HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT During Splinterlands Town Hall August 8, 2022

Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Summary for August 8, 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, @yabapmatt and @hardpoint

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) Nate @nateaguila (Creative Director) Cryptomancer @cryptomancer (Splinterlands Developer) Chatter (Director of Marketing) Homestead @homesteadhacker (Business Analyst)

BIG NEWS: MLSPA and Splinterlands Unite!

• Here's the Announcement on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MLSPA/status/1556627201579155456

• Here's the Announcement from Splinterlands:

  • https://peakd.com/splinterlands/@splinterlands/mlspa-announces-partnership-with-chief-blockchain-gaming-developer-splinterlands

Aggroed's News

• We're working with the MLSPA to go bring about a soccer game. That's the big news here today.
• At the high level I'm excited about it.
  • Why is this so exciting and such an amazing opportunity
  • Soccer is the 4th largest sport in the United States, they have something like 100 million people they reach out to, there's a whole bunch of teams, just shy of 1000 players in this in terms of the league. Those guys have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers in social medial. And to me, what I get excited about is "how do we bring more people into Splinterlands, into HIVE, into this ecosystem and into crypto?" The MLSPA is a fantastic starting point for us in terms of getting a good foothold for us. It will make it easier for us to get a foothold in things like entertainment as well. As part of those companion products you create Hive accounts and those Hive accounts can operate your Splinterlands game, your MLSPA game and and whatever other games we choose to create which could be football, basketball, baseball, hockey, fighting, racing. It could be entertainment, sci-fi, anime. It could be a whole bunch of fantasy-themed games.

There's tons of...so many ways we can bring people in and this is just the first one of them. These announcements and these types of things are we've been working on for months and what we've been doing for months is not just have MLSPA but have an entire ecosystem of games. That's true for entertainment, we imagine casino, and the big part of what we're talking about today is sports. And I know soccer is not one of the big three, but it's a fantastic place for us to start and they have a really young audience that are part of crypto currencies and the athletes themselves are pretty pro-crypto. When I dream about what it is I want for Splinterlands and crypto, I want more and more people in this ecosystem and with 100 million fans both domestically and internationally that we can start pulling from, I really feel like that's a massive win for this community to bring them in here.

I heard people say hey what if we lose people from the Splinterlands's ecosystem that might actually go to the soccer one? That's a reasonable concern but I think the piece that I'm really looking at is, what happens to Splinterlands if 100 million fans gets interested in this game as well.

Matt's (Chief Project Officer) Take

• Everyone here is a part of making the Splinterlands' success. We've had a lot of interest from all other sort of different organizations that also want to get into this space with similar types of products. We had to make a decision. Do we just say, no we are only making Splinterlands or do we go after these other opportunities and work on how Splinterlands can benefit from it. To us it seemed like definitely the no-brainer way to go. And so this is hopefully the first of many such opportunities that we're gonna have. And even though we announced specifically the soccer team and the partnership with the MLSPA, really what we're building is a sports' Gaming platform, the Genesis League Sports which is gonna be a sports gaming platform that works in very similar ways to Splinterlands. We can get into all of that, what we're planning to build, what it benefits the Splinterlands community.
• (Aggroed) The deal that we made with the MLSPA came through an organization called OneTeam. OneTeam is the organized corporate entity that manages players' associations. They manage NFL, NBA, Major League Soccer, NHL, Rugby and others. So what else makes me excited about this is, having landed this, it now puts us into the ecosystem of other sports teams and they granted us the rights to work with MLSPA. So you guys saying soccer is small, it's only the 4th largest sport in the United States, it's only 100 million fans, I want you to get this thought that we're already part of the bigger ecosystem. We want to make sure that the Splinterlands' folks are engaged in this and there's direct economic benefit.

