If You Are Selling Right Now, Why? -Splinterlands

I'm still seeing a lot of people saying that bots left because they could no longer exploit the system.

It's causing many of us to panic sell because we are seeing Splinterlands crash without the bots who, if you believe the above statement, are never coming back.

But I think that idea is a fundamental misunderstanding of what's really going on.

Bots didn't leave because they were against contributing to the economy. The bots are gone because they are not advanced enough to rent targeted cards.

Who cares right? They're gone and clearly Splinterlands is going to collapse without them. Just look at the rental market.

The distinction matters though. Because one means they aren't coming back and the other means they are just temporarily missing and will come back soon as contributors.

As I posted yesterday, the rental market is no longer in that bad of shape. It was for a few days but now what's happening is that its splitting into two markets.

One is the cheap CP market. This is the one that until last week was becoming the only way to make a respectable profit in the rental market. This one is not doing so hot right now and we're seeing that reflected in the prices of those cheap CP cards. This is also the only market that many of you know and the one that just last week I was being told would keep winning when I was saying I thought we were about to transition back to playable cards.

The other one is the playable cards market. This one also took a hit in the first few days but its back stronger than its been since the first few months of the rental market. In fact, yesterday I wrote a post about being just 15% below in my rentals where I would be by this point in the season but within a few hours I was 20% above!

Today its come back down a little but I'm still pretty much even with where I'd normally be right now in terms of daily DEC. And its due entirely to cards that just last week were barely making me anything. Cards that people who went all in on the CP strategy while that was working, don't have to save them so it all looks like armegeddon out there. It's not but to understand why its not, we need to understand what is actually going on with these bots.

So what's going on with the bots?

The bulk of the bots worked like this:

They started a game, they looked at the ruleset and the available mana. They went to a database of millions of recent games and they looked for games that matched the current parameters. Then they checkd which teams won the most times, compared that to what they had available to them, and they played their best team

It didn't matter if the cards they played were starter cards, gold cards, what their ECR was, how many times they won and lost. All they cared about was getting 5 wins per day to get the quest done.

Most of those bots were in bronze where there weren't even dec rewards so it absolutely didn't matter what cards they played because there was no bonus per win and you got one chest at the end of the day whether you played your ECR to nothing or you got 5 wins in a row.

If they were in bronze III, they didn't have to rent/own a single card ebcause there was 0 CP requirement to be there. They just farmed that one chest and went back to sleep because that was really all they were capable of doing. That was probably 100k bots. They owned a spellbook, paid $0.50 per season to a bot service, they collected anything above that as profit.

But who wants no dec and 1 chest when those starter cards are good enough to win your daily quests as high as silver 1 if you didn't care how long it took. And they didn't, because they're bots!

While they weren't advanced enough to rent specific cards, Peakmonsters has a neat CP bidding feature. Peakmonsters looks for the cheapest CP within the bot accounts bidding range and rents it for them. This would allow the bots to spend a little but move up to a place where they'd get more chests. If they went up to bronze 1 or higher they would even get a little bit of DEC for winning.

This is why cheap CP of any kind was golden and it seemed like no matter how much gotput on the rental market, demand never really waned.

Think about it. If you had a bot in bronze 3, you paid that $0.50 per season to the company running the bot but ultimately you got nothing for your wins, you got one chest per day that was most likely a potion, a couple credits, or a 1 cent card, and at the end of the season you got 5 chests. You likely barely made back your 50 cents.

The profit potential was very low. Now if you could rent a little CP and push up to a higher league, you potentially got a small amount of dec per win and you got many more chests per day and per season. If you got to silver you had a better shot of getting a monster in the chest. And that meant a better chance to hit more jackpots.

You were still paying the .50 cents for using the bot no matter how much you won so winning more if you could move up cheaply enough was a better deal. It had to be cheap though. And what was considered cheap enough cut off at a certain place where they could no longer expect to be profitable. Running bots is all about math after all.

As the CP came available on the rental market, bots in need would rent it through peakmonsters and move up. The amount of bots who could move up depended on how much cheap CP was made available on the market and there was not close to enough for all the bots.

It got to the point where they actually weren't even making any money anymore because they'd bid the CP up too high with so many bots trying to move up. They were willing to take a small loss to bet on the occasional jackpot but even then, most were stuck in lower leagues than they wanted to be in.

Cheap CP became a whole industry where if you were paying attention you realized you could buy the cheapest rewards cards, max them out, and rent them for 100% + APR returns to insatiable bots. Meanwhile the rest of the rental market was making under 10%.

Because there were so many of those cards coming from chests daily and being dropped on the market, the price of those cards never went up even though rental business owners were competing for them. We'd just buy the floor and wait for a 1000 more venari-whatever-the-one-cent-card to be found in chests and hit the market to drop the floor again.

These bots renting CP or just sitting in bronze waiting for affordable CP made up 2/3 of the daily active player base. We know that now, because we just lost 2/3 of our player base. And really, it's probably more than that since many of those bots are still running.

Those bots didn't have the tools to rent a bunch of cards in a targeted way. Some tried to use the rent a set features in peakmonsters but the problem with that is if one card suddenly becomes not available for the price you wanted, you get none of the cards.

Rentals also get canceled from time to time especially toward the end of the season. Keeping up with which cards you have and which ones you need to replace when you have hundreds of accounts is next to impossible. Plus it can get very expensive in terms of hive power.

Then what cards your bot plays is completely out of your control. They only know to play the card they have access to that fits the best winning strategy. If that's a starter card, which they always have access to, they are going to play it.

