Splinterlands Town Hall (AMA) Summary for August 29, 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)
Introduction from Aggroed
- Next Town Hall will be September 6th, Tuesday. Chatter said don't miss it, because the news is going to be BIG!
- Aggroed introduces Dante (Dantedurango on Discord) Head of Engineering
- Helps with the Dev Team/Coding
- Head of Engineering 90/10 split, managing and back end
- Dante is involved with many of the meetings Aggroed is in to make sure everything is happening and getting implemented.
- Any major advancements or breakthroughs with the Road Map for Splitnerlands?
- We are on track and we had to move our schedule and the team is handling that really well
- Milestones: New Ventures project creating a Steammonsters game engine so that people can also create their own games and earn to play game fi games.
- Aggroed: Where is that project at?
- So far we have a universal authentication system so that you can log into multiple games.
- The Defi Game in a Box or Web 3 Game in a Box idea is growing but does that mean we are slowed down on getting our packs early October?
- We do have a way of receiving packs by using PayPal so we don't have binance or ethereum
- So we have something in place but still working towards the additions.
- What about the Splinterlands' Side?
- The new ventures platform has a focus with Splinterlands as well. One thing feeds into the other and builds upon the other.
- The card market place items and NFT generation which is a whole new concept of generating NFTs quickly and dynamically.
- Aggroed: What about game modes?
- I'm not sure what I'm actually allowed to speak about so I cannot answer these details.
- Aggroed wishes we can leak it all now. Ha!
- Next week will be a big week with Matt visiting and sharing some major announcements. Node update, Tower Defense, MLSPA updates, etc. A TON of freaking things!
- The new ventures platform has a focus with Splinterlands as well. One thing feeds into the other and builds upon the other.
- Any final points, Dante?
- MLSPA site and it's not just going to be another card game. There's going to be an actual step by step play action so it's going to be a little different from a traditional card game so that will be nice but we're building that platform to include other areas like mini-games.
- Aggroed: We will cover social casino games, our entertainment stuff, to sports stuff to Splinterlands' itself I really want the full range to reach everyone, the experienced crypto player to the new player.
Chatter Updates
- Announce the Announcements
- Next week's announcements: News about Tower Defense, Rift Watchers and everything else. Be there next week and a lot of things in the pipeline. You don't want to miss any of the Town Halls in September. Remember it will be Tuesday.
- We're working on a tournament partnership with Alliestrasza and Mason. They have reached out to create a tournament with us which is GREAT.
- Splinterfest Tickets
- Half of the VIP tickets are already gone
- We've had a lot of sales in Fiat rather than SPS because they want to keep that SPS with the price where it is.
- It's going to be an awesome time guys. What other conference do you come to and you leave with more money that you started with? Not guaranteed, but we're giving away prizes, land plots, you get free limited time merch and limited time merch for sale there. We'll have wooden cards for us there as well. You'll meet all the team members.
- Team members we have 40 team members that have got tickets and more people getting tickets. We are thinking 50 to 70 team members that will be there.
- If you want to really meet the team and make an impression with the team, you really want to be there. You can build a relationship.
- We'll be doing an AMA with Huobi.
- A lot of people just haven't mapped out their plans. I would like to see if we can hit 300 or 350 before the event starts.
Nate Aguila's Creative Team Update
- We're finally putting to bed the final assets for Rift Watchers.
- Engineering has everything from UI/UX and all the animations that they need in order to make it happen. So when is it gonna happen? Well, since the creative side takes so long, you can rest assured it IS happening and we'll probably have the dates next week.
- Aggroed: We haven't put out or formal white paper yet for these have we?
- Oh I'm sure the community is holding with baited breath for these details. It's like 99.9% there so before we go release this to the world we want to make sure it's 100% before we release it. Of course I'll share some eye candy like you guys love.
- Non-card market, just take what we have and it's a lot more involved than anyone expected. Trying to take a non-fungible token and applying it to fungible tokens you realize this is a different type of beast.