Economic Benefits for Splinterlands Community

• We want to build this whole Genesis Sports League platform on the Splinterlands platform what we've built over the last four years.
• It will be run on the Hive Block Chain.
• It will have its OWN set of validator nodes along with it's tokens and work just the same as the SPS and validator nodes.
• We are setting it out like the Cosmos ecosystem. I guess there are kind of two different ways of like building a large-scale platform to run lots of different applications. And the one is the Ethereum model where every single application has small contracts on the same blockchain and doesn't make sense because everyone who runs an Ethereum node has to process every transaction, every application that has ever been or will be built on that one platform which gets into real big scalability issues and issues around being able to run full nodes. Cosmos, to their credit when a different route. They sort of made this SDK, this development kit, where anyone can build their own separate blockchains using that same development kit. So their all separate block chains. They all work differently. They have their different models of validating and all these things but since they are all built with the same core development model, they can all interoperate. And there's a bunch of ways that that gives value back to the atom token, which is the base token of the Cosmos ecosystem. So when we were evaluating how we were gonna handle all these other projects, ya know one method was the SPS validators could try to also handle every single other project we wanna do, but that was really unreasonable because it was gonna end up being like ridiculously expensive to run SPS validators and most people wouldn't be able to do it. They would need huge servers and stuff which is the opposite of where we're trying to go. So we though the Cosmos-type model was ultimately a lot better. So the validators that we build, what's going to be open software will be able to be used for many independent projects. So the Genesis League Sports project will be the second independent project that we'll run along with the validators along side the SPS validators. And it's good that we are able to do this in the beginning so we don't get stuck in the validators only working for SPS validators and we'll be able to make sure this code is generic and can run all these different sorts of platforms. And they will all inter-operate. All these different blockchain platforms will all use HIVE as the underlining layer for the data, accounts and security, and since they are all built on the same layer 2 platform, they will all be able to work together. And that's where the value of the SPS comes into play.

• There's lots of services that we will provide, allowing payments, different crypto currency payments, fiat payments, account management services, account recoveries, letting people get their keys, customer support services, there's a whole list of services that we provide that are in addition to the core validators. So our goal is, as we build out this platform, it won't be just us that build games but a third party platform might want to build a game and we can just use all these services that Splinterlands build and those will have a model for using those services. If any third party wants to build their games using this model, they will have to have SPS and a Hive account and their own validators for their own token. The idea is that SPS is the atom for the Cosmos ecosystem.

• That's further out of course. First we're going to make our games and show the world that we can build high-quality web3 games and that will bring more interest from third party developers to us.

• In the more immediate terms, since we're the ones building these games, like the deal we have with Warner Music which will be something similar at some point, we can directly give benefits to the Splinterlands players and SPS holders who made this possible.
• We'll have the white paper out for Genesis League Sports in maybe mid-September.

• It will have its own token and there will be an airdrop (the ENTIRE sports platform, not just soccer) for those who have staked SPS and it will probably be a year or so.

  • Remember Splinterlands players received airdrops for those who had assets in the game but no one has assets yet for GLS so the airdrop for the entire sports platform will be SPS.

• We'll have promotions and benefits similar to the chaos packs. There will be validator nodes for the sports platform. The airdrops will kickstart to get things going out of nothing and you give airdrops to an existing community. So we'll give all the airdrops to SPS in Splinterlands since we're the ones making the games with these new partnerships so all these kick offs will go to you. This is why we said hey we could say no to all these partnerships because we felt we could give all the benefits to the Splinterlands' platform which no other company could do.

• To answer one more question I think that's come up a lot. We didn't take off all the developers on these Splinterlands' projects. It's been mostly new people in the organization and we've been working on developing the sports game for a little while now (which was different than the Warner Music announcement which was made very early on) but we've actually been working on developing this sports game for a little while now and obviously you can see there's been lots of Splinterlands' development going on at the same time. There's two separate teams working full tilt on both of these projects so you can see we're still getting work done and we're keeping it as separate as possible because it's still of the highest priority for our company to get all the things on the Splinterlands' roadmap done and on time an as quickly as possible so we stay on the Splinterlands' roadmap.

Haythem - SNR Product Manager for Genesis League Sports

-My background is in computer science. I was a software developer. I did my PhD in Computer Sciene. I worked mostly as a computer scientist and product data. I've written several books in computer science. Most importantly, I'm a blockchain fan. A few months of ago when Aggy and Matt reached out to me I was very excited because I'm a sports' fan, especially soccer. Being able to work on the game and design the game is a dream come true for me. It's a privilege to work with MLSPA. We're hoping to have more partners in the future. What excites me the most with this opportunity is what Splinterlands did is build a very fun game and a great economy on top of that and so we're trying to build a fun soccer game first. That fun soccer game needs to be easy, very intuitive to play, same style as Splinterlands. It has to be fun from a soccer perspective and then from that we can build the economy around it. - Three 3 Main Dates with this game. - Pack Sale - October - we're finalizing the date - we have to wait until the end of the season to combine things. - We're looking at just shy 1000 players so we need those cards to be created and the game design - End Game: There are still things being finalized so I don't want to share yet. Here's waiting for the soccer season to end to get all those stats. - Pack sale mid-October and Game release sometime after that. I hope to share a timeline and roadmap sometime later this week.

