Hello Splinterfans!
It has been over a week since the new ranked battles format has dropped and I thought I would give my feedback after playing for the last week.
doing battle in silver II
I was very excited to test out the new ranked play as the game was getting quite stale for me. Even though I think I have a pretty good gold deck (in wild it gets to Diamond I), I was spending most of my season in silver league trying to get into gold where I want to play and utilise my deck fully.
Are bots and battle helpers used in modern? Maybe I am a bad player and am missing some meta rebellion cards, but I think either that or the algo is punishing me with my low win rates when I was playing under the old ranked system and it taking so long to get into the gold league.
Therefore, it has been some fresh air that you can now play your cards with all abilities regardless of the league they are in. So it has inticed me back into playing more games. It has been fun because I have had a higher win ratio and more unbalanced games I guess.
When people play, for us to enjoy something, I think we need to have a higher than 50% win rate to keep us interested and motivated. Otherwise, it just becomes frustrating and not satisfying.
However, with the changes, there is also the flip side that even in bronze or silver, you can face some almost maxed out decks that you have no chance against. Do you hit the brick wall faster?
I still didn't make it into gold yet, with 5 days of the season left. So it hasn't helped me in that way.
Before, I would upgrade cards to gold level, but now that I can use cards from all levels, I am incentivised to max upgrade, even though this is outside of my planned budget. Yet we still have a league structure, but I cannot play in my desired league anymore. It is a bit of a weird situation in that way.
facing a maxed out Quix the Devious in silver II
The current ranked battle earnings seem also pretty bad as they seem more based on how much SPS you have staked instead of how much you have upgraded your deck. It seems we have just flicked from making leveling up your deck important to now the SPS token is important. Is there any balance that can be reached?
my current earn rate in modern
I do think it is important to have staked SPS to get earnings, but there seems to be no consideration of your CP anymore which is an important factor for real players and less for bot players. With the leagues gone and unless you can get to diamond and champion, will you really get very much earnings? Something is not balancing here.
Are we just having a case of power creep because there are so many cards and sets? For an established game like Splinterlands, this could be in some ways expected. However, now you would need a quite powerful deck to play in bronze and silver if you want to do well and have fun. This was the same beforehand I guess too, so maybe there isn't so much change there.
Summary
It is maybe too early to give a final verdict, there seems to be many pros and cons to the new ranked play system and it seems to have split the community like I haven't seen before.
Whatever you introduce, there will be some who will like it and some who don't. I think the main thing is to make a fair eco-system and support real players as much as possible and probably there in lies the real crux of the matter, bots are still having a big negative effect on the game and you can't enhance one thing to entice new players and keep existing ones happy whilst you have the elephant in the room.
Thanks for reading.
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Title image created in Canva using images from source.
All images used from source unless otherwise stated.
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