A couple months ago, I separated my Splinterlands playing cards from the cards I rent out to other players in a bid to make things easier to manage. I think if I understood the PeakMonsters filters better, I could have been more organized but, this was working okay, as I could play on the one account, renting the many cards I need to it, while renting everything else out on the other with a few clicks.

However, over the last couple weeks, I have been trialing a rental service that is managed by @grosh, Splinterrents. It is a service that is managed through a discord bot, so it isn't the prettiest, but it does the job for what I need and when there has been issues, @grosh has been very quick to respond and rectify. It is in itself, a work in progress project and hopefully it does well, especially since in the coming six months, most of the Chaos Legion packs will be sold and there might be many looking to rent them out.

This service isn't free though and there is a 5% management fee (on top of the 5% from peakmonsters) that is updated daily and can be paid through Hive-Engine or in-game. What is handy is that it lumps the payments together, so if more than one account is managed, it is okay to pay from any of those accounts.

For me, this is a convenience thing, not a rent optimization thing, because I found that I was spending time managing my rentals that at least while I am on holidays, I don't want to be spending. This is even more the case since the rewards changes, as during the season rents were quite low so I didn't manage much, but at the end of the season they spiked heavily, meaning it was worth managing. At that point though, I was trying to optimize - not for the income, but because it was fun! Now, the rentals are much higher during the season and the spike at the end of the season is non-existent or perhaps even negative, so active management more than normal isn't needed and there is no fun in it.

But, there have been some other changes in the game rewards of late that are going to have an effect on rentals and I am yet to ascertain how much of an effect.

The first one is the shifting of the minimum rent time from 1 day to 2 days - which means that "less management" is needed by the renters, but getting the "best price" for that rental is more important. In terms of the rent bots like Splinterrents, I am not sure how that works out, but for me personally, it doesn't change things much, as I still don't want to have as constant interaction with my rental account.

However, it does change the way people play the game, as right now, the "Daily Focus" on a particular Splinter means that people will rent cards to maximize their ability to obtain Focus chests. But, with a two day rental, it means that if the next Focus is different, they will still have the cards from the previous that they aren't incentivized to use as much. For example, if I rent cards to complete a Water Focus one day, they don't help me play a Fire Focus the next. This is of course a benefit for those who have fuller decks and don't need to rent much at all, which is the point really, isn't it? - Encourage ownership.

Many of the bot accounts do not own, as their role is to maximize the rewards, so they look to rent enough of what they need to earn more than the cost of the rentals. However, with the changing of the rewards from one to two days, they will have "wasted" cards in the mix too, meaning they are going to have to recalibrate the way they play the game.

On top of this, the Energy Capture Rate (ECR) will drop at a 5x faster rate once an account has less than 50% ECR Power. This does effect me in terms of my play2earn status, because when I play, I tend to play a couple days hard and then take a long break, returning the rentals and renting out my playing cards. I do this due to time reasons and of course, who doesn't like to earn some rent money?

For example, I rented "Modern" card needs and spent a day playing hard and pushed my account from D3 into C3 in the Modern Format and then, added some "Wild" cards and pushed it into C3 in the open Wild Format. Since I suck, this took me a little over two days of playing, and at the end, my ECR was hovering around 20%. This is good for the daily players of course, but not so great for the "weekend players", but this is the thing with P2E gaming and any gaming...

Attention Capture Rate!

It is all about getting more attention being spent on the game by players and investors, which is a good thing in this case, as unlike the 99.9% of games out there, this game, we own. Yes, @aggroed, @yabapmatt, Team and investors own the business of the game, but it is us as players who own the majority of the assets of that game - where we spend our attention is valuable, to us. So, as individual players we might want to maximize our personal daily earnings, but as asset owners, we want the value of what we hold long-term to increase.

For me, the overall value of what I hold is far more significant than the daily earnings or rents I get, where a 1% increase in its value will account for months of gaming time. However, for a "renter" that is playing to earn, these values matter because it doesn't matter if the value of assets increases 10x, unless you own, it doesn't help - other than what it might do to the value of daily rewards etc.

And, on top of the Daily Focus, there is (I haven't played yet) Daily Ability Focus too, which means that there is a kind of "cross-reference" in play, so playing to the Daily Focus and the Daily Ability Focus challenges, means additional rewards. Meaning, more incentive. But, the incentive today is going to very likely be different to the incentive tomorrow, so renting to maximize day one, could mean having nothing useful to maximize day two.

Decisions!

But again, it is about ownership, right?

Playing Modern, a Champion Level Full Deck can be bought on the open market for around $5000, which is a pretty penny. Lot's of the recent promos can be added for not much more. That gives a pretty decent set of cards to play with. A Full Deck Gold Set, is about $2800 worth. I am not sure how many packs are needed in order to get a full deck, but at $4000 dollars per 1000 packs (about 2600 currently if buying DEC and then in-game purchase), it might be better to buy to play off the open market to kit out a full deck. Of course, there is no chance of picking up those GFLs to sell for more cards if that is what you are after.

However, because all of these cards are still in print and there are ~6M packs still remaining to be sold, the rental on these isn't high, so it is a decision to play, or rent and hold until these cards drop out of print and the value starts to increase on the better ones.

While all of this might be irrelevant or minutiae for many people who aren't interested in these aspects, the gaming world is changing rapidly as Web3 starts to gain momentum. This means that ownership of our experience becomes more important and due to the incentives provided, we will start paying more attention to these aspects.

The ecosystem is the Value

Because you are reading this on Hive where I am also a user, owner and investor, it is even more important for people like me, as this gaming loop of Splinterlands feeds back into the platform loop of Hive, so paying attention to my investments on either side, supports the other. Web3 is the incentivized web experience, with ownership as the foundation. As gaming and business change to leverage it, platforms like Hive get attention automatically.

Just think - here I am spending a couple hours writing a Post on Peakd to submit to the Hive blockchain, about a game that is built on and transacts across the Hive blockchain, with assets that are secured by that Hive blockchain, that can earn through P2E gaming, airdrops, rental income, Liquidity Pools and several other ways - all managed on Hive, through multiple interfaces that connect to Hive. I don't think there is another game on earth that has this kind of reach and connectivity and definitely not one where all of this is generated by the gaming community itself.

There is definitely no other platform like Hive out there that can manage this kind of interactivity and, not be dedicated to a single game, but provide a platform that could host thousands of games similarly, as well as video content, blogs, exchanges and who knows what else.

I find it incredible that people don't find Hive incredible.

But, if your "Daily Focus" is yourself - you may just miss the future of everything else.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]