Dear Splinterlands,
You've built a strong community which has stuck by you because we trust you are doing your best. When pioneering a brand new world, we understand that you will make mistakes, then we expect you to learn from them and adjust.
We have some exciting new things happening on the horizon, so for the most part this is a great opportunity for us all ahead.
Battle Scars
However, we do have battle scars. These scars are a result of many battles we've had over the years, where the community was doing its job to helping you to decipher the inputs to reach a system that works. We got these scars not because we were weak, but because we were strong.
We got these scars because we did care and were willing to fight all (even you) when we felt changes needed to be made for the game to survive. Nobody wanted to fight, but everyone that did so believed it was to make the game succeed. Because we cared.
We are your soldiers and you are the Generals. We need you and you need us.
Learning From Mistakes
After watching the community reaction from the latest rollout of the Survival Mode, its clear to me legitimate questions have been raised which need to be addressed. These questions aren't technical in terms of how Survival Mode operates, but are theoretical in nature regarding intentions.
What are you trying to accomplish with Survival Mode, and where will this take us? Is automation the key aspect in determining future success within this whole game? Said otherwise, are we targeting humans for growth or reverting back to targeting money growth with automation and/or financial advantages.
Is this a reversal of mindset regarding bot play versus human play? Should we interpret 2/3rds of the payouts going to the players that use bots as an admission that human-only play can not sustain the game? If so, then this has implications for people that question our six year marketing strategies and what it portends for future success.
Is this a trojan horse way to get the SPS DAO to eventually spend more of its money to bring bot farmers back? Realizing that the team is only funding the initial rounds, its clear that the team is spending valuable dev resources in expectation that the SPS DAO will continue funding. Is this the right way to roll out such a large portion of our reward pool because its bound to cause division and negativity once the SPS DAO has to decide between possibly two unpleasant choices: (1) spending DAO money when times are tight or (2) having the team waste all their DEV work and killing the program.
I've seen the understandable variety of reactions from many over the past few days, and they range from super excited to absolutely against it. There's a ton of assumptions being made, in addition to conclusions being drawn based about the future of the game based on those assumptions.
We all realize you don't have all the answers and want to experiment, and that's even a smart way to do it as long as you engage and respond in a timely fashion. We can't wait months and months to make changes, and we can't hide from the motives either. Hitting things head on with clarity is important, so I hope the team is super responsive with such a shakeup to the system.
Great Leadership Requires Confidence, Trust, and Vision
Earlier I said you were the Generals and we are the soldiers. Soldiers are in the fight and want to see the mission succeed, they are individuals with their own minds and feelings.
The Generals have to anticipate and address issues that come up. They have to provide vision of where we are headed, and convince the soldiers to follow this plan. To do this, first the Generals need to be trusted, and then they need to make the soldiers confident of success.
I think most everyone still here trusts the team, but its clear to me that the vision for the future is blurry to many of our players with battle scars. As a result of this massive new mode, they are now questioning many things, so we need great leadership to address those issues and be responsive with clarity.
My Personal View On Survival Mode
-I don't mind experimenting, but to me its simply an experiment.
-If funding from the DAO was to be voted on as it stands, I'd be a "no" because I don't think it will work systemically to bring in a meaningful amount of new money, and the trade-off of negativity is not worth it.
-I will play it if I can win something, but I won't invest in buying more cards or rentals as a result of this (I'm afraid this will be the norm btw)
-I don't mind having an automated place where people can manage their collections to win (defi), however I don't think that Defi does much more than shuffle around assets to give an edge to certain people over others. So its not a super high priority given the current state of the game.
-I'm very worried about our ability to attract and retain new players, to me this is the only essential factor to determining our success. I've been unclear as to who we are targeting, and this mode is a bit scary as it seems to be reaching for another big bot buying spree (which I don't think will happen, and even more so, if it did then I feel that is still not a good thing)
-Finally, I feel that if we are going to have this battle again, which will create new scars on those that fight for something they believe in, then we must have great leadership from the team to listen and learn, in addition to being clear about the vision/purpose. If the team is responsive as things get moving, then we will all see how it works out together.
