Yup, absolutely. You don't have to do a single thing on the Hive social media environment if you don't want to, and many won't. Don't get mad at the Splinterlands team for choosing superior connectivity and power versus mediocre at best. I've experienced perhaps 50 battles where the Steem chain had poor performance and it rejected my battle and made me lose simply because the Steem blockchain has poor performance. As a platform owner/developer, I would be pissed and immediately explore other options. They knew they didn't have to look far at all because when the current Hive witnesses were running Steem, there wasn't any performance issues at all besides the ones around HF21.