Splinterlands Town Hall September 26, 2022

Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Summary for September 26, 2022

*Please note: I cover as much as I can of the summary as a record of the ACTUAL Town Hall/AMA conversation. 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. (I do not include my opinion in this post.)

Founders Begin the Town Hall (formerly AMA)

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)

Introduction from Aggroed

• The purpose of these things is to bring you as much information on the company as we can and so we'll explore the various things that are happening in Splinterlands.
• In the last two weeks, we had a 1 min 39 seconds sell out for Riftwatchers
• Tower Defense 12 hour sell out
• Runi project sell out in 1 min 30 seconds
• So I'd like to do a quick team stand up. We don't have everyone today we're taking a rest for some of the team members but we have WeirdBeard and Nate today talking. WeirdBeard will discuss the increase in Brawl Hall
• We have two guests coming today and we also have Nifty Arcade and EMP coming

Nifty Arcade: Jared and Tyler

• We're going to show some development as we go and get some feedback
• We're here to solve 2 problems: player onboarding and capital onboarding
• People want to bring in their capital and have trouble with that or have trouble getting into the player action
• We're gearing up for Splinterfest. We're rolling out this punch by punch different features. One of the things we're excited to show off is the discovery portal.
  • World of Web3 doesn't really have that same setup like you would see in XBox and other areas that are all streamlined
  • So you come engage with the artwork on what is Splinterlands and a curated play list. We built this with the community by speaking with the high level influencers and developers and so this is a curation of those discussions.
• Aggroed: So a player comes in, checks it out, and what do they do with it?
  • This page is suppose to help you know what to do in playing Splinterlands. If you're compelled by Splinterlands, I can create an account, rent a collection or link your collection, and the sum total value of your collection. Also have an earnings tab and the market and we are reworking that based upon feedback but you can come here and rent out a deck-level account. It's up to the lender or card owners.
• Aggroed: Where is this? Are you guys still in development? How close are you guys?
  • We're really close. We're just waiting on an endpoint and working with the team and then we'll add that rewards split. When the rewards are earned it goes between the two parties. And as soon as that goes live, and we're hoping that's before Splinterfest, we'll be ready.
  • Right now we have 500 spots as a beta launch so there's a waiting list you can get on niftyarcade.io to list your cards or if you're a player wanting to get the cards. You can track your earnings there as well. It grabs every single moment of your account if you want to capture those things. It will also have reporting and we'll be squishing that as well so anyone can run their guild, their organization, their own accounts all through one place.
• Our goal is to provide them with the visibility, the functionality, we call that removing capital constraint. We offer people the ability to purchase decks wholesale at different levels. So if I want to play a bronze account, diamond, etc you can come right here. Our idea was if you didn't know what you needed, you can come here and get that full pack.
• You can go to niftyarcade.io and we're looking for Alpha players if you're interested in testing it out for us and give us some critical feedback.
• Join our Discord as well (link is on the website)

EMP and AJ Brockman

• AJ Brockman joined in November 2018. I've been successful outside of crypto (made a portrait for President Obama) and I brought my success here into crypto.
• This is a project I started earlier this year. It's dealing with inflation in a positive way. We have very specific rules on how we deal with inflation. All of this is exposure to Ethereum. We feel like Ethereum could be a number one crypto at some point and so we have pegged to that token.
• We build these contracts on top of our platform. One of those contracts is the Detonator that will add liquidity to protocol. We've had major success here.
• Now we're offering that service to others, and Splinterlands is the first to join and now we have the Generator for Splinterlands with that contract.
• Some people think it's a Ponzi scheme but we're the furthest from that. We use the LP that we collect. Now we're able to get the LP incentives from Splinterlands directly and use that SPS to then put it back into the protocol into the contract itself so we don't rely on new users.
• Aggy sums it up: This is a way to stake money into the contract and the contract uses some of those rewards that come out of the SPS whitepaper that if you're providing liquidity for trading then you can get rewarded for that. This is some protocol where you can stake it directly or you can do stake it in this pool. But overall this sounds like a DeFi project that is built on Ethereum but this is using SPS and SPS liquidity to reward users. (AJ adds: We are on the Binance Smart chain though)
• If I can get rewards directly from Splinterlands, but I can also park money in this EMP pool and I' m getting a different pay out. Can you explain why I'd want to do that?
  • AJ: Here are the reasons. 1) It adds liquidity and it's beneficial for SPS itself because typically you can unpair it and that's a lot of pressure on SPS but these LPs are not able to be broken so it helps SPS
  • Now you as an investor, actually able to earn more in the long run by depositing it into this than doing this directly with Splinterlands. We're able to do this due to things like our daily raffles we have. We have a bunch of incentives to do this. As long as you have a long time on this generator you can get your original investment back over time and you put your LP back into your wallet and you're earning
• AJ: We're really excited and we're one of the sponsors at the Splinterfest and we also have a guild now and EMP is also a form of payment in Splinterlands so we have brought a BUNCH of investment over to Splinterlands. We're really excited.
• We have emp.money as our website and we have a Discord and a Splinterland's sub channel where we hired some players to coach people how to play Splinterlands. Come on over to our active Discord!

