<aside> 🗒️ (notes from an internal discussion at gangbusters.io by @thebrandonwu)

</aside>

I was intrigued by our discussions on retired assets and thought I’d see if I can find any examples of this from existing crypto games. Still early in the process. Here’s one example: Prince Julian from Splinterlands

This card was nerfed in 2020-01 (https://ecency.com/splinterlands/@splinterlands/balance-and-development-updates). Note no mentioning of devaluing the card in the comments.

I could’t find any pricing info on Prince Julian from around that time (before/after the nerf). One data point points to 180 untamed packs in 2019-12.

Price of untamed packs: hard to find. From their Kickstarter in Oct 2019, $5 gets you a GOBLIN CHEF STARTER PACK, $10 gets you that + a sticker + 4 untamed packs. Assume the sticker is worth $1, an untamed pack at that time is worth about $1.

So let’s say a Prince Julian was worth $180, based on the two pieces of data above.

In Feb 2020 after the nerf, the card is going for $499

Price of this card today is at $579, or $2450 for a gold version (https://peakmonsters.com/market?card=Prince Julian&edition=Promo). Note that the price today is heavily influence by other factors - not a great data point for the purpose of looking at the nerf.

There’s one discussion I could find on the Discord where the player complained about a nerf to another card that happened at the same time. It seemed to get resolved fairly quickly.

I asked on their Discord about cards being nerfed this morning. Only one reply so far and it suggests players aren’t that bothered.

I think player expectations has a lot to do with this. Players come into the game with the expectations that the cards should be balanced, so when the developer makes changes to keep the game balanced/fun, players are ok with it. They likely bought the card not because it’s OP but because it’s fun/unique/rare (most probably won’t know if a card is OP until the card has been in play for some time). If a card turned out to be OP after some time, the community expects it to be nerfed. There were quite a few comments about how the nerf was expected.

Players expect the game to be balanced, and that expectation helps regulate effects of tweaks as players are expecting buffs and nerfs to happen and have priced that into consideration. When knowing an OP card will be nerf’ed down the line, players would pay a lot less for the “OPness” of a card.

It also benefits the players to keep the game balanced (they want the game to be good). A better game = more players coming in = higher value of what players own.