Splinterlands Town Hall Minutes April 25 2022

Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Summary for April 25, 2022

*Please note: I cover as much as I can of the summary as a record of the conversation. I do not provide my opinion but actual conversation that occurs during the Town Hall/AMA. This summary will have questions provided from the Discord and the answers given by the various Splinterlands' team will be typed by me. Please forgive any typos or errors; some may be from Discord or some may be my own.

Founders Begin the Town Hall (formerly AMA)
Today's Town Hall included: @aggroed, WeirdBeard, Doogie and some guests (Nate couldn't make it today and Chatter (Liam) will appear at the end)

If you wish to contact the team, here's some of the personnel:

Aggroed @aggroed Founder and (C.E.O)
Matt @yabapmatt Founder and (C.P.O.)
Hardpoint @hardpoint (C.T.O.) (Chief Technical Officer)
KBux @kbux (VP of Engineering)
Nate @nateaguila (Creative Director)
Cryptomancer @cryptomancer (Splinterlands Developer)
Chatter (Director of Marketing)
Homestead @homesteadhacker (Business Analyst)

Introduction from Aggroed

• Weird Beard Introduction
  • Esports and Competition, Tournaments, Etc.
• Doogie
  • VP of Projects in Splinterlands
  • My job is to never be noticed. If I'm doing my job right you have a great experience playing the game.

Heads Up on Competitive Aspect of What We're Doing in Splinterlands

• WeirdBeard: There's a whole bunch of announcments we can't talk about coming next month. We changed all the tournament icons. They look like League of Legend and you should be able to tell if it's Bronze, Silver, etc. The biggest thing we're doing is how to run more KYC tournaments for people that don't want to compete against alts, bots, etc.
• More and more people are playing the tournaments.
• The link of time is shrinking between people who first join the game and when they click that first tournament.
• Looking forward to new tournament styles. The discussions are about prize pools and how to we increase the overall prize pool for tournaments. What are ways we can start bringing in more net dollars for the tournaments.
• Sponsors for Tournaments: They know mainstream gamers have a distaste to NFTs, but that's because they haven't seen how NFTs work in a game. So they are interested in what to do with them. What's the competitive aspect. Getting these companies to understand that it's real competition and the games develop. Having that conversation misses 90% of the bull about NFTs and gets the conversation about the competition and having that competitive scene for players.
• Education is important in getting them to understand how this all works.
  • People ask "Can you make an influencer card?" No, we don't just want that. We want to build the grassroots tournament scene. Doing a $100,000 tournament one time is dope, but we need to offer more tournaments not just one.
  • How do we take this to stop seeing it as "fancy new toy" but let's do the ground work to see what you would have in Apex, Call of Duty. We want this sustainable. We need to keep in mind we're making tournaments for all levels.

Guild Brawls Update

• What are the spiritual priorities you have in the group for the guilds?
  • We don't have an in-game communication system at this time. Guilds are one of the strongest touch points of the community. You see people start a guild and you see communication occurring. It's a strong way to create subcommunities. What can we do to get more people involved outside of playing ranked on their own. So it's that social aspect. And we want to make people want to play and compete and the economic condition isn't on your mind. It's like buying a corvette. You don't want to think about the price, you just want to buy it. Whatever I've got to do, I want to be involved because my friends are there. So if you're friends are there, you come in. If you're having a good time with your friends, getting nitpicky about the other stuff seems to fall to the waste side.
• The real aspect then here with Guild Brawls is building up those subcommunities and getting friends in the game.
• The overall thing we're doing here is, the world is expanding so everything is "and then". You don't just do a new thing and then move away from it. You BUILD upon the tournaments you already have. This is all based upon rank and touch points but it's very much a solo grind but the moment you enter tournaments you can trash talk and have that interaction. In guilds and brawls I want to be able to put bounties on certain guilds. I want to put 1 million DEC on those guys because if you beat them I want to get something for it!

