Good morning Splinterfriends and Soulkeepers!
There's been quite a few changes to Soulkeep in the months since it has been released... some of them good, some of them bad... however - there has been one thing consistent this whole time...
Double Coconuts ability to fuck things up.
Now look - I usually try to see the positive in things... I usually attribute to ignorance instead of malice...
But there are only so many "WTF" moments one can endure before they too say "How the fuck are you guys so bad at this"????
Let's begin our journey from the beginning... All the way back to the end of June 2024 when Soulkeep finally launched.
Soulkeep released!
As one might imagine, when Soulkeep finally released (after many delays and near death experiences)... it was a highly refined, incredibly polished, smooth running game!
It was quite the opposite of that... 😑
There were tons of bugs and glitches and rules that didn't quite work as planned... but that was to be expected... so... what ended up happening?
The "Perma-Spell" Exploit
Certain people figured out that if you placed a spell... it would act as if it were "permanently" in that location every subsequent turn...
This allowed certain players to stack this exploit with another issue that arose...
If you used a combination of Quake Towers, Slime Lords and Tarantulas... you could "Spawn Lock" a Fiend that made new fiends... Slaying Mantis and Blood Queen were prime targets... this allowed players to harvest many... MANY more souls than others...
Some players (myself included) placed really well by Spawn Locking and thus earning RIDICULOUS scores on maps... what I didn't realize and what many others didn't figure out is that someone recognized that you could stack Soulful with these Spawners and the upper level Spawners to get INSANE amounts of Fiend Souls... thus advancing VERY QUICKLY up to Leagues 5/6/7...
A few players (and myself) were earning large payouts every day but one person was earning 6k+ SPS/day, alone in League 6... then 7... they advanced so fast... that Double Coconut decided to just say "Fuck y'all" and they shut down Leagues 8-10... "bEcAuSe ReAsOnS"...
Enter the first "Fuck the players" from DC
So how did @alexandrp54321 get so far ahead... while everyone else was frustrated... did they cheat? Did they abuse the system? Did they...
While some may say they abused certain things like the Legendary Spawner during "Spawn Lock" days where they earned HUNDREDS of Legendary Souls... which then was subsequently nerfed by DC... the actual answer is simpler...
Alexandrp54321 simply PAID TO PLAY
While most of us were playing 2-3 times per day... even while tickets were only 2 DEC per Ticket instead of 4 DEC... ALEX PLAYED UPWARDS OF ELEVEN TIMES PER DAY...
While I have incredibly negative feelings towards Alexandr due to what happened later on... he put up TONS OF DEC to get ahead... and he earned the right to be Big Man On Campus...
A moment to understand how Soulkeep distributes Rewards
Let's take a moment to pause before we get ahead of ourselves... so we can understand how Soulkeep distributes their Rewards.
A. Soulkeep rewards players in SPS B. Rewards are distributed by League with League 10 earning the most and each League under that earning lower rewards... C. The top 50 earn Rewards... if there are enough players...
HOWEVER
Let us understand this very important fact... IF THERE IS ONLY ONE PLAYER IN A LEAGUE...
They get ALL of the Rewards for the ENTIRE LEAGUE
This leads me to a very important announcement: IF YOU DIDN'T TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS SOURCE OF $SPS REWARDS AND PLAY... THAT IS ON YOU. DON'T WHINE ABOUT IT.
Delegation Exploits and Rental Fuckery
Let's get back to how things are going and how Double Coconut manages to continue fucking things up...
First - let me just point out that I can't even tag DC because they don't have a Hive Presence... at all. Zero.
Seems kinda weird to not have any presence on the Blockchain in which your game is based... kinda... Remember - they have their own servers, I don't even think the games are Blockchain based but they are Web3 which is fine.
So... after the PermaSpell and Spawn-Lock bullshit was fixed... we ran into another exploitable glitch...
Ye Olde Delegation Exploit
The Delegation Exploit paired with the change from "random %'s" on maps to "SAME MAP SAME % EVERY TIME" gave birth to the rise of the Multi-Accounters...
Alexandrp brought his Alts and his guild to Soulkeep and began draining SPS rewards via this method:
Play free game... Learn Map. Play free game on Alt... Get better score. Play again on Main... Get kickass score... Delegate to Alt... RESET ENERGY ON CARD... Play on Alt and magically... 2-3 Accounts or more all have the same score within 100 points...
This caused quite the ruckus in the community and led to Double Coconut making it so cards Energy were not reset via Delegation...
Pause a moment
Soulkeep Cards have "Energy". This "Energy" is how many times it can be played and each card recovers their "Energy" in 3/4/6 hours or whatever - depending on their stats... this is important!
