THE WATCH #1: What Everyone is Missing about Splinterlands
Really appreciate the reception to my last post. This blog has now changed to The Watch.
This blog will share the most valuable weekly Splinterlands news.
I will also track and share the top whale movements.
As always, everything 100% open and honest with the community.
Speaking of the community, a lot of people were highly triggered by my last post. Even had some ad hominem personal attacks! Want to start by restating my main points and clear up some things.
The Issue with Splinterlands
Splinterlands' marketing points of emphasis include the high amount of daily activity and the warm and welcoming community (see the fan fiction, drawings, etc). The part they don't share is these numbers are fake. The game is dominated by botnets and power whales. In fact, a large majority of the player base are estimated to be bots/multi-accounts. None of their key metrics are real/honest.
Whales are strong in all games. But the whale power in this one is extra strong due to all of the botting plus insider corruption. Many of the top whales actually work for the company.
Side note: Many industries prevent employees from using the product. I remember in mobile gaming there were big scandals when it was discovered that company insiders were high on the leaderboards. My take: employees should never be the top whales. There is a blatant conflict of interest! The SPL team could have done all sorts of shady things for their employees and who would bother to track the chain and find out?
Recently SPL used their fake numbers as pretext to justify releasing 15m Chaos Legion packs ($60 Million). They did this knowing it would tank the market value of cards. If 15m packs tank all assets X%, but a more reasonable print would tank Y%, then X-Y% is the amount SPL stole from community assets. It goes straight to the company as $4 per pack.
SPL has sold out its players every step of the way, always taking the quick buck. I've worked for many scumbag corporations. I know scumbags when I see them. Even the scumbags don't go as far as to attack player assets, lie in marketing, and profit from bot rings. Be very careful.
Also let's clear a few things up:
I was a really big SPL fan. I started this blog as "Road to Champion" intending to play competitively. I did not come in to make a quick buck.
I'm fortunate to be in a life position where large dollar losses won't hurt me. Others are not. This isn't about me. This is about players being misled and cheated.
I'm mainly writing these to help the community avoid getting scammed even though it costs me time and money.
How Splinterlands might Play Out
1. The Bull Case
There are definitely some catalysts for explosive growth. Other than the lying and cheating, I actually like SPL's strategy. They're pretending to be the biggest game so they can latch onto the mainstream and get good press.
Unfortunately each day we stray further from the light. SPS is in the dumps. The recent roadmap stopped the bleeding for now. But each day that passes like this makes it less likely SPL will regain momentum.
Sidenote #2: A lot of shills treat it as given that 1) packs will sell out at $4 and 2) this game will pump again like it did the first time. How many crypto/NFT projects do you know that faded into irrelevance and came back strong? Why are these givens? I will eat my words if the general sale packs sell out quick.
Sidenote #3: Another thing the shills miss is there is a large opportunity cost to holding your assets in a sunk wasteland like this one while waiting for it to moon. Other cryptos are mooning so you're losing a lot. If cryptos tank hard, all NFTS will suffer. Take it from someone holding a bunch of SPL cards nobody wants to buy. You do not want to see full NFT winter.
So in the bull scenario the team finds the catalysts. Interest will surge. Even then, the game will never hit critical mass due to all of the botting. But I think this one ends with everyone dumping SPS at some peak after it moons. Hopefully we make a good amount 😅
2. The Dump
When things go bad the insiders will dump. They took the weak $3.6M in investment money earlier and sold out SPS for it a bit. It's kind of biting the price right now. And now they're trying to take $60m from the Chaos Legion packs. This game is basically musical chairs. Don't get stopped holding the bag. Watch this blog for when the whales move 😉
3. The Slide into Irrelevance
This was my least likely scenario coming in. I wouldn't have even dreamed of it prior to CL. But with each day that passes with SPS at $0.23 and weak Market Cap, this scenario gets more and more likely. You have to ask yourself what SPL offers against the best NFT games out there and the best NFT games yet to come.
WHALE WATCH Update
If I have time later I might track when different assets are moving.
The founders are just logging in and collecting stuff.
The employees are also just collecting/renting and staying quiet.
The top guildmasters are just renting and staying quiet.
I track two high level players: jacekw and bubke. I don't know their backgrounds but they seem legit. I'm hoping they are clean heroes we can admire. jacekw The GOAT is selling a lot of Chaos Legion cards on the market.
Sidenote #4: As a Silver player, I was highly disappointed to find out that the leaderboard is dominated by bots. One of the few legitimate players at the top, Kira1995, is a Splinterlands employee. At Gold you have Byzantinist/ByzantineKitty who also work for Splinterlands holding $8M+ in assets. Do you want to compete against bots or employees? Take your pick.
News and Notes
Bookmark @splinterlands so you never miss important news.
SPL released a roadmap for SPS once SPS started dumping. I was not impressed. But again, I think there are definitely catalysts for SPS to moon in 2022. It's also clearl the team wants to pump SPS so they will do their best. I'm long SPS.