Sicarius Introduction - On Rapid Development Dev Team

• Sicarius has been with Splinterlands for a year. Seeing a lot of cool new people. Aggroed found me on Discord or Hive and I'm so glad you did. It's been a blast. I help with the support team. At first a lot of what I worked on was creating buttons for support to go and click on those things for users. Hopefully it got noticed that the time from opening a ticket to when it closed has gotten drastically better. Which is awesome. It makes for a better user experience.
• So now I still do some of that stuff and I've helped get the new engineers onboard. Now I'm on a dev team that is sort of the catch all stuff, sometimes it's great and sometimes it's not as great.
• Tournaments are more isolated the some of the other systems but I think it introduces a lot of unique issues. It's an entirely different story so there's a lot of things that go on behind the scenes to make that work.
• One of the biggest things we've been trying to tackle as a development team lately is how do we get our players to invest more of their time or what kind of content can we put out there or what kind of game changes can we put out there that will let users come play it more. What kind of changes can we make to the game so that people will want to play all day long? We talked about League of Legends and what aspect of that game keeps me coming back to it? That's one of the challenges that the dev team has been facing and we've got some changes coming up and some announcements. A lot of that has to do with the ranked reward changes.
• Rumors are guild brawl changes-- and that's high on the priority list.
• Blizzard chat -- as Splinterlands branches from one game to more games, I want to make sure who I'm talking to is who I think it is, so all of this comes back to the Hive blockchain or whatever blockchain we're talking on. So is that going to be the radar?
  • That is. There's currently no good way to chat directly with people and so that's on the radar. Some of the issues we're trying to tackle as well is the scaling. Unfortunately that has to take our priority sometimes because at the end of the day a game with a chat system is no good if the game doesn't work.
• A lot of projects we didn't have that many servers and we had to create these new servers almost in a panic as the numbers got bigger and bigger. We have a whole info structure team that has to keep track of all of these server instances. The game might be out 10 or 20 minutes and that's not because we can flip a switch.

Farpetrad Introduction (Neil)

• Rapid Development Team (five team members)
• The ranked reward development has been a real focus.
• I've been working on the back end of the game mainly.
• I added accessibility for the team selection so that players who have to use a screen reader can play the game now. Having that accessibility is important to the game. It's an awesome thing to have because it opens the game to so many more people and gives better opportunity.
• So I've been working on Ranked Rewards but now working on API documentation for our 3rd party developers. It's just starting and making sure requests can be sent. This documentation will really help with the 3rd party developers.

Code and General Discussion of Overall Coding for Land with Sicarius (Software Engineer)

• The code has been updated, more modernized, and the whole game is written without frameworks and express is the only framework we use and honestly it's genius. There are things that Matt has done and I've never seen code this cool. He's a wizard.

• For land, the code is older, so we have got to improve that codebase and reinvent this code, not from scratch, but we have to modernize it to make sure it's up to the standard of today. Some of that is about breaking it up into servers, modernizing the code, scales well and functions and other people that are not Matt that know how to integrate it.

• I witnessed this with STEEM a lot that they would say we're going to go do this but then you realized that there are a lot of background areas that must be accomplished in order to get this functioning in a way to handle this many components, which means you've got to make the market more efficient.

• The code is exciting.

Wrathed (John) Introduction

• Been here for 3 weeks and I'm a product owner

• What's a product owner? And how did you get this job?

  • The ultimate goal is to maximize the value of the product. So you're blending the business world and the customer. You're bringing it altogether. Managing the backlog of work that the devs have with what the customer is asking for. Product owner is that middle ground between all roles.
  • I was a product manager and crypto gaming combines my passions of crypto and gaming.

• We have 4 product teams right now and 10 more dev teams. Where does the prioritization come from?

  • Technically I'm on all the product teams along with Homestead. I take a step back and see which is going to drive the most value for the overall product.
  • There's an art to it all, what is more important to the game, you have to weigh whether it's going to impact player experience, investor experience especially in the crypto market, because there are NFT collectors, there are players in the game and there's SPS investors. There's no real way to just say "it's this" so you come together as a team.

• Aggroed: What's going to get the highest value for the player with the least amount of time? My main thought is "here's something cool and there's something cool". Which of these cool things can I do faster and get it out quickly and functioning. I will prioritize that we get the fastest job done first (He used an example of getting 10 million dollars on a project but it would take 1 year versus 1 million dollars that can be done in a month).

