So the Splinterland's Land whitepaper finally came out yesterday... The Secret of Praetoria and there is a LOT of dynamics to take in.
I'm focussing here on just my initial reaction to some of the main points, i.e. what it will mean for me as a TRACT holder (100 plots) and what I'll need to manage my land going forwards.
Land Surveys and Starter Packages
Thankfully we managed to veto the insulting proposal that investors spend yet more DEC to boos their changes of getting a Legendary plot during the survey stage, so that just is what it is - for free and with the same percentage chance of getting a Legendary, Epic, Rare or Common plot.
Personally I'd like to see a guarantee of getting at least one Legendary plot for having a Tract but I don't think that's in the proposal anywhere?!
There are THREE Starter Packages - Building in a Box, Time Vault and Unstable Totem
These may be prettified gamified assets but they all just essentially give you boosts to production in the early phases of gameplay.
And let's face it - this is glorfied DEFI with perty NFTs BUT the early days are when the prices of whatever perty resources are produced are going to have the highest value, and the it's downhill forever after.
So I think buying all three for every plot you have working is going to be worth it.
These are 10K a pop so that's 30K per plot, and 1.5M DEC potentially for 50 plots - I'm aiming for half initially.
Power Sources and DEC staking
Summoners have been sacked off and in place we have Power Batteries - these are 5K a pop, but including in the Building in a Box, so no extra cost there which makes that starter package worth it IMO!
And we'll also need DEC to stake.... 50K per plot for max cards...
So for 50 plots that is 2.5M DEC.
That total amount of DEC - 4M is doable pretty easily for me by the time land is released, it should just stack from the rentals I've got... BUT it doesn't inspire me to buy more cards... I'd rather make sure I've got the DEC in waiting ready for LAND, it also makes buying DEC batteries for the early stages appealing.
Card Power
Higher CP cards yield massive boosts to production time....
A gold legendary is 10 times as efficient as a regular common, this isn't as much as I'd expected, but the trend is certainly there.
No role for SPS
I feel we've been a bit mugged of with SPS on the back of this white paper - it has absolutely NO functionality, in fact it's the other way around - you can specify that monsters mine SPS.
I'm sure we were told (misinformed) that SPS would play a significant role in Land staking.... but no we've been blindsided here.
Final thoughts...
There is a lot more to land than what's above, in fact it all seems quite complex, but I guess there are several stages being gone into.
Overall it's about 60% of what I expected, RUNI seem like a very good buy as they provide a 100% boost to all monsters if staked to one plot.
I am VERY disappointed to not see summoners or SPS providing any production boosts I would have thought these would be natural partners for such functionality from a purely gaming perspective.
But this is all very complex!
Overall not a bad WP, it holds together.