Community Poll - Lower Unlock Costs for Soulbound Reward Cards
The SPS governance proposal system provides a good way to conduct a stake-weighted poll to see where the Splinterlands player community stands on certain topics. This proposal aims to collect stake-weighted feedback from the community that the Splinterlands team can take into account in its decisions regarding different aspects of the game.
For this poll, we are looking for feedback on the unlock costs for the Chaos Legion soulbound reward cards as described in this post from the Splinterlands team: https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/reward-cards-update
- Please upvote this proposal if you feel that the costs for unlocking the Chaos Legion soulbound reward cards should start at 5x the card's power-per-BCX, increasing 1x every month for 5 months to a max of 10x with all other aspects of unlocking staying the same as in the post.
- Please downvote this proposal if you would prefer that the team stick with the unlocking costs in the post.
Once again, please keep in mind that this is just a poll utilizing the SPS governance proposal system to get stake-weighted feedback from the Splinterlands player community to provide to the Splinterlands team. Nothing in this proposal or the results will be considered binding.
10x is too much
many cards can remain dead on accounts, they can't even be used as workers on the Lands
Cheaper is something, but still don't think that the whole system around the retiring the current soulbounds is a good idea. Even with "only" 5x, it will most likely drive new players away when the supply of very helpful cards is so reduced, if possible at all. It's not a bonus card that is really good like Lux, it's a whole set of cards.
I will not be able to complete my soulbound deck before the change, and probably won't be able to afford to buy to complete it. And I'm not a newbie, so I at least have some of them at a decent level.
I liked the idea of having to stake the cards for a long time, and then they unbind automatically. And even if that's not possible - there must be another option.
Also, why do the old cards have to retire? Can't we just have them in a seperate section in the Glint-Shop? One for Chaos rewards, one for rebellion rewards? That way, even new gamers can get the Chaos cards.
my vote in no for both and I cant vote up or down lol
You can vote on the proposal page in game. Just click on the SPS balance at the top right and go to the "proposals" tab.
I'm just gonna reference the things I wrote on this post:
SO those who have massive bags of sps and have voted against this proposal can u just give an explanation for your action? You people are sole reason for this sorry state of sps today. You people were enjoying free sps drops for an year and at that time no batted an eye for inflation. And now you want to restrict the average and new players to have an even game. Cut rewards there, remove rewards there. remove leagues. To hell with you all.
OMG, it was not the bots, it has been them whales all this time who have quietly driven this ecosystem to the trash playing their fucking monopoly, how did I not realized before.
Do not expect any logical explanations other than "the market will plummet more" (that is the best explanation they have to justify a stupid decision).
There are layers of reasons as to why this is a horrible, terrible, no good, bad idea.
50 DEC to 'unlock' a RF, Common card- at current prices is.... 3 cents. At those prices, there will be plenty of cards unlocked and available on the rental market. You drop that price down to $0.015 and you'll end up with:
And remember- this is all only relevant until CL rotates out of Modern. Once that happens, well, much of the relevance of these cards will be lost.
So you're comparing these cards to Rebellion cards but you even say yourself that they are going to rotate out of Modern soon. Of course they will be cheaper unless there's an absurd huge tax on them. Btw, there is no way we'll get a new set in about 4 months. We're at least 6 months away from a new set but probably close to a year. That doesn't change the argument though.
Why is flooding the market with reward cards bad? Imagine if the burn fee was 2x or even 1x (burn value would remain glint instead of DEC). Do you really think the market would be flooded the same way it is with the CL reward cards? Those were free to sell so even if the profit was very minimal on each one, it was always profit. For these you'd still need to burn some DEC when we know there aren't enough players to take them all. It would actually burn a lot more DEC if the fee was lower because many more cards would be unlocked and more would be sold actually helping the flywheel instead of hurting it.
You say a lower fee will cause many to lose money after unlocking their cards but it's much more likely that people will lose money unlocking their cards at 10x than at a lower fee. On top of that they risk losing more.
At the end of the day, it's not even about selling these cards. I don't care about that. I'd rather burn them for glint to get the new reward cards faster. The biggest problem is that if I want to complete my collection I will have to pay absurd prices for these cards. I have some cards that I have more than 2 max level copies and others that I haven't maxed out. I stopped buying draws and chests because I didn't want to spend a ton of Glint that I will need, to get a few cards that I need, while getting mostly useless repeats that I will never be able to sell for profit and burn for much less glint than they cost.
