Hey everyone! Time goes by REALLY fast, my holiday is coming to an end - in fact today is my last day off! But what I mean is time goes by so damn fast in general, we're old before we know it!

In three days, four years ago I made my first Splinterlands account, it was @nozem, and a couple of days after, I made my second account - this one - because back then, we had a different energy system and basically it wasn't very rewarding to drain more than 30% of your energy because every battle, your rewards got lower...

My fresh start in Splinterlands

I started my ranked battles, back then we earned DEC for the battles we won, and the cards we could find in chests were pretty valuable, and not soul bound like they are now.
I remember pulling a Legendary card worth $40 in my first week with my $10 account 🤑 it was Ancient Lich.

With some other players in the Guild called Non Fungible Gaming where I played other games with, mainly League of Kingdoms, we started a Splinterlands Guild and I managed it (and still do) giving an extra layer to a great game already - a nice community.

Back then, I didn't knew the importance of the different set releases and all that, Untamed almost sold out, and later Dice also, but I was still learning everything so I did buy some separate cards but no packs.

Of course, when the rewards are this high it gets to a point where it's no longer sustainable and people find ways to exploit this and ruin it for everyone, and the bot farms arrived leeching funds from the Splinterlands economy into their own pockets, taking profit is never wrong but there's a difference in taking profit and leeching.

So the nerfs started, they NEEDED to start for the game to survive, there's always a delicate line between earnings and sustainability in the long run, and I was loving every aspect of the game so I was fine with it, I just kept on grinding and growing my deck.

When Chaos Legion launched, it was the time for me to finally get some affordable archons and level my deck up to Silver League, where I remained for most of my Splinterlands time.

With the collaboration with the Wasder app two years ago, we had an inflow of new players so we decided to start a second Splinterlands guild, funded by Non Fungible Gaming, to help and guide new players earn more together, the influx and excitement was short lived and the second guild got inactive again but since a couple of months I can happily say we have found a nice friendly and helpful second group of players to bundle our forces and kick ass in brawls.

Splinterlands in my daily life

So over the years, Splinterlands has became a part of my life really, with all the things to do besides playing I mentioned before such as making blogs like this, I got a side hobby to fund my deck a little extra by collecting cans and bottles from the streets for the deposit money.

I'm also the guilds leader for both splinterlands guilds, managing the guild, talking to players and advising and helping new players.

I do my ranked battles every day, the only thing that changed since the new modern rotation is I now have even ANOTHER account, so I can let Archmage and XBot manage my wild decks, so I have enough time to manually playing one Silver level account in Modern.

Looking at my two account profiles I'm at a whopping 38.000 battles in both leagues combined! Most of the first ~25k was all me manually playing but I couldn't keep this going so good thing there are bots as well.

When you're a new player and want some help, our guild is definitely the right place for you, I wrote tons of explainer articles for new players before.

The slow, but steady growth

When you're serious about something, commitments comes easy - at least it does for me, but one can only keep going for multiple years if something is FUN, no rewards can beat the FUN factor because one day you will get bored and find excuses to skip that day and before you know it, the game gets abandoned.

I started with two $10 accounts, and only 1000 battle power maybe, slowly grinding and battling while having fun.

For the sake of this post I was checking my total SPS stake across my two accounts, and WOW I did not realize before I have another milestone to celebrate, I crossed the 150k total SPS staked!!! 😀

One day hopefully we look back at today's value and laugh about how low it was, but even now $1000 in the governance token of my favorite game is awesome.

the 1000 battle power that I once started with, grew to just over 1.1 MILLION power in total.

Splinterlands and Hive

When I first started with playing Splinterlands, I received a Hive account as well, but all I did was playing and making posts, and extracting what I would earn to put in to the game.

Then one day I was listening to a The Peoples Guild podcast with @azircon where he explained how hive works, and why splinterlands players should be more engaging to hive as a whole, it was that podcast that opened my eyes and I stopped extracting, growing my staked hive called Hive Power so I can upvote other peoples post as well and diversify my posts to not only Splinterlands related content but now I'm also making content about my newly found sports love: cycling on my mountain bike!

I want to encourage everyone in doing this, a strong hive community is good for Splinterlands as well, and the ability to earn real money with making blog posts is just awesome and a good way to learn English when you're not a native speaker like me.

Plus, making blog posts is fun!

When you're a Splinterlands player and don't know The Peoples Guild podcasts yet, you should check it out, you can listen to it on YouTube as well as Spotify 🙂

My plans for the future

I really hope we get another bull cycle like the one in 2021 in Splinterlands, because now everyone IS ready for it, and I also hope the guilds will be reworked.

Combining this: because now both of our guilds are not fully filled with active players I sincerely hope we can find new, active and excited players to help us grow and become a part of our small NFG Guild group of online friends!

Because I believe in the potential this game can have, also with the land part of the game creating one big ecosystem I am still investing some personal funds in to my land monthly, it's slow and expensive... but as you can see, with commitment - things can get huge!

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Have a great day!