Aggroed's Overview

• Here's the overview of the high-level Genesis League Sports. Genesis League Sports at the top then under that all different types and then within those types different leagues. Within that we're imagining different types of game modes, from prediction bracket games to fantasy modes to manger-style games where you have your different NFTs and put together matches (they won't be battles but there will be similarities to battles in Splinterlands).

What we're announcing is a big project in that it covers multiple sports. We have a couple different game types. Our first group has come on board with this; there's others in the pipeline. At some point we'll be announcing those as well. The opportunity here is 100s of millions of fans. That's what gets me excited. I want to grow this ecosystem as big as we can. Rather than grinding it out one little bit at a time with one user here and user there I'm looking forward to scooping up millions to bring into this ecosystem. There's just so many pieces.

• We have a product, we have a product roadmap and we have developers for this and we're working on visuals and white papers and everything else. All this stuff is coming and hopefully it's just.. I guess the thing that we've been sharing from very early on is that our vision is to get as many people into crypto currency as possible. We want to be the vanguard for getting people in here... sports.. you might be not be into sports but.. this is one of the fastest ways on the planet... to find these mega brands with huge audiences that have been around for decades and bring their audience here. That's the vision. The vision is not just here is one soccer game. The vision is here's Genesis League Sports and we're gonna pull all these people together, and they're coming here. This isn't gonna be built over on Ethereum. We're not going to be totally separate. It's gonna be built here and part of our community. I think that's... I don't know.. that's the piece I'm excited about.

• Haythem: Why choose soccer? It's the biggest. The choice of soccer is we would get the biggest audience. It's not just MLSPA, we're hoping to go after bigger leagues and that's the main goal here.

Hardpoint's Perspective

• Two different things I see that people are wondering
  • What kind of game is this gonna be
  • From the team perspective, it's like the Warner partnership, yeah we've been staffing up this entire year and they are two separate teams and we do have engineers that can move back and forth but really everything that is being worked in Splinterlands is working in parallel with the GLS system. What's so exciting of the GLS system is basically we've taken the best from Splinterlands and we're building GLS up from what we learned from the Splinterlands' system and what you'll see over the long haul the strategy is to cycle in new features back into Splinterlands. Some of these features will be new and going to be even more advanced. Why didn't we do it in Splinterlands? Splinterlands is very complicated and would take a lot of time to retro fit it back into the old platform but we will. There will be a lot of interplay between the new platform and the Splinterlands platform. There will be more platform and we'll be using the same tech underneath and the tech is not small. We're sitting on stuff that most teams couldn't put together in any time short. This platform is very complicated, it's very large and it takes a lot of staff to run this platform and that's why we thing this is unique to Splinterlands. It's really exciting to see us launch this GLS platform. We're taking how you do NFTs and economics and we have so much cross-marketing between the two. All SPS players will be vibing off this. There will be a lot of cross pollination and boost Splinterlands. This is going to bring a huge influx of capital and interest.

Hearing from GLS Team

• Kay (Kaymaria) - GLS Marketer
  • What we get to reach into the web2 world it's really exciting to get people onboard to the crypto space. It's giving them a new pathway to the crypto space.
  • Beth (realityvsmodel): We're really excited about this not just as soccer fans but getting into the sports arena as a whole
• Haythem: Things are different than Splinterlands because we're working in the sports arena but it's great and everyone's doing a great job.

QUESTIONS from Splinterlands' Community

• QUESTION: can we get an idea on gameplay so we can visualize it? Will it be a one on one type game or a team vs team concept?

  • A squad (team) and you are able to upgrade that team as far as tactics and formation. You match up against other players. I can't give more details than that.
  • Managing a team, playing other players and getting rewards.

• QUESTION: One of the things that attracted me the most to Splinterlands was the market. Do you think we’ll get a market for buy/sell/rent the new nft’s?

  • Yes

• QUESTION: If you ever strike a deal with some European leagues, are you willing to switch it to football, or make it a regional thing? The term soccer sounds suuuper nasty to us.

  • It is called Major League Soccer so there's zero chance we're going to call it something else as long as the league calls it that so as we get more, we will call it X to whatever the league calls it. We honor the names as we work with them.

• Question: how will this impact the teams work load?

  • It's certainly a lot more work but it might lead to a lot of automation and system control. I think upfront it's definitely more work but down stream it will be less because of the automation.

• QUESTION/SUGGESTION..... If you really want to improve pack sales moving forward for all future editions and long term card holder retention, can we