• Weighing that entire ecosystem is what you want to do.

• Is there something you're working on that you're most excited about?

  • Ranked rewards and tech modernization
  • Modern and Wild coming after that ranked rewards.

• Ranked Rewards will be sometime next month, then modern and wild will come. Tech modernization is nearly done though that depends on modern and wild.

• Aggroed's favorite phrase: "Ninety percent of directing is casting." Let the smart guys in the room do it.

Where are some of the priorities and hurdles? -Discussion with Doogie

• Introduction: Andrew (Doogie) VP Project manager
  • My focus is to make sure we're delivering products on time with the right features at the right time and making sure we're serving the community.
  • I come from a very different world. Coming from mission planning, like running the environment, coming up with solutions to world problems. I was airforce and we had to be ready to go anywhere in the world within X number of hours. My job was to herd all the cats. Our teams here are based here on people and we've held that true to our company's value so each team delivers and works on something so when it comes down to a feature set or something we want to see us as a game company releasing to the community it's about bringing everyone in and saying what are the conflicts of us doing this here and will that have a domino effect on the other teams.
• Our devs and the people that we have are pretty brilliant.
• We will have an updated roadmap Mid-May
• Working with Chiclet on 360 data

SPS Validator Nodes

• Since Splinterlands is going to run its own set of validators as a Hive sidechain, I'm wondering why the team initially decided to build on Steem (instead of Eos or Tron perhaps) and what are your views on other chains that other crypto games are using today (Polygon, IMX, BSC, Avalanche)? Would Splinterlands node architecture allow for compatibility with other layer 1 blockchains or is it tailor made for Hive (let's say SPS holders vote to become a Solana side chain)?

  • It's not quite true (Hive sidechain). So we look at this sort of like store fronts, as Splinterlands expands we can move across chains.
  • The platforms weren't very sophisticated when we started this game. We didn't want to build on Ethereum bc of the gas. EOS didn't exist yet. There's a lot of good stuff on Hive blockchain.
  • I'm a heretic. I don't think they can scale and even if they can scale it won't be enough and it's really hard to fit all of human ingenuity on one server. Ultimately I'm agnostic. I'm not indefinitely with Hive and as long as it makes sense we'll be here. We want what's in the best interest of the gamers. We want to make it scalable for millions of transactions.

• Will licenses will need to be physically HELD in the account running the node in order to receive rewards, or will one be able to DELEGATE the license to an account running an active node, while maintaining possession of the license (ie like delegating cards)?

  • I think we'll have delegation.

• Will licenses be trade-able from Day 1 or will we need to wait for Q4 / full release?

  • You'll need to wait for the non-card market and we'll have to have these NFTs work there

Ranked Rewards

• Is there an exact date ranked rewards changes will go live?
  • May I believe
    

Bots/Account types

• We derived from Gold II Battle log: there are around 60% of daily active accounts (from 400k) are either bots or card rental accounts, which means 240K accounts are contributing very minimum to the ecosystem besides taking out. What ratio number does Spl team has on daily active bots/rental accounts? What do you think/expect that the new rewards system will drive the ratio to? And what is the expected ratio for the sake of ecosystem healthy from Spl team?
  • I'm not certain that just because they're bots.... bot accounts that grow and buy cards are not a bad thing. If we want to build a decentralized game it shouldn't matter if there are bots or not. You can't have a decentralized game and centralized control. I don't know the current ratio in our brain that's higher than I thought. You're renting cards still though so that's providing a reason to go get all these cards. I have no idea what that new reward system will drive that ratio to but our goal is to get human players to keep engaging in the game. That's the high priority with us.
  • WeirdBeard says from the tournament side that one of the big things to understand there's times and places that bots don't have an approach there because they are anti- competitive. As far as tournaments and what we're doing for the outreach. KYC tournaments are super important to us. We don't want new players to enter a tournament and say "oh it's not humans". It's really complicated but there's small steps being taken because we're not saying "No bots".