So... people took advantage of the Energy Reset via Delegation... and DC decided to make it so Energy didn't reset upon Delegation... which means... you guessed it: Rentals got ALL SORTS OF FUCKED UP.
Yeah that's right - a Rental counts as a Delegation... so if you Rent a card... you stand a chance of getting a card with ZERO USES available... well let me tell you from experience... RENTING A CELENE FOR 200 DEC/DAY WITH ZERO USES FUCKING SUCKS!!!!!!
Nice job Double Coconut... nice job...
It's not like Splinterlands doesn't have a "Cooldown System" that could have been used to prevent all of this but whatever...
DC screw up #2
Reward Miscalculations
Soulkeep has a set Reward pool from which it distributes it prizes... this Reward Pool was slated to diminish at a 1% rate... all clearly laid out...
Yet... oops... DC forgot to account for that and had to shut off rewards for a 4 day stretch to let that sort itself out... whoops... 🙄
Talk about a fumble...
But hey that's ok - we got to play for free each day still and that was something... it's not like they doubled the cost of their tickets without telling anyone right???
Oh yeah - they didn't Double them... they TRIPLED them and called the first month a "Promo Period" - to be fair... they never mentioned ANYWHERE that there was an introductory promo price... and after the discord went bananas... they reduced the price to 2x to account for a burn from SPL.
But that's par for the course:
Make changes... THEN tell everyone the updates - I have pleaded with them to tell us first before just randomly changing things... they have listened sometimes... but I feel like their liason Arhov is just some poor intern that is overworked and dealing with us, a bunch of feral gamer goons who happen to have a lot of money wrapped up in games like this so we get a bit rabid...
They tasked her with working on this and unfortunately, when you have a game like this, with prizes like these... sticking a part time intern into this who is only available every second Thursday between the hours of 1am-1:15am... well they tend to get tagged and overwhelmed with lots of things in Discord...
Speaking of overwhelmed and DISAPPOINTING... During this entire course of events... heaven forbid the game glitch or lock up or fail to load or crash or ANY NUMBER OF THESE... quite common occurrences...
One is told by Arhov to "Submit a ticket" for review and they could refund you your entry fee... IF THEY FIND AN ERROR...
Well let me tell you... I have submitted several tickets over these months and in these tickets I have been told things like:
A. "I know it LOOKS like the fiend died inside the Soulful spell... but they actually did not... according to our servers... we aren't refunding you anything...
Followed by:
B. Ok... on this second attempt I see where it DID die inside the Soulful spell... but weirdly enough the First Fiend to die inside Soulful TRIGGERS THE SPELL but doesn't earn any bonuses...
To which I replied "What kind of fucked up retarded shit is that - you're telling me that I did exactly what I was supposed to but the first monster to die in the spell DOESN'T FUCKING COUNT????"
They said "Good news though, thankfully the team agreed and we have changed it so the first Fiend to die in Soulful will give you the bonus... next time... sorry you spent 944 Tickets (4k DEC) to play again... but since the game was "working as originally intended"... we see no reason to refund anything.
Me: wut?!?
I mean it costs them NOTHING to comp a few Tickets right??? RIGHT????
This coupled with that surprise price increase encouraged me to write this Peak'd post about "Customer Service" back in late July.
DC bungle #3
Soulboxes and the biggest FUCK YOU from DC to date
If you don't understand that a Company... a Game... a Product... is only as Successful as its customers willingness to spend MONEY on it... you might understand why Customer Service is so important and why Customer Retention is a primary goal... usually.
Some companies do not give a singular fuck about their customers and continually dump on them... giving them the shit end of the stick more often than not...
Do this enough times and eventually... the customers leave and find somewhere else to get their dopamine hit (in the case of a game like this)... unless they're into that sorta thing 😏
In this case... many players like me started playing back in June and have played EVERY DAY... to earn Souls for advancing up the Leagues.
We paid $$$ for Assets. We paid our Time. We paid DEC for Tickets.
Our Reward: Higher Leagues = Higher Rewards right?
Enter the Soulboxes...
So, what are these Soulboxes we hear so much about?!?
Ok... so on the surface, Soulboxes look like a way to buy... Souls. In Boxes.
That's exactly what they are and by purchasing them in these packs - you either buy the whole allotment or you don't... you can't decide to buy "up to" 42 Boxes in this case... it's either 0 or 42...
Each box contains a certain number of Souls to allow players buy their wa... err "help players advance"... How many Souls per box??? Here you go:
This means by purchasing 42 Soulboxes you could receive...
