My Take on Proposal 34 (and why I am against it)
The SPS governance system was rolled out recently, and we have received the first (non-test) proposal to vote on - Proposal 34 - Split Ranked Battle Reward Pools By League. One of the coolest things about the DAO system is that we get to discuss and debate these sorts of governance proposals, and I thought I would take part in the discussion by making a blog post about my analysis of the proposal. So remember - this is a discussion. Have anything to add, or things that you think I may have missed? Feel free to comment below, whether you agree or disagree with my position! Depending on how this goes, it may become a recurring series of blogs on the various Splinterlands proposals that are up for vote.
You can probably already guess my opinion from the title of this post. To summarize - I think that Prop 34 has great intentions, but it has a couple of fatal flaws. In this post I have listed out three ways that I think the proposal will negatively impact the game, as well as a few suggestions for improvement. I do have to preface this by saying that everything in this post is just speculation on my part about what will happen if this proposal is passed. It is educated speculation, but still speculation. Current early voting on Proposition 34 is overwhelmingly in favor of it passing, which is why I thought it would be important to put my thoughts out there. If the vote continues on that way then I hope that my predictions turn out to be wrong. Anyways, on to my thoughts!
Reward Distribution
Proposal 34 weights rewards heavily in favor of a small number of players at the top. According to data shared by the Splinterlands team, as of the end of the season there were 823 players who made it to Champion in the Wild format, and just 202 who made it into Champion in Modern. This is out of approximately 280,000 accounts playing in Wild and 180,000 playing in Modern. So what we would see out of this proposal is 30% of the ranked rewards being distributed to approximately 0.1-0.3% of the player base.
I should note that this is based on the END of the season, where rating inflation should be at its highest. In other words the distribution would be even more skewed earlier in the season, because the rewards pools are filled evenly over the course of the season. Just to be clear - I have no problem with a greater percentage of SPS rewards being distributed to players at higher ratings using higher levelled cards. I DO have a issue with the degree of concentration implied by the changes described in Proposition 34. And while I have heard some speculation that the increase in rewards for higher leagues will cause more players to be playing in higher leagues, my belief is that the opposite will occur, which brings us to my next point.
League Populations
The number of players playing in the highest leagues is likely to decrease, not increase, as a result of the proposed changes. Ratings in Splinterlands more according to the Elo system, or at least something very close to it. That means that you earn more points for beating higher rated players, and also lose less points for losing to higher rated players. The result of this rating system is that player ratings will have a normal distribution, with most of the players grouped around the average rating and a smaller number of players in the "tails" of the rating distribution.
Anyone who has competed for a leaderboard spot in any league should be able to attest to this - at the high end of the ratings spectrum, it is much harder to move up in rating since wins give you less rating points and losses have a much higher rating penalty. An important point here is that players (in aggregate, at least) do not increase or decrease in rating just because they want to. Thanks to the matchmaking system, the distribution of players across ratings is a function of the number of players participating, the rating inflation over the course of the season and the amount of rating points leaving the system at each season reset.
One of the stated objectives of the rewards changes is to encourage players to consolidate accounts by incentivizing players with multiple accounts to combine collections and level up cards. I believe that the changes to rewards will achieve that goal and more cards will combined into higher level ones held in fewer accounts. However, a smaller number of accounts playing each season will also mean that fewer players are on the tail ends. This means even less players in Champion and that rewards would be even more concentrated among an even smaller number of accounts. And when the stakes are higher, then there are enormous incentives to reach that Champion league rating threshold, which leads me to my final point.
Integrity of Competition
Anyone who had been following events in Splinterlands should be aware that there have been serious allegations of win-trading in ranked battles, both for leaderboard positions and placement into leagues. Proposal 34 introduces a huge incentive to whoever can get to Champion first. While I agree that players should be incentivized to reach higher leagues, having such a large reward based on a single event means that there is also an enormous incentive to game the rating system - for example, by attempting to find ways to evade the matching algorithm and mass queue up games with a bot farm at off-peak times, outright win-trading with other top players, or some other way of exploiting the rating system.
As a final example of a possible issue with the system, consider this scenario. For example, if it takes three days at the start of the season for anyone to get to champ, then the player who gets there first will receive the lion's share of three whole day's worth of pooled SPS rewards. My understanding of the Rshare system is that if there is nobody in a Champion league for more than a day, then the very first person to get there and win a battle will earn a disproportionate amount of the SPS pool allocated to the Champion league in a few battles, even if they have a miniscule ECR at the time. With the proposed changes, the stakes become even greater than they are currently.
Good Idea, Poor Implementation
As I mentioned at the start, I see what Proposal 34 is attempting to do - encourage consolidation of cards and play at higher league levels - and I agree that it is a desirable outcome. However, the details of the Splinterlands rating and league system make this a proposal which (in my opinion) will have unintended side effects. Yes, players will try to get to a higher league. But in practice I suspect that the lower number of accounts playing will mean both that fewer players actually make it into higher leagues and that the rewards will end up being even more concentrated than the current distribution of players would lead you to expect, leading to high incentives to cheat the system.
While I do wish that there would be a more even distribution of SPS rewards in this proposal, the real dealbreaker for me is the interaction of segmented rewards pools with the ranking fluctuations and league populations over the course of a season - particularly on the high end. I think that there are a few possible minor tweaks that would do a great deal to alleviate my concerns. What I think is probably the easiest option would be to combine the Diamond and Champion league pools, making it possible for all of the rewards in the SPS reward pool to be earned from day 1 of the season. But there are also other options - for example, the rate that the Champion league SPS pool is filled could be scaled to increase over the course of the season. The Champion league could also be changed to include the top x% of players participating in ranked matches instead of having a hard rating threshold (and really, this move to percentiles instead of hard rating could be applied to ALL the leagues). The distribution changes of Proposition 34 should allow a reasonable number of players to earn from the all levels of the pool, especially from the highest one, on day 1 or the season - either through changes to the way the pools are structured or through changes to the way the league system is implemented.
One final note I would make is that we should not vote yes to a proposal in hopes of passing the proposal and "fixing" it with a future one. That approach is fine for proposals which have minor issues which could benefit from future refinement. It is not fine for proposals which have potentially serious implementation problems which are time-sensitive. Future proposals are not guaranteed to pass, or even to come up to a vote. And even if they do get passed, then the voting and implementation process takes time. In this situation my belief is that the potential damage to the game would be severe, would be time-sensitive, and would far outweigh the potential gain.
Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:
Splinterlands Economics: Supply - A look into Supply, and how understanding it can help us in Splinterlands.
Striking Out - Using Tenyii Striker in Battle! - Last week's battle challenge, featuring Tenyii Striker!
Splinterlands Economics: Markets - A discussion of markets, and their role in Splinterlands.
Thinking about giving Splinterlands a try but haven't signed up yet? Feel free to use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=bteim, and be sure to reach out to me if you have any questions!
All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails made in Canva.
Thanks for sharing! - @yonilkar
Thanks for your opinion.