A lot of what you're saying mimics my feelings. Why am I going to buy packs when they are doing everything in their power to make them worthless when they rotate out of modern? And Matt freely admits that land in its current iteration is boring and doesn't have much value. He also said they are relying on a huge influx of players and money in order to hire the devs to build land. So the idea that land will save us is pretty pie in the sky right now.
One thing to note though is $20k in SPS is based on the current price. If we did get a bunch more players I can assume it would push the price up which would increase the USD value of wild rewards.
that's the point I just made. If the price of SPS goes higher, then the number of actual players we could support comfortably would be much higher.
Yes, a higher SPS price would also enable more players to participate in Wild.
However, if we have to rely on the token price increasing to prevent Wild assets from decreasing in value, then something is seriously wrong.
Given the current state of this ecosystem, this will further devalue wild assets and in my option also modern assets.
The reason I disagree with what you are saying about old cards going down in value long term is that so little of land has been released right now. Look at how much impact the grain LP has had in such a short time. Look at the staked DEC on land, it's constantly going up now. We are already at $35k liquidity in the grain LP and it's only been about a week. Next is going to be the research leaderboards titles which means people will be fighting over those rolling titles which will require grain.
I just don't understand how you read the white papers for land and don't get it, how this will not make old cards valuable.
Every tiny thing they release for land is going to act like a leverage of stimulus to the economy as long as they make it somewhat relevant to ranked.
Example A
Lets say next month or the month after that, they release the salt system. Players that own at least 2 surveyed land plots will now earn SB desalinization crystals in ranked. Now we can start desalinating our land to reduce our trading fees, our taxes and boost our production. On top of that, on the other end, we will earn salt tokens. Salt tokens in the white paper can be combined with potions to create something called "enhanced potions" but what if they let players use their salt tokens in the 2 week run up to a promo event. "The company is letting you use our alchemy lab temporarily during this promo event to create enhanced potions" and you can apply those to the promo cards and also to jackpot chests.
Now all the old players with thousands of potions will start making these enhanced potions that can be sold on the market.
Example B
None of the magic plots have been released/enabled yet. What if they release/enable the next 2 magic plots and they match the same elements of the next legendary summoner airdrop?
And they make it a requirement that you produce and burn on the wagon a specific number of those same magic resources in order to qualify to get the special skin of that summoner. How much do you think that special skin is going to be worth? And this will drive up the price of grain.
I think the problem with the land white papers is too many people went to sleep trying to read it because of all the details. All they have to do is start releasing/implementing little parts of it and make it relevant to ranked.
OK so its currently midway through 2024. Land was supposed to be fully released in 2021 and currently the company doesn't have the money or human capital to work on land in any major way and won't unless we get a massive influx of players, which is far from guaranteed.
So why does the land whitepaper not excite me? For the reasons above but also because the distribution of land is so concentrated that almost none of these people will ever be able to utilize it all. The thing about land, and almost all Splinterlands systems is its not based on what you have, its based on the percentage of the active whole. The same SPS rewards are being given out whether 5 plots are running or 150k plots. Its also why raising the SPS staking requirements in this proposal is pointless (but that's another topic.)
And as far as the DEC being staked on land, about a month ago we were higher than we are today. We got up to 1.522 billion. It dropped to 1.509 billion and we are currently back to 1.514 billion. It has gone back up some since the grain LP but we're still lower than we were a month before the LP came out. Losing players.
Now for example A. Having yet another thing to buy and sell doesn't bring money in. It shuffles value around and dilutes the value of existing assets. As existing assets drop in value, players run away because their assets are dropping again and that sends asset prices down even further. We've been in this spiral for a few years now.
For example B. First I'll say that this is a long shot. Second I'll say that it shouldn't ever happen because it will again lead to players leaving. They bought thousands of dollars in cards but now they can't even get their airdrop unless they also do something else? Moving the goal posts repeatedly sends people packing.
I want land to be amazing and bring value to the cards but its not even close to ready yet, there's no gaurantee it will ever be ready, and it has a lot of hurdles even if it gets ready.