Suggestions/Requests

• I remember in the past there was talk of a more developed communication system directly on Splinterlands itself, I'm thinking private groups, 1 on 1 messages, the whole works. I'm curious the timeline on this, I think it would be in everyone's best interest to decentralize communication, bring it closer to home. Why are we still relying on discord? As great and handy as it is, I don't trust it, compared to what could be implemented.
  • Totally on board with this. I don't think I'll get rid of discord but yes we should have a complete in-game communication system. So Wrathed, if you can make that happen by next week, that would be GREAT!
  • Sicarius jumped in to say as a company we're not really in the business of making a communication system is. As awesome as it would be, Discord is good at what it was created for and as much as we'd like to add all these things, does it really make sense to make this big fleshed out Discord system to send gifs to a friends.
  • Aggroed will still like something though, an internal way that players can communicate across the game. I still believe this is an important part of the game. We created Bee Chat for people to use to chat. We design around economy, game play and community. Honestly we need this to be highlighted somewhere. We need to focus on each area. I have a general strategy but I don't have the direct answer because it involves so much. If we are covering these areas though we will get the best and most beautiful parts of this project done.

• Will you make it such that if someone cancels a rent, they are able to undo the cancel, if that red timer didn't run out?
  • I don't know. If there's enough people that want it, that's for splinterlands feedback.
• For Guild Brawls, is it possible to limit the CP range for each type of fray?
  • WeirdBeard will think through that.

• Since the daily quests will be updated with major changes, is it possible to change the purpose of the daily quest potion and make it a good potion that can improve the efficiency of earning without affecting the balance? For example, reducing the chance of opening DEC or potion in a treasure chest, thereby increasing the chance of opening reward card...etc
  • What we want are people buying your cards and what we want are people buying less random potions from us. It is better to pay the market than pay us directly. Your question is hey why not buy potions from you guys? And I'm saying, Hey what about buying cards that gets you more rewards?
• Since the validators are expected to go live in Q4, would you consider giving rewards to nodes/licenses that participate in the testnet? Perhaps just give voucher rewards for participating in the testnet, and add SPS rewards when it goes live?
  • I think things like that are being thought through. I don't have an answer for that now.

• Why should 100 people running hundreds and thousands of robots ruin the game for everyone else? There should be a limit of 10. If that is not enough revenue they can invest else where. This is supposed to be a fun game with rewards. Some are treating it as a liquidity pool for themselves. People that invest in the game are being screwed. Also you can see some guilds want to take over the game itself. Just some observations. I want the game and economy to succeed. Cheers and have a great day.
  • Well I don't believe in the premise. You are handicapping whales who are choosing to put money into the game. And why should we limit you? And more importantly, who's going to enforce that? I think a little bit of this question doesn't understand blockchain in general. We allow bots to function but do everything we can to make sure they don't have advantages but we want this to be a decentralized game. We hope you'll see we're making choices that will make this sustainable over time. We think it can be an amplifier and that's probably in the best interest of players.

• It would be nice if a brief explanation was posted on how to run a validator node of Splinterlands. Surely there are many interested Splinterlands fans who would like to support the decentralization of the project and at the same time expand their Splinterlands portfolio by acquiring a license, but are not technical professionals.

  • Yeah I can't say this is gonna be the easiest thing in the world to run but we're trying to keep it simple stupid (K.I.S.S.) Hopefully it's not that bad and even if you have limited skills you should be able to follow along, but they're not out yet. We will tell you how to do it it's just not out yet.

• Have you ever considered giving staked SPS some benefits in-game? For example, giving power to a player according to the SPS that player has staked. Like 10.000 staked SPS equals 100k power or something similar.

  • Yeah we've thought about stuff like that but I'm not a big fan because it takes away power from the players. We're just not there yet and that still needs to be decided on.

• Is there any solution for a newbie to make money from the game?
  renting cards at the start of the season for 1-2 days, sitting idle midseason and renting a few cards again at the end of the season seems to be the meta for earning rewards now. 1.: is this intended? 2.: if not, what is the teams approach to change this?
  • Buy as many assets as you can now.

• Suggestion: losing x amount of ranking points for every day of low power might be a good thing? ppl could still do the same, but at least they would have to climb the ladder again making it less profitable to do with x accounts.
  • These things are sort of the same lines with rank rewards.