Words with Wizards: WHEN LAND?!?!? With 16 Bit, Wrathed- PC, Neal McSpadden, Sicarius and Farpetrad-DEV

• Wrathed
  • Product Dev and I work along with Homestead and we are working to make sure we have our product requirements and we're trying to make those milestones we're laying out.
  • Product team is when Matt and I have ideas, we have the Product team that has to go figure out how to do that. Whatever that thing is, it's not just "hey go build land, "there has to be whole teams to see how that's all going to work.
• We are sick of the question "When Land" Can you tell us where we are?
  • If you look at our roadmap, land isn't just land. We have precursors to land. We have tech modernization and noncard market. Tech modernization is kind of an overall to the backend structure to how we have our code base. It increases our front in performance and how we can be more sustainable and reliable. This tech modernization is helping us move to more stable area. If we need to make updates to things we have to do it in various areas so it will not only increase our front in performance but our development in the future. And right now where we are in that project... so we actually released a little bit of that 2 weeks ago. Unfortunately we ran into technical issues. It was blocking just a few people from getting to the site so we had to rework that and we have it in QA and we're working through that. (Sicarius is working on that)
• Sicarius
  • Aggroed: Did we get the bugs and tweaks now? (Sicarius was muted so we moved back to Wrathed)
    • We've got everything on the menu bar, and once we have this up we can shift over to non-card market and get that lined up and pushed out. Non-card market is for improving the ecosystem. You'll be able to trade in game. You'll be able to trade totems there ON SITE for example. You'll be able to do that within our online shop. You can trade there and it also sets up the framework for the land assets as well.
• Aggroed: Where do you feel like you're at in development:
  • Sicarius: (audio isn't working)
• Farpetrad- DEV on the land
  • We're in phase 1 to deliver both claiming your tokens and surveying your land to see what you'll receive. This will allow you to blindly distribute plots out to the members.
  • Aggroed: So that land claim is what they originally got but they have to turn that land claim into a specific plot. So you're working on the back end to send to the server that you will have in two steps (1) Unrevealed piece of land and then (2) Revealed land
  • Farpetrad: Players will receive their land. They will just know that it's on the land. When they do that second part which is actually surveying the land, they will get to see if they have a castle or keep on their land or any resources, etc.
  • Aggroed: Has anything in that whitepaper changed on land? Are all the resource types still in tact?
    • Most is in tact. There is some brainstorming to add additional features and gameplay but that stuff is still being discussed and planned but the resources have all been locked down. Nate can tell you. I can tell you the whitepaper has been downloaded into my end so it's been implemented.
  • Aggroed: When roughly will tech modernization be done?
    • First parts in QA. It's a little tricky right now because we're limiting what we're pushing out bc we don't want anything game breaking. It will be before or after Splinterfest depending on testing. Non-card market is 95% complete. That will need to go through QA and everything's going well so we'll say end of Oct beginning of Nov
  • Aggroed: What about the land pieces? When can I get an NFT in my wallet and know what I've got?
    • This timeframe is a little more difficult to put a time to. There's a ton that goes into it (art, back end coding, claiming functionality, a lot is in motion). We're trying to target end of Q4 or maybe into Q1. It really is a massive expansion. Obviously there's always potential for anything to come up in that process.
• Aggroed: Some of the criticism I'm taking here is hey you just put out Tower Defense but you haven't done land. What's going on?
  • One thought I have, is Tower Defense hurting land?
    • It's not. It's being developed with Double Coconut so that's not taking any of our time or resources away. Right now we have all 3 of the land components working in parallel. I guess one of the tough things to point out is keeping up with regular development. So any updates with the regular game, we have to update that but we're nearly done with that so it will free up our time.
• We're doing some testing today about how to claim the land. I've written a simulation that runs perfectly but now we're run it over on the blockchain so this is the point where we're testing that whole feature out on the blockchain.
• Aggroed: Not only will you get land, you'll be able to trade land and we have someone building out how you do this claiming, redeeming etc. Literally all these things are currently in development and none of them is in conflict with the Tower Defense and not interfering with what's happening on land.
• It's being actively worked on consistently.

