Hey everyone, thanks for checking out my post! It's time to make another Splinterlands blog post for this weeks Social Media Challenge.
It's a Thursday now, and last Tuesday there was another maintenance window, it has really bad timing of landing exactly on my playing hours every single time 😅 because the maintenance starts at 17:30 my time and when I'm lucky it's over at 19:00 but the team warned us this time is going to be a long one, so my energy was a little wasted because I couldn't play to keep it under 50 energy until the next day, luckily my guild buddy @estebam was up later and put me in to the next brawl! 😃

So, this weeks Social Media Challenge is the same as last weeks:

🔥 Share Your Most Remarkable Splinterlands Moments: Do you possess a battle of epic proportions that deserves to be seen by all? Have you crafted something extraordinary within the Splinterlands realm? Maybe you've got profound thoughts, insights, or strategies related to stats, cards, abilities, or gameplay that are waiting to be shared? We want it all, and we want it to be nothing short of AMAZING!

To find out how you can participate in the @splinterlands challenge yourself, check out this post here.

And I have to say, I was amazed when I logged back in the next day and clicked BATTLE, everything looks different, actually I was kinda shocked! 🤣

The funny thing was, on my very FIRST battle, right after the update, who did I face?

It was my best Splinterlands friend @estebam!! 🤣
Still shocked by the new look, with literally everything changed (it looks awesome by the way!) I thought O SHIT now I don't know where to look and he's going to kick my ass!!!

Good thing for me, he had the same problem so I totally kicked his ass 😋

SPS Validators going live

So I don't have enough in-depth crypto knowledge to fully explain this but what it comes down to is that the SPS transactions are now longer being processed by the team in one decentralized server, but will be processed by all validators out there, everyone who have bough a validator licence can now run their own server, start processing all transactions so SPS becomes truly decentralized. Peakmonsters is working on a service in which you can stake your licence for a 'cheap' fee for people who don't want to have to rent or own their own server, but I think this will centralize things more... 😏 but again, I'm the first to admit I don't know nearly enough about this!

Matchmaking & Team Create Overhaul

Seeking Opponent

So, when you now click the BATTLE button, a new 'Seeking Opponent' screen appears which you can minimize so you can look trough your played battles and do other action in-game, once you have found an opponent, the screen automatically gets full size on the team selection screen again, which looks completely different, but first I want to say these waiting screens look so cool!
You also get tips in the bottom right corner of the screen, especially helpful for new players!

Enemy Found

SO, again it's something else entirely but it surely looks nice, the rule set explanation is right below the rule sets, no need to hover over them anymore, great work team!

Matchmaking Screen

This screen gave me some stress at first! 🤣 OMG where do I look!?
I think it looks great though and is probably better on phone now, but I'm a PC player so I don't know... everything you can select is now on the left and makes it easy to select or deselect filters, notice the 'remove' icon below your selected cards to remove them from your team, I didn't notice this at first lol... after about an hour playing I got more accustomed to the new screen, and for new players this doesn't matter because they will just learn to use this. 🙂

So, I could see in the recent battles my opponent likes to use Gladiator cards, with the Melee Mayhem ruleset I hoped he would not go heavy magic so I made a team to hopefully counter this and evade the heavy blows gladiators have, that worked, even though I had a slight level disadvantage I totally kicked his ass 😁

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

Battle Results

This is still the same, nothing to improve here I think! 😀
The rewards are nice, even with the low SPS prices we have today it's like earning 3 cents for having fun while playing a game, and I'm not even a top player!

Conclusion

I think this is another awesome update and we have had so many, @splinterlands has been called dead so many times but yet we're still here and improving every time, the most important thing for me is I'm still having FUN after 3,5 years playing almost every day, earnings are less important, it's a nice EXTRA but never should be your nr.1 reason for 'investing' in to a game, because after all, it's still a game.

I want to thank the entire team for all the work they are doing, VONAK!

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.

Also, when you require any help to get you started,let me know, I'm here to advice and guide new players and maybe I can help you with card delegations too!

Have a great day!