• Given that starter cards remove the reward-earning potential, curious if yall have considered offering complete rookies the chance to play with leveled up starter cards? expanding the starter card roster? the abilities unlocked take the fun factor to a whole 'nother level - seems like an easy way to toss newbies some longer-term bait to get their teeth sunk into the game
  • I would say that's a 3rd party thing to do. That's great. We don't want to do it because we don't want to be printing those low level cards all the time. It's card inflation so that's why we don't want to do stuff like that. That's a great idea if some entrepreneur wants to do it.

Rapid Fire Questions

• QUESTION: Are there currently any teams/devs that focus on smaller QOL improvements or does everyone focus on the big projects right now?

  • The guys on the call right now are the ones doing the more quality of life.
    Ie I'm dying for a better in game notification to let you know when action is needed for brawls and tourneys etc. Submitted it to the feedback site over 5 months ago lol... but that sort of feels like a black hole.
    Things like a countdown timer to maintenance would be GOLDEN... little QOL improvements like these would have a big impact... is there any focus on these things at the moment or are all resources directed elsewhere (major projects)?
  • It's a Jenga tower.. putting in one thing can affect everything else so no project is small.
  • We'll keep getting faster and faster.
  • We just changed a bunch of notification UI so that should help you all. They are being actively worked on, some are done, those quality of life updates are coming.

• QUESTION: Twitter accepted Elon’s buy offer. What is your take?

  • I'm all for free speech and blockchain is really the best way to do it then also support those who support free speech. The current owners do not advocate free speech. I'd rather live in dangerous liberty than a nice protected speech bubble.

• Question: When will the problem of market bots that buy cards in the same block they were listed be solved?

  • I don't know when.
  • That's a tough issue. If we limit someone's ability to buy something, are we moving from decentralization? We are coming up with some solutions though.

• Question: Can you give more details about the next promo card (athlete one)? Could you tell us at least the sport that he/she plays?

  • No.

• Question: Can you tell us more about the plans about resurrecting the app?

  • We hired a full group. The guys are working on it and hopefully more coming.

• Question: Its now been at least 6 months and its been brought up here several times. When will you buff Djinn Renova?

  • Let's prioritize that.

• Question : you guys keep saying you would like players to play the game for fun or for hours a day this is hard with ecr model as you are just worse of for playing more any ideas how you plan to approach this because no one plays practice

  • I see us changing the rank reward system.

• Credit goes to Tyler, Chris, and Alfredo - our three creative coordinators. I can't go into too much detail and won't (as, there's plenty of magic to be added with lore and nate's storytelling ability)... but....this is the character art of one of the characters we (company-wise) are considering for proposal as one of the new rewards cards 🙂 (honestly i don't think aggy has seen it yet either)....dropping it live here for everyone here at the same time.

• QUESTION: would you ever consider post-poning Rebellion by 6-12 months?

  • We want to make sure it's ready to go in October but that doesn't mean we'll sell it in October.

• Question: do yall have a 3rd party place to look at safe bots for splinterlands?
  -We practice safe botting. Maybe someone has a link.

• QUESTION: As most of the road map is describing the larger improvements coming over the next year, could we think about something similar that is more centered around the smaller things people really want to see soon, more related to gameplay?
  There is only 1 item on the Feedback list in the "planned" status.

  • No we've put a bunch more in. I don't know how much feedback is updated but I'll check into that.
  • On the tournament side big announcements coming.

• Question: I think that SPL has a problem with moving the deadlines and my feeling is that the community is stressed about that. Can we improve communication about when new features are coming, or if you don/t know when the feature is coming maybe it is better to say "soon" than "by the end of the next month"

  • We put out the first road map and a vote on next Thursday so on May 5th I'll have a vote and by the 12th i'll have some version out to the community. We'll keep putting that out for you.

• Question: Can we do a season and lifetime DEC/rewards leaderboard

  • Great idea!

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Here's the Link to the YouTube video from Splinterlands' Official YouTube Channel if you want to see the Town Hall as well for a reference.

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If you enjoyed my post and want to try Splinterlands, please use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=rosiew

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Splinterlands Discord: https://discord.gg/Tw7KjNsQGs
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