Land Resource Prices

It has been months since I have written a post about Splinterlands. There are multiple reasons for it. First, I have been travelling a lot towards the end of the summer and early fall. Also secondly, there haven't been much of interesting things happening on land lately. You guessed it, Cryptomancer, our sole developer have also been travelling a lot like me. So, land development have been slow.

Last, I talked about grain factor, was on that post in June 22. That is the time I developed this particular type of plot that highlights an interesting phenomenon called "stone anomaly".

Stone Anomaly is defined as the difference between the price of Stone in Grain Factor, and the average price of Wood and Iron in Grain Factor.

In other words, it is the shaded area in the plot, and the step plot below showing the value.

Fast forward 3 months, and above is the stone anomaly plot today. You can see that there is virtually no stone anomaly, it is 0.04, and the lowest it had ever been! I had defined stone anomaly as such, because in efficient market all resources should trade as per their fair value in a chose system, which land market is. So if there is perfect efficiency, all land resources should trade exactly as per their production difficultly which is defined by grain factor. It took three months, but finally the market caught up with price. Currently, Wood, Stone and Iron are add trading nearly Grain Factor of 0.7. Yes, they are all at 30% discount to fair value.

Why Land Resources are at a discount?

Well, price is an net sum of supply and demand. There is a lot of supply and there is limited demand. On the first plot, I have highlighted the demand mechanism team have been introduced this year. Except midnight potions, I do not see the impact of the others on this chart. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that neither the pickle draw nor the Conclave Arcana wagon repair kits were able to create enough demand for the land resources. Why?

• those items like draw tickets, and wagons were priced too low
• the item that they will produce, pickel card and CA airdrop card, are not very desirable

The other item of note is grain price. As you can see from the plot above on July 18 Grain traded at a low of 8.46 DEC, and since them grain has rallied 23% to current price of 10.46 DEC. Since all resources are compared against grain in the Grain Factor plot. The drop of resource prices from July 18 to today can be just due to rally of grain prices. July 18 stone was 128 DEC, today stone is 77 DEC. That is nearly a 40% drop.

But wait, there is another factor. DEC price. On July 18, 1000 DEC = $0.90, today 1000 DEC - $0.71. That is 21% drop in DEC price. Since grain is priced in DEC, we can safely say that 23% rally in grain prices is just the drop of DEC price in USD. In terms of real dollar value, there is no change in grain price.

Therefore, we can also say, if we assume grain is flat in price, the drop in the resource prices, wood, stone and iron is real. They are really trading at a 30%-40% discount.

What can we do about it?

I have the following request to @davemccoy and the team.

• Please take 32% land usage for a whole year seriously, we must use more land
• Incentivize players to use land, as land is the ultimate sink of the cards in-game
• Price the items higher in land resources, much higher
• Make the products (cards, mechanisms, whatever) more desirable or must have items in-game

We have a massive over-supply of all resources, and we are producing millions of resources in Praetoria and nothing to do with them.

There is a massive stockpile of all resources and if this continues for long bad things are going to happen. We need to introduce sinks of these resources today. We should have done it yesterday!