10,500 - 21,000 Common Souls 6,300 - 14,700 Rare Souls 1,050 - 3,150 Epic Souls 42 - 84 Legendary Souls
Keep in mind that is 6,300 DEC for that amount... and in League 7 (where I am) you would need a lot of these to advance... but how many would you need???
Here's the Spreadsheet of Soul Requirements by League
Thank you @tehox for this data, you are a gentleman and a scholar
Ok well... according to this data it seems to advance from League 7 to 8... you would need a total of:
Common - 181,553 Rare - 81,830 Epic - 18,095 Legendary 2,011
So let us do some rough math...
At 10k Minimum Common Souls per batch, 18 "batches" of these would equal 180k Common Souls... ✅
18 Batches x 6,300 Rare Souls = 113k+ Rare Souls... ✅
18 Batches x 1,050 Epic Souls = 18k+ Epic Souls... ✅
18 Batches x 42 Legendary Souls = 756 Legendary Souls???? womp womp
Now I know the argument could be made "but Dingus, you would average out to be 1.5 Legendary Souls per box because it is 1-2 per box"...
Sounds logical... but toss that shit right out the window... I have bought a few batches here and there... but let me tell you... I have never... EVER gotten the average 1.5 Legendary Souls per box... If I bought 42 Boxes... I would get like 50 Legendary Souls... in fact... I'll prove that.
Here we go:
Notice the timestamp
Let's click "Approve"
Yay. Success.
Now... let's open them to reveal 50 or so Legendary Souls... well off of the 64 average lol... SURVEY SAYS...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH Fucking told you so 👿
No, I didn't type this after opening the Soulboxes... I have just NEVER SEEN THE AVERAGE and I am guessing because they have like a 10% chance of being a 2 and not 50-50... but it's not advertised like that. Whatever.
Anyways... DC told us that we could buy a "Batch" of these Soulboxes once per day and it would help accelerate the process of moving up in Leagues...
However... per usual... there was a glitch... or exploit if you will...
Apparently... at "certain times" one could buy a batch of Soulboxes... only instead of getting this screen:
Notice it says "Purchased"
Instead of that... one could buy another batch of Soulboxes... which allowed some players to advance EXTREMELY QUICKLY without playing...
One player, Jonaro, went from League 5... to League 7... and then to League 9... in 4 days.
This means that they passed someone playing the game from the beginning... simply by dumping DEC into the game... the reason that is a big deal... is the amount of Rewards available in League 9.
League 7
Damn you Lincemarrom!!! DAMN YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!! 😁
Lincemarrom's last minute bump where they edged me out of 1st place... dropped my Rewards by 800 SPS!!! Holy crap that is a bummer... still a decent chunk BUT... let us examine League 9...
So... this cheater who abused the bug... earned 1,602 SPS... and even if they placed LAST... they would have earned 976 SPS?!?! Are you kidding me?!??!
Up to this point - DC has been pretty chill about punishing abuse of things but Arhov said today they are discussing punishments for those who "highly abused" the Soulbox Glitch.
Personally - I think that's a bannable offense... but it isn't up to me... however... something needs to happen... or why shouldn't you or I cheat the next time we find something like this... I mean... they won't punish us... so who cares right???
Ok Batman may care...whatever lol
The other person who probably abused this exploit is Alexandrp54321. I say this not because I think they're a shitty person - talk to them in Discord for more than 5 minutes and you'll know they're a shitty person...
But Alex paid and played his ass off to get way ahead and earn a ton of rewards early in the game... Good for you... I applaud that.
However... Upon making it into League 8 after they re-opened it... he started profusely whining about how they changed the Soul Requirements - increasing the Epics needed...
So... he played early... he paid a lot... he abused the Spawn Lock to earn LOTS of Legendary Souls before that got nerfed... but Erlendo beat him to L9 and let me tell you...
THE AMOUNT OF CRYING AND WHINING HE DID WAS INSANE... naturally... the rest of us in the Discord who were saying the same thing about him multi-accounting and abusing the delegation exploit were having a blast rubbing salt in the wound...
I mean... if you're going to be a dick when you upset other people... be prepared to have a lot of shit talking when you start bitching about THE SAME THING LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Now... here's the interesting part...
Erlendo beat Alex into L9 by a week or so... he obviously had more Epic souls... but was probably short on Legendary souls...
But somehow... Alex made it into L10 before Erlendo
While the argument could be made that Alex "just had more Souls" or "played to earn them"... this comment was made around the time Soulboxes came out...
followed by...
So... a player who flagrantly took advantage of every possible loophole, exploit, bug, glitch and opportunity... while continuously berating those who argued against it... manages to Advance to L10... TWO WEEKS ahead of Erlendo... who made it to L9 ahead of Alex...
I especially love the "Just t