I'm missing max cards on 3 rares, 1 epic and 3 legendaries. If the unlock cost was up to 3x, I would certainly max them all. With 10x I'll ignore the 2 rares that I'm not very close. I'll unlock 2 copies on an alt of the rare I'm missing 2 bcx, just because I'm so close. That's still 400 DEC, for 2 copies of a rare. I can buy some CL legendaries for a bit more than that. I'm missing 5 copies of the life epic. I would like to get the Inspire but I don't think it's worth paying 5000 DEC to move them from my alt. As for the legendaries, I'm missing 1 bcx of Ferexian Hero. I'm not sure I want to spend 5000 DEC there either. I used the card often but the extra attack stat makes it worse against Forcefield. Another one is the Hulk which I never use so I don't care. The last one is Aves Sturgis which I use often and would love the get the Rust ability. However, I'm missing 4 copies. There is no way I'm paying 20k DEC for that.
If only we were given the ability to complete our collections without the RNG of getting repeats, I wouldn't be so frustrated with this unlock cost. Or if we could trade soulbound cards with each other (same bcx and rarity) with maybe a small fee. I've given up on selling any of my soulbound cards. I just wanted to complete my collection without huge RNG and without paying a huge tax.
Let me start off by saying: I 100% agree with every point you made.
The fact is, as you pointed out, the demand for 'unlocked' Reward cards is not fluid- in fact it will be highly static. Take an account with hundreds, or even thousands of BCX of SB Reward cards- their actual demand for unlocking those cards may only be, say, 3 Rare/1 Epic/3 Leg. With the cost being 10x, they may not unlock all of those cards but even if the cost dropped 90% (down to 1 DEC/CP)- they would never unlock more than those 7 cards.
I agree, there's no way we're actually going to get an new set in the next 4 months. My money would be on something closer to 14 months, TBH. Which is a shame.
With the new set, I believe SPL is in something of a "3 body problem".
I'm comparing them to Reb cards because those are the 'in print' cards. For the health of the economy, we don't want more cards on the market that undercut the value of those cards.
Dropping down the unlock fee will only add more cheap cards to the market, i dont see how that helps anyone. New players will get reb rewards cards for free whilst they are playing so its not like they wont be able to expand the collection and get more into the game.
Not if there is a requirement to burn a similar type card, that would make it so that there is zero card inflation instead of more cards getting in circulation with the ones that get unlocked now.
The market will keep on plummeting regardless of the artificial inflation on assets, it will not be fixed until we get new players.
The 10x Cost which increases over time will kill the game even more.
I get that whales like it as they can easily afford them and the supply will stay low so they are more likely to keep their value. Value-extracting bots also like it because they can just keep them Soulbound and continue extracting value with just them as Summoners are included. However, everyone else gets screwed over along with the economy.
Many existing players who haven't gotten the set to where they wanted will be unable to complete it as the cost compared to the rewards just makes no sense whatsoever. They will further grow frustrated with the game driving them away. For new players it will be even worse as they will have no way to realistically ever get these cards while being up against older players who all can use them still in the soulbound state.
The game will be in a very unbalanced state where not only a couple specific cards but and entire set has an extreme low print rate while other cards have hundreds of thousands copies in circulation.
What I would do is the following:
What this would do:
I have been talking about this proposal a lot on discord, but none seems to read it, I see this is no brainer, it is a shame that some whales want to keep control of the market and don't care about the future of the game, and CEO does not seem to care either as he hasn't even got in touch with their average player/spender, seems like he would listen only an elite.
at this point i only want to see this game smash to the wall to have a laugh in the face to whales and ceo
I want 3-5x with no burn value for DEC.
what a farce... by now everyone knows that the people who dictate everything in the back room have enough vote power on their own to block any proposal....
I mean, things like this will never pass unless we get a significant number of new players. And we will never get a significant number of new players if things like this will never pass. A real double-edged sword.
I think the current 10X is simply too expensive, such that very few cards will be unlocked, very little dec will be burned, and players will mostly find themselves in one of two positions:
Reasons I can see people like the 10x multiplier:
However I think that in a tradeable card game, players want to be able to swap and trade cards around to complete their sets and it's just very expensive to do so at 10x - especially for players that collect and play gold foil brawls, where RNG has such a signficant effect on the ability to get specific cards.
I still believe that a similar effect could be achieved at a lower multiplier, like 3-4x, which would still prevent a flood of cards unlocked (since they will be more expensive than any other cards from the same CL set) while not being unobtainable for most players.
10x is already too cheap.
I understand that people want everything cheaper, as any cost cuts into their profit margins, but flooding the market with cheap Reward cards undercuts the original purpose of making Reward cards Soulbound in the first place.
Please explain how is 10x too cheap. These are CL cards and they are moving out of modern as soon as the core set also moves out. The core set has many cards being sold at burn value. Even legendary summoners are being sold for less than 5000 DEC. So, why would anyone in their right mind buy one of these cards over the core set, before maxing it? How about Rebellion? When several legendaries cost about $3 per BCX, why would anyone buy these cards that will rotate out of modern much sooner for similar prices of these cards that will stay longer and less people have them?
