New Season, New Rewards, How Does It Work?
So earlier today Splinterlands announced a new reward system! Lets go through em. (TL:DR and link to official post at the bottom)
Starting from the next season (30th Oct) the minimum and maximum rewards you can get from ranked battle will be tied to your current league. So if you have under 1k power but 1700 rating, you'll get the same reward as if you had 399 rating, which is the highest rating in the bronze 3 bracket. (think its about 0.2 DEC or something like that per win) Similarly, if you win and are at 250 rating, your reward is based on being at 250 rating as its in the middle of the bronze 3 tier.
I apologize in advance for using bronze 3 as the benchmark, but its probably the easiest to visualize.
Its quite a big change, since DEC is no longer purely tied to your rating, it basically it removes any incentive to sit around at bronze 3 or 2 and farm over 1k rating for DEC. God bless whoever is going for the leaderboards though. They're also gonna be earning less per win too.
Secondly, loot chests, which you get from quest and end of season rewards, have an updated drop table and will also be tied to your league. For bronze, they can no longer earn DEC from quests and end of season rewards and they will get credits instead. The percentage breakdown is in the table below.
As of the time of writing, 1 DEC is equal to 7.726 Credits. While I understand why it had to be done, especially with bots farming in bronze and such, I'm kind of curious whats the minimum number of credits you can get from a chest, because someone is probably gonna get REAL confused why they managed get what is essentially 0.12 DEC if they pull a 1 credit reward.
But the more interesting change is to the Card rewards from chests. That is a hell of a drop from the original 50%, especially since Bronze and Novice get 1 chest for their daily quests. Well, if you needed anymore incentive to try and rent your way to silver, here it is.
Personal thoughts
Personally I do like the change, in the long-term it'll be healthier for the game with everyone disincentivised from sitting around in Bronze every season. Though it does mean I myself need to go looking around for decks I can use in silver and the lazy person in me is gonna miss the sight of getting like 3-6 DEC a win even while in Bronze 3. (If an actual person can get this much, imagine a bot farm, there are bots that have higher ratings than i do)
Wait, you ain't complaining about the new system?
Why would I? It hasn't even started yet. I'll give it a season or two to settle in and see how it affects people, myself and my friends i brought into the game included, especially in bronze, and would recommend you do the same. Personally I might try spending a bit more time in bronze as well before moving up to see how much i can get in credit rewards and see if it matches up with what we could originally get from the chests.
TL:DR
Bronze/Novice earns credits instead of DEC and less chance for cards from loot chest. Battle wins tied to current league (so power up) and it'll probably be better in the long run for the game. If you wanna see the announcement yourself, link below:
https://peakd.com/splinterlands/@splinterlands/game-economy-and-reward-updates