Nate's Eye Candy
- Fungible (And this is subject to change so remember that)
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This eye candy [above] is work from Kai that we met last week.
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All this stuff takes longer than you realize because in order to make it usable you have so much more to do [on the backend]
- Nate: What other company is adding all these layers? With tokenomics, DeFi, etc. No one's done this before so we are estimating how long it will take for these things. It's like NASA going to the moon for the first time -- we'll figure it out on the way. For every stream of "just do this" there's an ungodly amount of other things that adds to that.
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HEADS UP: There will be NEW ABILITIES in Rift Watchers!!
- Which I (Nate) think it's soo cool for the overall game play
- It's called Fury so guess what that's gonna do
- Here's a Fire Sneak Peek: Mordeus
Ended up with this for the Concept in the end for Mordeus
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/721050878005608528/1013820051440283818/concept_mordeus.jpg
New Rift watchers wall paper
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/721050878005608528/1013820377174126602/wallpaper_riftwatchers_runemancers.jpg
- And here's a link to the latest Lore
https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/the-talisman-tome-of-chaos-story
- Nate Sharing
- I will say, you can see the sheer talent and creativity of these team members. I am very happy and proud of every single member of the creative team. None of them treat it as a job. It's more like every single day they are saying "well this needs to get done!" 30 hands go up simultaneously to "let me do it!" It's so different than working with a corporate job and that's incredible to see and I hope you see that bleed through in the UI and the design and the artwork and everything else. And as I see that passion play out I see things getting better and better and better.
- We are looking at the future for Rebellion and land, and all the rest. Creative is not content to sit on our laurels. We want it to look better and better and better and more immersive and making everything come alive.
- Skins are coming!!
WeirdBeard Update
- Aggroed shares his heart: I want universal spawn like quality for this game where if you have an internet connection and Splinterlands you can play this anywhere and you can make a difference in your life.
- We have an update with tournaments and Allistrasza
- We have ghost tournaments released
- Splinterfest will have tournaments with land given away, thousands of dollars of prizes, etc.
- And this can't be the last stop on the train
- Everything starts with this Splinterfest and it's going to keep going. We'll have some pretty major announcements and the new tournament format and the current tournament format and it's all on the heels that we are continuing to see more and more people competing in the tournaments.
- We're developing and establishing stars in Splinterlands. It's not just are you a streamer but how are you building the community? And we are working towards that staking SPS on players and how they help the game.
- We're really focused on the longer-term games and building Splinterlands.
- I want to walk you through the Splinterfest Tournament. We're going to have a production team. This is a full production supervisors. We have unique and custom framing and it's a lot and that's not a bad thing but the production quality on this tournament is going to be gold standard. I'm so excited for people to get to Splinterfest and see it come to life and be bigger than it is. We'll have hair and makeup for casters. You've got to do it because we're trying to take it to that level so it's not "oh hey, here's some people who play on the block chain" We're trying to make this a big deal. We want to be better than the others.
New Folks
- Jemmarti
- I'm part of the support team under the Splinterland financial team under Khan. I got here through Byz. I lost my job back in 2020 with COVID and I asked Byz if there were any openings and that's when we started to grow the team.
- We deal with lost funds. We go and find when something gets lots because of a transfer. The recent events it was due to the update, and we don't usually have that much, but people send wrong tokens to the wrong account and occasional something doesn't get updated or delay with the transfer. I was also in charge of verifying the lost airdrops and being in contact with the devs to get that reset.
- Aggroed: Are you from Oklahoma? I live in Canada but I'm Filipino.
- Working inside Splinterlands is the best thing I've ever had. It's nothing to compare to the other companies I've worked for. It's really great to learn about everyone here. Talking to everyone, you learn something almost daily. Within support it's actually stressful when something breaks but these people especially our team leads handle it so well and I hope people give us some patience when something breaks.
Randomly in Discord this was shared for fun of the new ability (of Aggroed)
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/721050878005608528/1013825229795098764/aggroed_fury.png
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Jared (Discord name: Jfroman)
- I'm an Engineer, I've worked 25 years as an engineer in the financial sector. I work with applications that look for patterns in the software. Before joining Splinterlands and I worked on various tax apps. Transfer pricing software. It watches for the transfers of goods and services and making sure they are being compliant.