Setting artificial prices has never worked.
This game is going to die if it costs $125 to unlock a 1BCX gold foil reward card. That is fkin crazy....
I like the current soulbound format, but I think the unbind fee needs to be tweaked just a bit. Start unbind fee at 8x and go up to 20x over 12 months and then let the cards be unlockable in perpetuity at 20x without making them locked forever.
Very nice. The whales are voting down to guarantee no other players can ever attain these cards max level by keeping the cost to do so unattainably high for all other players. They'll give other reasons, but the history of actions make the intentions clear. It truly seems like no one with any meaningful say has the best interest of the game nor the playerbase at large in mind.
At least in a few years it won't matter that the whales are the only ones with these cards, once the game is virtually or literally dead due to the decisions of these last 3 years. And much more of the same moving forward clearly.
If the number of cards is the real problem, why not use a "sacrifice" system ?
By burning (and giving up the DEC burn rewards) some cards, we accumulate points and we can use these points for unlocking soulbound cards.
Similar to lands PP, older cards can be burnt for more unlocking points.
The result is that mostly "weak" and unusable cards will be burnt, reducing the number of useless cards on the market and paradoxically giving them more collection value since only a few will remain available.
This is even better than using DEC to unlock since it will encourage players to buy and burn the cheapest cards, cleaning up the market and giving more value to the remaining cards.
I honestly think it could be a great occasion for the game to get rid of useless cards by burning them in exchange for unlocking cards.
Only few or the elite can only unbind the cards, This forever goal of the team to make DEC at peg will never happen. Lets just focus on our goal to set SPS to 0.05 cents to activate the flywheel.
Why not just make burning mechanism for SPS to be converted to DEC-C. In the conversion, the minimum price of SPS is 0.05 (even if the real price is way below that). And the only purpose of DEC-C is to be used in unbinding cards. Will that be more reachable rather than insisting that DEC burn.
BURN SPS FOR DEC-C
DEC-C will ONLY be used to unbound cards.(NO OTHER UTILITY)
CONVERSION RATE (Minimum value to activate flywheel $0.05)
1SPS * $0.05 * 975 = 48.75 DEC-C
1 SPS = 48.75 DEC-C
With this, we can be able to burn more SPS and activate the flywheel rather than insisting on that DEC to maintain its PEG value and expect SPS to rise.
FWIW, I would be okay with them always being soulbound. I just wish there was a better way to get the specific ones we need, especially later in the run. This unlocking thing is not a realistic way to round out a collection. Not for me, anyway. I would never pay that much for a reward card. Especially since the only ones I still need are legendaries.
I just wish there was a better way to get the specific ones we need, especially later in the run.haha exactly!
This 100%. I'm missing 3 max rares, 1 max epic and 3 max legends. 2 of the rares I'll ignore because I don't play them anyway. I'll move 2 copies of the one I'm 2 bcx away from an alt. I'm missing 5 copies of the life epic. I don't think the inspire is worth 5000 DEC. I would like to max Ferexian Hero and I'm only missing 1 copy. However, I won't pay 5000 DEC for that because level 3 is better against Forcefield. I won't pay that much for something that isn't always better and the card works very well at level 3. I also don't have a max Hulk but I'll never play it anyway. Aves Sturgis is the biggest miss. I'm missing 4 copies but I won't pay 20k DEC to move them from my alt. The Rust is not worth that much money. I also didn't want to keep spending Glint to get mostly repeats while trying to finish these. There should have been a way to get these without RNG and without a huge cost (of both Glint or DEC).
The price is way too high for reward cards. It's cheaper to buy new cards off the market and there should be no time limit on unlocking. If i want to pay the fee in two years I should still be able to.
Web3 is meant to mean ownership of assets. A fair price IMO would be about 10% of suggested. More people would actually unlock burning more DEC and people won't get pissed off from being screwed yet again and leave. Myself included. If this passes as proposed I will be very pissed off with the the team and the game for constantly shooting themselves in the foot and driving away the few remaining players.
The game can be resurrected but not like this and not by screwing the players still here who have been committed for years.
Thank you for participating in SPS DAO Governance @clayboyn!
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: 2024-08-12 03:14 UTC
Keep raising the unlock soulbound is the funniest thing, especially when Splinterland keeps talking about attracting new players
That's pearls before swine. Nice try.
I can still understand unlock costs that are charged due to fees. But manipulating the market price and setting an end date is nothing more than a ransom attack. Rediculus. Splinterland is doomed if it continues down this path.
!invest_vote