners and teams to go with them at least... Then have months of experience playing those cards to even compete.
bronze league = level 2 summoners
silver league = level 4 summoners
gold league = level 6 summoners
diamond league = level 8 / max level summoners
champion league = top players in the game with way too many max level cards.
Please adjust how much rating is gained from battles in modern league.
I should not have to own/rent 2-3 max level summoners and teams just to compete for silver league rewards.
Take a random sample of like 10,000 battles in each league and adjust the gain in rating accordingly so that the average silver league player uses a level 4 summoner. and so on.
Do this on a daily/weekly/or per season basis.
Or do something as follows.
silver 3 = average level of summoner played = 2.5
silver 2 = average level of summoner played = 3
silver 1 = average level of summoner played = 4
gold 3 = average 4.5
gold 2 = average 5
gold 1 = average 6
diamond 3 = 6.5
diamond 2 = 7
diamond 1 = 8
If you are going to increase the cost of renting cards, then increase what we earn by playing them.
SPS rewards would probably have to be adjusted due to the fact that everyone would have much higher ratings.