After missing one Town Hall meeting, and with lots of questions rising, it was normal this Town Hall would be pretty packed with information, and it was.
But before we delve into that, let's note that the 5-year-long COLONY airdrop for holders of staked GLX and SPS has started. As announced before, the airdrop is on an exponential curve, meaning fewer tokens airdropped at the beginning and more at the end. Here's the schedule, for those who haven't had the chance to see it:
Screenshot from support article here.
Back to the Town Hall, which has nothing to do with the previous information, but it was announced on all Splinterlands-related discord servers.
I'm expecting this year will feel very long for many Splinterlands users, especially if we start having a full-fledged bull run in the second part of the year, and Splinterlands doesn't move with the market.
I believe this period is both good and bad for Splinterlands. It is bad because long-term investors in the game will become more dominant as they pick up the assets dropped in haste by those who can't take it anymore.
It is good because it is a sort of "cleansing" period of the ecosystem, needed to get rid of the bad apples and "impurities". I prefer cleansing because of the game reference, but you can call it fasting... 😀
As Matt reminded us, we had the same kind of period in 2019-2020, before the 2021 craze.
It is obvious Matt is trying to recreate the same kind of scenario, with Splinterlands assets going up at the end of the bull market. But 2025 will be different from 2021, and I say that hoping it will be different, and not in a bad way.
Launching SPS in 2021 on BSC, the airdrop, and the lack of assets to buy sent existing tokens and assets to the moon, but also attracted the wrong kind of crowd, in my opinion. Most of them are long gone, but their main reason for joining was to pump their bags at the end of the bull market, not to stick around when things get harder through the bear market.
Users blame bots and want to see them banned from various places. The truth is bots are tools and everyone will use them at some point, maybe not in Splinterlands. It's the PEOPLE we attract we need to be cautious about. The kind of people who make/made the atmosphere in the Mavericks channel toxic for no reason, I hear (I don't frequent that channel). The kind that only sees rewards and likes nothing else about Splinterlands.
From that point of view, the focus on the new player experience before marketing Splinterlands heavily seems logical, and hopefully, it will attract more players than DeFi people. The timing of when NPE will be ready and marketing will start seems about right too, probably in Q4. People will have more crypto funds to invest, but it would help if they could attract people from outside crypto too, regular players. Fiat doesn't go through the bull-bear cycle and pays salaries.
A good piece of news Matt shared with us, in my opinion, was that he's not focused on attracting more VCs into Splinterlands. This was a mistake they've made in the past (in my opinion), but he understands very well the risk of bringing in VCs into the company and wants to avoid them. He also avoided saying how many months of runway the company has (which I believe is a good approach), but he mentioned that they are currently in no danger.
What I didn't like as a landowner, was the fact Land doesn't currently have a full dev assigned to it (but has 2 part-time senior devs from the team for Land 1.6 tasks, namely the Grain-DEC LP and prefix titles), and given the updates, I don't have high hopes for Land 2.0 launching by the year-end anymore. NPE is expected in early Q4, and probably the next core set in Q1, beginning of Q2 2025. So, Land 2.0 either goes out in December 2024 or, more likely, Q2-Q3 2025.
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