- I would also have to say game developers make the best software. I got my start as a game developer back in the day.
- At Splinterlands, I've been jumping around a little bit. When I first started I was working on applications that was used by the support team and then I've been moved on to a new venture project with Dante.
- Aggroed: What are you most excited about?
- I just love that a platform is being created that can be adapted to other areas. I've heard some of the talk as to where people want to take things and the game play aspect of it and re-engineer that for other products and I think that's super exciting and the possibilities are endless.
- Taking the engine that is Splinterlands and build other products for an endless supply with a million different airdrops for a million different game plays. I think every single project that comes will want to give to the audience and see if we can't get them to start playing what we're doing. So this whole ecosystem is what future games will base their products. I can tell you that every single group or everything team that comes here is going to want your attention. They want you to play their thing and so there will be lots of incentives along the way so you can do that.
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GodZ
- You've been a player for years now so I think folks know who you are but introduce yourself
- I'm from India and a computer background. I was building up the Splinterlands Wiki. I started working for the support team as a live agent and I'm also working on QA Work, testing for the game.
- Aggroed: When we starting to get into other products and we can increase hiring and I hope we hire internally and I hope a lot of them start in support because you get to know the players, you get to know the concerns and then moving through the company, you know what the kinds of challenges that players are facing. Then you can catch those problems in advance.
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Aggroed: Anything else you want to share?
- I'm most excited about the Splinterfest.
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Nick (Discord name Ura Soul)
- Part of the Hive community and the Steem Community
- I've been with Steem and very active then in Hive. I'm the Spliterlands TV Dev for the TV aspect. We try to growing the TV network and bring new users into the game. Advertising online is very much controlled. Typically it's quite complicated and expensive. If you can reach the audience where they are, you know they're qualified, you know they want to play games because that's why they are there, so then you grow. Ultimately this is a social game so it just makes sense to build a community on Twitch where you can do that. It's a no-brainer and develop systems that make that.
- Aggroed: What new features do we need?
- I would use data and a scientific approach and so there's analysis and study and feedback and speaking to the community. Generally speaking it's always about keeping the customer happy.
- Aggroed: What do we need to do to grow the follower count?
- There's lots of tips and tricks. Networking in general. I've talked with Ron about using Twitch to create raids and share audiences between channels and so hire influencers and offer them benefits to those influencers to work with them.. to work with other gamers. It's important to reach out to people and build those relationships.
- Are you from Oklahoma
- I'm from England. I got some time off from the Queen to talk to you today.
SplinterlandsTV Clip of the Week
- r0ond0n provides update.
- I really want to shout out Nick. We pieced together some code on a shoestring budget to now having a professional production and putting this together with the website and in a custom way with our software. Sometimes you get a front end dev and a back end dev and he's good at both
- Nick: I've been programing computers since I was 4 years old.
- Aggroed: Gives a shout out to the Splinterlands' supporters.
- Then a fun opportunity to do voices for the shout out
- Diana Croft (Aggroed calls her Crofty) (voice for Splinterlands) gives the shout out to
- Spikesan1, holdmycards, Techy004, mhowii and nfoGuides
YGG | Knightav
- Splinterlands' focused DAO.
- We finished our first quest season. Winners received ownership in the DAO and we have our second kick off in one or two weeks so if you're serious about playing Splinterlands please reach out to our members you can find in the Mav chat and elsewhere.
- We are focused on the mid to hard core of Splinterlands. And as we get further into land we'll be having more.
- Excited about SPS governance kicking off and we'll start talking about how to vote on that. We'll have DAO votes for how to vote in Splinterlands and we're really excited about that!
- Aggroed: Thanks for being here. We're so happy to have YGG on board!
SPS Rewards Questions
- Why is it necessary to claim SPS rewards? Why can't this be automated? I think this makes it complicated for new players to start earning and this is just an annoyance for seasoned players.