Neal McSpadden on Proposals and the Financial Situation

• Aggroed: Please understand he's not able to predict or know exactly everything but he's giving his understanding of proposals and all of that. He's very intelligent and one of the biggest whales
• Neal: I do want to say because I'm a big whale, there's my background bias. Anything I say is going to be focused on that. (Aggroed: And sometimes we've worked with him, but he's not an employee of Splinterlands but we have employed his services at times)
• I think the proposal system is great. Currently they are coming from the team, and I know we're looking forward to when WE can have the proposals not just the team.
• Overall a huge fan and we're starting to see the transition of the control from Splinterlands the company to Splinterlands being fulfilled by the community. From a crypto guy I think it's fantastic but the worry some people have is that what if the community screws it up because obviously Splinterlands has stood the test of time (since 2018) and very few other crypto games have and that's because of the leadership of you (Aggroed) and Matt.
• The counter side of that is that people who have invested in the game, they will do their best to make sure it lasts.
• The current proposals are most important so let's go through those.
• Aggroed: Rather than us say this is what we're gonna do regarding the packs presale and ended at a specific block and if your transaction got into that block the community voted to let those people have those as presale packs. The reloading page was a problem.
• Proposal 3 was a refund because if you purchased packs thinking you were buying presale packs but you really weren't. That was voted yes that you could get a refund.
• Last proposal got voted down.
• On the first proposal, I don't think anyone could have said this wasn't fair. If you're submitting a transaction there's no way to know you're not in the qualifying area so I think that was fair.
• Proposal 2 a little more controversial but reasonable.
• Proposal 3 was a new option that was developed after Aggroed's initial response. The Dao would undo the transaction and burn the packs and get your vouchers back and shake our hands and walk away. People didn't want to lose SPS from the DAO but did you want unhappy people?
  • Aggroed: If people put in money they want assurance that that won't change after the fact but if you put money in you want assurance that you can fix that as well and the community wanted refunds and that was ok.
• Neal Proposal 4: I voted no. Having the refund from the DAO makes Splinterlands' position obsolete and redundant so I think we're in a good place. If you submitted in a way not knowing you weren't gonna get the thing you thought, you're getting a refund and I think that is good. Your outcome matches your expectations.
• Aggroed is saying: Some say those only passed because the team voted it
  • Matt was telling me to be cautious in my voting and so I wonder what do you think? As a whale that's part of this ecosystem, is it appropriate for employees and whales to vote on this?
  • Neal: So, I can see how it's a little bit tricky. I think there's 2 separate considerations. One is that the Splinterlands' official account and then the people that work at Splinterlands. If you work at Splinterlands and you have SPS staked and you were involved in making the things and I think those accounts voting are fine. For Splinterlands official voting I think that should be reserved for things that are a major issue. A vast majority of proposals will not be that, but things that are really important I think it's find to use the Splinterlands' stake for that.
• Aggroed: If it's life or death for Splinterlands, Splinterlands should go vote. What about employees?
  • Neal: I don't think it's unfair and SPS is not being distributed to the team so you earned and developed your stake over time so I think that's yours to do with what you want.
• Should we reward land holders SPS now or wait?
• We recently moved team SPS to Tower Defense should we start Tower Defense now?
• Neal: These are questions of timing. In the long run, it makes no difference, in the short run, sooner is better. For land, sooner is better. One is it incentivizes people to buy and hold land. Land presale was 2 years ago so it's been awhile and we've been waiting, but kickstarting that now is already late so it's more ok. So I voted for that one.
• Tower Defense: We voted earlier it will get 1 million SPS a month so do we start that now? What we had was a presale and when Tower Defense packs become available on the shop again, we're probably still 7 months away from the game. So for me, as people who have supported that venture, should we get rewards now versus later? Well, I'm ok with it. I've seen arguments about the philosophy of play to earn that we should earn when we play. Right now the community is very split but for me it's ok.
• Aggroed: I think it's easy to say yes to land because they have been holding onto it for 2 years. My answer for Tower Defense is entirely different with revolves more around DEC. If you can take your accountant brain and tell people why it would be beneficial
• Neal: Well let's say the SPS starts now if we I buy a Tower Defense pack then I am using up more DEC and the supply shrinks and then when we hit that magic number of 1000 Splintoshees then we have SPS burn. The cycle will continue as long as there demand to push up DEC. Massive amounts of SPS will burn and that will help.
• How does this help the overall ecosystem and size of this community and the value of the cards you hold. How does a rising price of SPS in what you describe how will that help the game?
  • You think about all the different things you can do, buy cards, stake SPS, hold land, hold Tower Defense packs. All these things earn SPS and if you're broadcasting to the world that the thing that you earn is going up in value, that is a lot more attractive to the DeFi community in the wider world there's way more incentive to join Splinterlands in player counts, asset prices, etc.
• Aggroed: Let me summarize: If this proposal passes, it incentivizes people to buy Tower Defense packs and the price of DEC will rise and if it rises it will hit peg and then people can start buy and burning SPS to buy packs and what's left is something like 9 million dollars left for Tower Defense and that's a lot of burning.
• Neal: It's important to recognize that is the best scenario. It depends on the intensity of the demand
• Aggroed- Chance in Discord asks: What about removing some of the LP SPS rewards?
  • It's important to have liquidity just in general. If people want DEC how are they gonna get it? I think you need some level of incentive to make the whole thing work. How much is the question. Those are questions that will make some proposals to do this thing instead of that thing. I do think we need some kind of rewards... but how much? Well that's the question