Splinterlands Scandal! We Are LOCKED Out Of Silver LEADERBOARD!
I guess today it's clickbait time, but also not clickbait at all. It is actually almost impossible to climb up into the leaderboard right now, no matter how good you or your cards are!
So, yesterday I was minding my own business, just playing some matches to unlock my daily chests, when I noticed something weird. I was getting matched with players that had significantly less rating than me. OG players will know: this is something that happened a lot in the old days. Once you went up the leaderboard and air got thinner you were mostly getting matched with opponents that had significantly less rating, which meant you were getting +3 rating for a win and -36 for a loss, which required a 95% winrate to reach the top spots. A while ago the matchmaking had a behaviour adjustment which put an end to the bullying matchups and only allowed battles of similar skill (rating) levels. Therefore I was quite a bit surprised when I saw this happening again! But not only is this happening again, it is WAY worse now. In fact the splintering has gone so far, to where I'm literally earning +0 rating for some matches! Or in other words: Even with a 99.9% winrate you might not be able to move up, as even a single loss puts you a day worth of games behind. Or how are you supposed to climb with +0 every other match?
Not the only match with +0 rating that day.
For my mission to unlock a bunch of juicy chests this proved to be quite beneficiary, as not having to deal with maxed out decks made my life a whole lot easier. You might say that's pretty darn nice, not having to waste precious ECR on losses, but there's also a downside to this. At least for the ones aiming for a leaderboard spot! Whoever is already in there can be pretty relaxed with this situation. Everyone else might not be able to even find the matches required to reach a top 25 rating.
There has been a couple impactfull changes lateley that made the game a lot less interesting for botting and reward leeching and I see how a lot of botfarms might have stopped or reduced their pace, but is there actually not a single active player out there? Maybe I was right and the 2 day rental minimum also put off a lot of the real players. I did notice the queue times occasionally beeing slightly longer, but most of the time the game does not even wait for 5 seconds to find a proper opponent. Is this intended?
Now, do I complain? Heck no! I haven't been able to carry my butt into the leaderboard ever since I stopped playing in bronze, anyways. By stomping some nubs I can earn those RP in hammock style chill mode. But I feel like some tweaking would be necessary here. The game doesn't feel healthy in this state. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm sure there are enough players out there and queue times of 5-10 seconds would not ruin anybodys gaming experience.
Anyways. I thought this is pretty funny and I'm sure it will not last forever, but maybe some readjusting of the matchmaking would help now that the bots are hammering out their dents while reevaluating their purpose.
Happy RP farming,
3x4t0r
Disclaimer: This post is obviously a bit sarcastic and should not be taken too seriously.