- It possibly could be automated. This is a balance of efficiency.
- Is the team happy with the current distribution of SPS rewards now that we are starting to see data there?
- No I am not. I am not happy with what's going to silver and bronze and there's changes getting coded up. I think bots should be able to earn. Anyone that has an account should be able to earn but it should be based on what you've staked in the game.
Tower Defense Questions
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Why are Riftwatchers and Tower Defense launching at the same time? Wouldn’t it make more sense to spread things out to give players the ability to purchase both?
- Well, it's mostly because of how packed we are but Chatter anything else you want to add to that?
- Chatter: It's coming down to the timeline and how much we have in the pipeline. We're going to have new things coming up from here until mid October. This is just about the timeline.
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Aggroed said we will need to stake cards in towers to increase “power”. Is it literally card power that will be important here, or will stats/abilities/etc play a role in the tower?
- I don't know that this gets pulled into the first version of the game but it's definitely our intention that you'll need Splinterlands' cards to make yourself more powerful. It's not all decided and I don't want to spoil it but you're going to want some cards that you can stake into your tower. In terms of going to buy some things we'll allow some DEC purchases. If you're planning to get into Tower Defense, you'll want DEC and so we'll allow that and we'll give a discount on that top purchase price and we'll treat vouchers as $3.00 So you want to get DEC and vouchers so you can get your Tower Defense packs. Those things will be worth getting into. This looks like a super fun game. You'll need SPS, DEC and vouchers.
Miscellaneous
- Will Splinterlands have anything at PAX unplugged in Philadelphia this December?
- What do you think? Are we gonnna do PAX?
- Chatter: We haven't committed to that yet.
- Did anyone lose funds during the Discord hack? How did it occur?
- Chatter: We're sort of going through that and I think we're resolved. Fortunately the scam was so stupid I don't think anyone lost funds. Big shout out to Bragyr and Bulldog for getting that information out there. It was a Discord server issue but I don't know of anyone lost money.
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Why isn’t SPS/voucher utility a higher priority? I realize it is coming, but it’s been over a year now with only isolated instances of utility. Shouldn’t this have been in place before ever launching the token to begin with?
- All of your Rift Watchers is SPS. The Tower Defense is DEC, Vouchers and SPS. Yeah, I mean that's the kind of thought that has zero idea of how much goes into all of this. When we launched this we thought it would be good for the game but we didn't think it would be a 500 X increase in players. That was a huge thing we had to go deal with. We've been planning these things and we continue to go integrate this. There's still a billion dollar of tokens that can go into the validator codes and so I don't think it's a fair comment and I know you want more so we're building more and Tower Defense will be millions and millions of dollars for DEC and vouchers. It's coming it's a priority.
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As the team continues to add more projects is there going to be a clearer distinction between Splinterlands the game and Splinterlands the company?
- I dont know what distinction you hold. Splinterlands is a game and Steemmonsters Corp is a company. More and more of it will be of the Steemmonsters Corp because you guys will be running it.
Rapid Fire Questions
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QUESTION(s): Any thoughts to an Idle style game? I've been addicted to legendsofidleon recently, but maybe aspects of this will already be part of land, I think it could be an interesting way of playing thru some lore stories. Additionally, will Tower Defense have any tie in to Land?
- I don't know if Tower Defense will have tie in to land. Once Tower Defense is out .. probably Q1 or Q2, but after that's out we can look at other arcade style games.
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Question: When do you think I'll be able to add my data collection proposal?
- Haven't checked into that. We'll see. My guess is before the end of the year.
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Question: when can we use the $chests and $focus commands again in the new tavern channel?
- I don't know
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Question: Is it good luck to buy 110 packs while listening to TH?
- It's good luck to be 2K packs during Town Hall.
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Question: wen license sps rewards?
- Dev got sick so next week probably.
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Question : when will we have the whitepaper for the tower defense and RW, especially the presale details
- Next week info
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Question: Could you spoil us some new card art skin for the non-card market every townhall?