I don't think holding DEC is a good idea. I'd rather hold it in assets if I believe in the game. DEC has very odd (manipulated) price fluctuations and will crash hard. Read between the lines with Matt's most recent comments on SPS/DEC and the company does not want DEC to be high.
Would also suggest you read the Town Hall summaries and the AMAs. I'm going to avoid discussing the most recent one I will just sound like a hater. This quote made me gag though ""People are the value. It's not just people are the value that we are going to extract, it is people are the value and that is why it matters that we take care of them""
I will sort out the previous giveaways from Road to CHAMPION before my next post. Sorry about the delay.
WOW! Bold statements. I only got sucked in to SL recently. Should I get the f*ck out and move to something else?
What other Play to Earn games do you like and recommend getting into now?
I recommend Gods Unchained.
Yes I recommend you do so. The cards are pretty cheap though and they'll be pretty cheap soon so stick around if you enjoy the gameplay. Just know that the strategy of this game is very bottable.
Do get out?
Which cards are cheap? Gods Unchained?
Is it playable on HIVE?
Thanks for sharing! - @alokkumar121
what can you say about this post ;)
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If you were actually someone who had basic knowledge of companies in general, you’d know that your statement on employees not being allowed to use company products is bullshit. Please show me one example of a company that doesn’t allow their employees to use their products. I’d love to see it.
It is very ironic that you bring up the fact that the Splinterlands employees are the top whales in this game as an inherently bad . Why is that? Because in public company executive compensation, the board of directors structures their compensation to pay them large stock options that vest in 3-5 years, assuming that they hit performance metrics, and this is a very large part of their compensation. They could easily instead pay the executive a large ass salary instead of these stock options (which the executive would prefer, since that salary is guaranteed whereas the stock options could lose all their value if the stock tanks for whatever reason even if its out of their control such as a stock market crash).
The reason why the executives are given stock options that vest in 3-5 years is to align that executives incentives with those of the retail shareholders. That is one way in which the board of directors (which sets executive compensation) is acting on a fiduciary duty to shareholders (which they are legally obligated to do).
So for Splinterlands, it actually makes sense to have their employees holding a ton of Splinterlands assets. It aligns their incentives with the incentives of the players who own splinterlands assets. You seem to be arguing that instead, these employees shouldn’t own any assets, in which case that would make their incentives way less aligned with the incentives of their player base that owns assets. After all, if they cause asset prices to fall, that not only harms their player base, but themselves as well.
The point you're FUDing actually makes it less likely that the company would just churn out card editions at extreme quantities (which would make the company tons of $ and fuck over players that invested a lot), because it would harm the employees of Splinterlands pockets more than it would harm the average players.
Which brings me to your last fud point, which is that Splinterlands is “stealing from community assets”. As even you mentioned, the splinter lands staff are massive whales, so them releasing a ton of chaos legion packs which has in the short-term, tanked the value of splinter lands assets, is hurting not only players invested but also themselves (and they are harmed much more proportionately since they are massive whales). They also aren’t “stealing from the community” because they spent a ton of time and effort in making this edition, why would they be giving it away for free?
Their SPS sale was definitely a mistake, no company is perfect. But their introduction of vouchers was a great way to give a ton value to the playerbase.
For presale packs the company was making $4/pack and the player base was making around $20/pack (because of vouchers that they could either use or sell to other players). The player base earned from the presale what the company will earn from 5 million CL packs (1/3 of the whole CL set), and the player base didn’t have to do any of the hard work behind designing and creating that edition.
Additionally, the player base gets over half the value that Splinterlands gets from the packs sold in phase 2. That doesn’t seem like Splinterlands team “selling out its player every step of the way”, in fact, it seems like the exact opposite.
It seems Splinterlands only got rid of vouchers so soon because a lot of new uninformed players like yourself whined about the voucher system in general, so that inherently means that less value will be given back to the player base. I don’t really fault them for listening to the cries of uninformed babies like yourself that were upset they were latecomers to a great investment, and wanted to make sure that they could make money handoverfist as well. After all Splinterlands is focused on new player growth and so I’d imagine they wanted to make sure that the new players didn’t feel left out (even though investing in packs is not smart in general unless you are buying a lot of them).
Lastly, claiming that scumbags don’t attack player assets, lie in marketing, or (in your eyes) profit unethically from their company is fucking hilarious. Have you ever heard of a company called Enron or Worldcom? Those executives were clearly scumbags, and its fairly obvious that the assets of their shareholders were drastically effected. Clearly you have not though because you know jack shit about investing and about how companies are run, let alone how conflicts of interest are handled in the real world to try and prevent exploitation of investors in public markets as well as private markets.
If you had even basic knowledge of these subjects, you could’ve at least tried to craft a convincing argument that made sense, instead of making attacks that only discredited the FUD you were trying to spread. I hope you haven’t tricked anyone into missing out on a great game that has rewarded the players who invest in it greatly, because either you’re trying to just lash out like a little kid who owned themselves, or are trying to tank the market so you can buy back at much better prices (since you clearly believe in the game).