Fast forward to the new rewards scheme. Those bots had no philosophical issue renting cards or they wouldn't have rented CP season after season.

But that bot has no ability to rent the cards it needs to play a winning game since it only determines what winning cards are when it is faced with a specific game scenario. You can't just ask it which cards out of all the cards it should have for all scenarios and then set it free to rent those cards and make sure it always has them on hand.

Here's a quick aside because I just noticed this when managing my rentals and it illustrates what's going on perfectly as bots try to navigate the rental market to come back online:

Check out these images below. In case you can't read the small print, this is level 1 fire elementals and Mantoids going for 30-50 dec.

These bots are trying to build winning decks targeting certain cards and they've bid two basic cards up above what you can get most top rated card in the game for. These are abundant cards that usually go for .1 dec. They must have rented hundreds of them. These are the experiments bot owners are currently doing though to figure out how to come back profitably.

Oh, if you're getting big ideas of buying out the supply of these cards, this will be fixed. The opportunity will be over in the next few hours so don't do that.

Quick aside done.

Why not rent a few targeted cards to win more?

If they rent a few targeted cards to try to win more, the bot would still play mostly the starter cards which would mean rewards penalties. Plus it would need to be manually done and checked on often to be sure they got the cards they needed at the price they needed and nothing was canceled and they are playing those cards enough to get a few focus points and get a chest or two.

One solution could be to buy every bot a full deck of CL cards but there would still be all the untamed cards sitting there the bot could default to and some of those cards are expensive to buy. Plus, if they just played with CL, the win rate would suck even in bronze so again, no rewards.

Also, buying a whole deck of even CL cards thousands of times isn't cheap and as more bots did it, the prices would soar.

Bascally a bot has to have either better tools available to it than most currently have, or they need someone to manually rent their cards each day, or they need to own a diverse full deck which would cost a few hundreds bucks per bot account, assuming the other bots didn't get the same idea. And if they did get the same idea, goodbye win rate. You need an advantage if you want the good rewards.

So now what?

The thing about these issues is that they are all fixable with time and necessity. Many of the bot owners who've coded their own bots already have many of these capabilities. Many of these bots have also already figured out some bandaid approaches while they search for better ways.

The major services don't yet seem to have it down though so only those who are running bots through them and are willing to manage their accounts are still going. That's a lot of bots we are waiting for still to either find solutions or sell the accounts to more capable machines.

But it is slowly happening and that's why my rentals are all the way back to where they were last season at this time even though most of my cards are sitting dormant and many of my best cards are being played by me instead of rented out.

Splinterlands is more profitable now

Splinterlands is not only more profitable to the players right now but to the bots who are still running too. The fact is, its now extremely profitable to figure these problems out so they can take advantage of the new rewards.

Plus, if you read between the lines into what the people are asking the devs for in these AMA, one of the big requests is, "Can you do something to default hide the starter cards from the selection process?"

The devs are calling these quality of life changes but I'd have to imagine its mainly bot owners asking fro this? The starter cards are already marked in the card selection process so you're in no danger of selecting them in the interface by mistake. What's actually going on is got builders are asking the devs to include something so their bots can check and see if its a started card and ignore card if it is.

This should be coming very soon and that should make it easier for bot owners to figure out how to code for starter cards.

What happens when they all figure it out, start back up, and suddenly we get 250k accounts back that all start renting?

Well, a number of interesting things.

First, a lot of calculations about profitability.

Just like before when all those bots were just sitting in bronze trying to get enough cheap CP to get themselves up through the ranks, they will again need CP but also playable cards this time.

They will be willing to pay a certain amount for CP and a certain amount for different cards based on their win percentage and how much a win is worth. With the new rewards, the profit margin is going to be much higher to start out with than it used to be but they are going to need that since the cards to play with won't be cheap.

We are already seeing strong player cards rental prices soar.

At first, they will be more limited in what they spend because daily prices on cards will be very unpredictable as people and bots figure out new combinations to combat a wider variety of play. If you're in bronze or silver, you're no longer going to be playing against bots who play the same combinations of CL cards each round because those cards won't win enough and if everyone rented the same cards, the prices would quickly become unaffordable.

(Hint: some cards are about to become unaffordable)

But as the CP demand started coming back and other cards started becoming scarce and profitable to play and rent out, what should happen next is a general lifting of all card prices and even dec if they haven't capped it off with SPS yet. This means the game will become more profitable to play as the rewards are all worth more.

And this is where the cycle begins. The more valuable the rewards, the more people and bots are willing to pay for the tools to gain those rewards. One goes up, the other goes up. But also, more people start coming into Splinterlands because people flock to where there's money being made.

Or, we could call this cycle a return to last summer but on steroids since this time, there will be an actual shortage of cards quite possibly instead of just a bunch of misallocated assets.

I the height of the last ramp up when everything was incredibly profitable and people expected assets to keep increasing, the big cards like Llama, Yodin, and Kron would rent for as much as 500 dec per day and back then that was $5 in dec. I asked people who rented for those prices about it and they said those cards won often enough and the rewards for winning were so great, that it was very profitable to rent those cards at that price. I know I certainly profited :)

So, I'll go back to the title of this post. If you are selling right now, why?

And I know the answer. Its because Splinterlands has done nothing but go down for 8 months and this was supposed to bring it to prosperity again and it it crashed everything. It's a scary time. But its always darkest before the dawn and at this point if you're watching, you'll see the sun is already coming back up. It's about to be a nice, long, and profitable day for all of us.

Hang in there.

Not financial advice. I'm a bot.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta