Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge: Splinterlands Learning Journey

The topic of this week's Community Engagement Challenge is "My Splinterlands learning journey". This is definitely an interesting and relevant topic, as there is so much a new player needs to learn so they fully grasp the full picture of Spl's economy and the game itself, that it often might seem as an unsurmountable obstacle to new player onboarding and retention. Especially when I started, it really took a lot of motivation, digging in Discord, reading PeakD articles and most importantly following as many SPL creators on youtube as you can, to be able to acquire enough information to make adequate decisions related to how to spend your time and resources in Splinterlands. Let's start with how I started playing Splinterlands and my journey so far.

I have been an active gamer with for more than 25 years, and I am also very loyal to the games I enjoy playing. The franchises which have shaped my gaming tastes the most are Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo. I played World of Warcraft for 18 years, and I'm still playing Hearthstone to this day, almost 10 years after its launch. In the beginning of 2020 I got interested in Crypto, even though I knew about BTC and Eth for years prior to that, I did not really have the desire to do my research and get involved, which was obviously a mistake in retrospect. Anyway, I got into crypto, started building my portfolio and naturally I got acquainted with a few gaming tokens (so I did know at that point that web3 gaming was an actual thing). I did check out a few games but they were nowhere near the quality which would make me play them. One day I was talking with a good friend of mine who was into crypto for a few years longer than me, and he mentioned to me he was playing this cool game called Splinterlands. I then remembered I had heard the name somewhere but I did not really make an effort to check it out, so when he mentioned it to me again, I decided to have a look at it. I immediately recognized it was much more than an idle clicker, so I asked him for his referral code, registered and bought a Spellbook. This was how my journey began at the end of January 2022.

So, I have been actively playing the game for more than 3 years now. It has been a very interesting experience as a whole since the Bear Market has been rather rough but I definitely do not give up easily, and as I said, if I enjoy playing a game, it is very hard for me to stop playing it and direct my attention elsewhere. Something that really helped me persevere is definitely the community. I began watching all the youtube stars from day 1 basically and I really enjoyed the content they provided - SteveR, Infidel, Aftersound, Gank and Walkingkeys, Tales from the Crypt Mancer, Hawks, Gathering the Magic, Bulldog, Br0nzedragon - just to name a few. It is really encouraging and somewhat surprising that the game has managed to keep all these content creators engaged and providing content on a regular basis. This definitely helps a lot. Another thing that also helps the community stay engaged are the regular updates we've been receiving from the company in the form of Town Halls.

As you can see I have spent quite some time playing the game since I began my journey. I do my daily 20-25 battles every day religiously and I am currently residing in the Champion Modern league. I am really glad we managed to get a really human-friendly league since Splinterlands had a neutral stance on botting for quite a long time but with the help of a proposal passed by the community through a DAO vote, we managed to carve out a safe space for the people who wanted to enjoy the game in a bot-free environment. I am one of those people who definitely enjoy playing the game, and I'll be frank, I felt very oppressed by the sophisticated bots we had in the game prior to the change. Thankfully those days of oppression are behind us now.

Let's get back to the topic, even tough I did somewhat touch on some aspects of it in the previous paragraph. The biggest hurdle I faced when I started playing the game was definitely finding all the information I needed to advance in the ranks and also understand the economy of the game and the way everything operated in one place, specifically in the game itself. I think that, since then, the team has made significant progress in the systematization of all relevant information as well as making it more readily available to new and old players alike. The support articles we have now -> https://support.splinterlands.com/hc/en-us provide a ton more information than they used to, there are now also in-game tips, and finally the introduction of the new campaign mode has been a very significant step forward for the engagement and retention of new players. Of course, all these, are still just scratching the surface. The truth is it just takes time to get to know all aspects of Splinterlands, and that's totally fine. I don't think anyone should have the expectation they can master the game and its economy in a day. Even when you have most resources in one place and available, anyone interested has to go over them, there's no way around that. And even then, watching the videos of your favorite SPL content creators as well as asking about stuff you're not very sure about in Discourd is still highly advisable.