- Nate do you have any card skins to share?
- Nate: Unfortunately we're a bit of a ways from that.
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Question : Aggroed are u allways this awesome to give away awesome cards on twitch, Thanks for the Hero btw !
- Uncle Aggy likes to show up and give cards to the streamers to give to the watchers. Hopefully Ron and Chatter are doing it as well.
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QUESTION: When do we get to buy them soccer players?
- Early October
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QUESTION - Will there be refined resources available in the non card market once land launches so people can build their buildings? Would be a great voucher sink. Say 1 voucher for 50 lumber, 50 bricks, etc?
- I hope we'll be having all kinds of markets, at the very least that will be available on HIVE engine. I think there will be the activity there but we're still a ways from that.
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Question: Any ETA on when promo and reward cards will be allowed to be used in "modern" frays?
Same question for using Dr. Blight in "CL" only tournaments. It kind of makes no sense that the face of CL its not allowed in CL only tournaments- We'd like it to happen but it's about Modern to Wild so there are entire categories so the Promo card would effect all categories. We are aware of it and so it's something for the devs to work on
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Question can we change the name of vouchers to fun coupons?
- I would like a different name but it might have to be stuck bc it's already out there.
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QUESTION: can you release an update to the odds of rewards. Merits and SPS came to the pool
- Yes but we're still tweaking the stuff so get us a little bit of time.
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QUESTION: What about using gladiators in special tournaments, can we get more utility for those amazing cards?
- Gladiator tournaments seem like fun.
- The more that we focus on the bigger things without substituting that we need more people to make it happen will make it easier.
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QUESTION: Will Splinterfest be live streamed?
- Yes
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QUESTION - Will it be possible to set our daily focus to a set time? For example if I want to collect at noon everyday and I collect at 5PM it will still expire the next day at noon. This way it wont keep getting later and later each day.
- Discord Draygyn offered this: "use Splex.gg to autocollect rewards and start the new focus"
- This isn't the highest priority but it's in there.
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QUESTION: When will be the next gladiator set? Like new gladiator cards overall.
- I don't think that's planned but we should get it on the the map.
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QUESTION: Can you tell us more about asset interoperability?
- I think what you mean there within different games. All of these are going to be totally unique. When we're working with MLPSA We don't get to do what we want. I can't even if I thought it was the coolest idea that all your Splinterlands guys would be part of the league it's not up to me. I'm not trying to run this company that way.
- In terms of the games we do control, the Tower Defense there will be pieces there but we want to make sure we're honoring the people that have already contributed. So can you use your vouchers? Yes? Your DEC? Yes? Can you stake cards ? We're trying to get there.
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question are you conceding to bring back the 1 day rental?
- We will if we can
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Question Aggy have a new Passport?
- Not yet
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question: what about the WMG project? can you give us an update?
- This week I think. Can't remember my calendar is huge.
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Question: Will there be changes on ECR penalty reduction below 50% for higher league (diamond and champ) or depending on staked SPS?
- I don't know.
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question will the player ambassador program come back?
- Message Chatter
Here's the Link to the YouTube video from Splinterlands' Official YouTube Channel if you want to see the Town Hall as well for a reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LC6f8ZxHKg
If you enjoyed my post and want to try Splinterlands, please use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=rosiew
Please remember my post is not meant to be financial advice and is just my opinion.
Follow These Folks:
Splinterlands: https://peakd.com/@splinterlands/
PeakMonsters: https://peakd.com/@peakmonsters/
Monster-Curator: https://peakd.com/@monster-curator/
1Up (#OneUp): https://www.1up.zone/
Here are some great links to join as well!
Splinterlands Discord: https://discord.gg/Tw7KjNsQGs
Monster Market Discord (Monster Curator): https://discord.gg/DR3J9rfRFV
PeakD Discord (PeakMonsters as well): https://discord.gg/7mQmzZeugE
NFT Studios Discord (aka 1UP Discord #OneUp): https://discord.gg/4VYBcNuVQd
