The theme of this week's Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge is about the learning curve of players in the NFT card game Splinterlands. The main focus is on the player's own journey, but as I believe this theme has already been discussed before, I decided to approach it in a comparative way, the journey before and how the journey is today. But of course, I will try to add new details to the player's journey, based on the theme's suggestions, such as: Greater difficulty and mechanics that took time to learn, a tip for the past and present and much more. Come check it all out now!
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[ENGLISH VERSION]
What was the Learning Journey like?
In this journey at the beginning of Splinterlands, when I had my first contact with the game, everything was very difficult. I believe that this difficulty has nothing to do with Splinterlands alone, but with everything new that you encounter, there is a learning curve that, after understanding, you look back and it seems like everything was easy. Initially, there were no great tutorials available, like there are today with the academy and the mini guides at the top of the pages, which made it difficult to understand how to play.
As intuitive as the game is, the issue of deck building and which cards to have was a big problem, because all the cards were very expensive, so you couldn't test to know which ones actually worked. Even renting cards wasn't very appealing, because it wasn't clear how much you could earn by renting cards, since there weren't as many tools as there are today. Just like any card game, it takes a while to understand what each card does and the combos.
A big help at that time were the deck guide videos for certain elements, where YouTubers made content about which were the best cards to have in each deck, and especially in my case the deck videos for beginners since I didn't have a collection yet. The problem is that as much as the content helped, some cards in that guide were very expensive, and evolving cards was even more expensive, so I ended up staying in bronze for a long time, because I didn't have the confidence to take that extra step and didn't have the tools to evaluate whether it was worth it or not. Today there are some interesting videos for beginners, like this one from bronzedragon, which shows the way to continue progressing in the game!
The people who managed to move up to the other leagues did so because they had the resources to rent or buy cards, and they tested strategies until they found one that worked for them at the lowest cost to stay in high leagues. For a beginner who had no idea, it was a very difficult start. Also, since most people rented cards, the feeling of ownership that is one of the pillars of collectible card games was not as present.
How is the Journey going today?
Nowadays, the entire path is more simplified. The biggest change for any new player was the addition of the campaign mode. In it, players learn all the game's content little by little and in a well-instructed way, without the need to search for content until they find something that is useful. They also receive some basic cards, to generate that feeling of ownership in the first few days of the player's contact with Splinterlands.
Another big change is the tools. Today you can rent an entire deck that another player has put together, without having to think so much about how to put together a deck and which cards to choose. There are websites like Splintercards, which have several calculators for you to evaluate the cards and much more. In the next Splinterlands, today you have more filter options and a more modern and clean interface that makes choosing cards much easier.
Finally, over time the Splinterlands team itself has also been developing and improving the game's Docs, making it quite complete, presenting details about gameplay, cards, rewards, guild, game tokens, land and the platform in general, being another place of information for new players.
A negative point is that today I see fewer content creators engaged with the game than before. But there are still Splinterlands creators to this day, and in the web3 gaming niche, it's quite rare to see creators talking about a game for so many years, since most ceases to exist in a short time, while Splinterlands has been available since 2018.