Maybe next time before putting $5k into something you should do a little due diligence and learn about the game, and maybe implement dollar cost averaging? I know, these are basic concepts of investing you probably haven’t learned of yet, but if you just take a basic class on investing you will learn these and many other things that would help you not make such dumb decisions in the future!
I'm sorry I try to engage with most comments but you wrote a wall of text. Your opener is so off the mark I didn't bother to read the rest. Why don't you do some research on Insider Information before talking out of your ass.
Or let's put it another way. Let's say all of the top company whales in this game know they will release new land that will devalue the current land. Only they know this. In the weeks leading up to the announcement they dump all their lands on the player pool and profit. You don't see a problem with this?
What a great way to deflect a total takedown of your post and your sheer incompetence/lack of basic investing knowledge. In case you didn't know, your entire post is a wall of text too, but you expect people to read it (after all, you're all about protecting them right? Thats why you argue that things like the splinterlands employees being whales is a bad thing, even though it naturally protects players who invest in the game).
Oh no i'm sure my education and training and practice as a CPA (while also getting a double major in Finance) has never led to me learning about insider information and information asymmetry.
You should try actually having even basic knowledge before you spout out your ass. As my original reply showed, you clearly lack any basic fundamental understanding of investing let alone different ways to protect investors in a company.
Also you do realize that if the top company whales start to sell their assets, that not only will the blockchain show they're selling (as well as their balances on sites like peakmonsters change), but we will see them listing their assets on third party marketplaces, right?
While Splinterlands employees aren't required to file Form 144 when selling large amount of assets, players also don't need to wait for the company whales to file a Form 4 to see less major sales of an executives equity, its all very public on the blockchain right after it happens. There is way less information asymmetry into what the company whales are doing then there is in even public companies, let alone private companies.
And yet in public companies aligning the incentives of executives with shareholders is a great way to ensure shareholders are protected from the executive trying to cash out while fucking over shareholders. And the same holds true with the incentive of having company employees own splinterlands assets just like the players do, its aligns their incentives so that the playerbase is more protected.
If splinterlands employees didn't own assets, they would have more incentive to release far more than 15 million chaos legion packs and at a higher price than $4/pack. Like I said, learn basic investing principles and how capital markets are regulated and why they are, and then you would see just how stupid your overall argument is.
I just see a triggered person unable to regulate his emotions. I'm sorry we're not going to have a great discussion if you're dumping f-bombs off every other paragraph.
Sorry to underestimate your prodigious double major + CPA 😆. You are still missing the point.
If you weren't so biased you would realize there are two sides to this discussion and you are nowhere close to objectively right. But I suspect you think your position is 100% correct.
Great post, definitely following. I'm new to the game and I generally like it. Would you mind sharing the source of your info?
Public record, blockchain, and Discord.
Almost everything I write about this game is well sourced.
And your speculations as to the implications are the exact opposite of well sourced. You think its bad that the company employees own the same assets that the players do. Yet you also worry that splinterlands will crash the value of those same assets via card releases.
So Jaelove is mad that Splinterlands employees by owning a lot of in game assets, have aligned themselves to have a lot of their net worth tied to how well they provide value to the playerbase. He thinks this is a negative thing, and thinks its better if the employees do well no matter how good or bad the game ultimately provides value to the playerbase.
Jaelove is an idiot.
You realize you can extend your arguments to insider trading as well right? Our interests are aligned until they're not aligned. That's the whole point.
And don't call people names hukk it won't change the reality. Grow up.
His source is baseless fud 💩
Nothing what he says is true and greatly exagerrated.
For instance the thing about bot numbers and marketing. If they counted bots in their marketing material the numbers would be bigger. There's also a bunch of context around the way bots work with this game that this person either doesn't understand or chooses to ignore because it doesn't fit his fud story.
Hint: Not a single truly decentralized blockchain game can ever get rid of bots. 99% will be crushed by bots. Splinterlands is the only game that designs bots into the economy such that they can live side-by-side with players and not break the game. This is a HUGE win for Splinterlands and not a con. I can't overstate how big of an competitive advantage Splinterlands has over everyone (especially Axie) because of the fact that they can handle the bots.
Take it from someone who runs 10k bots; the way the team has structured the economy I've been forced to keep reinvesting into the game to continue to derive value. The moment I stop and start siphoning value, I break my income streams and die off over time. No other game does this. The biggest issue in the Splinterlands community are paperhanded whiners like Jae here.
You run 10k bots and I'm the biggest issue with the community? 😂
You are one of the names I track BTW
For my case I moved a lot of crypto assets to hive and swapped them to DEC to buy cards just to read now that the gameplay is dominated by the company employees and bots. My interest in this game suddenly fell to freezing zero. The rewars I got were also very worthless like 1 credit and a lot of for me useless potions. I don´t like the idea to compete with bots and multi million dollar whale employee players. I think I wait for the next bear market peak if there will ever be one and get out. Thanks for your interesting post.