Splinterlands: New Ranked Rewards System and Effects on Rental Market

A few days ago the Splinterlands team put out a monster post (pun intended) explaining how the new ranked rewards system will work in detail.

Bits and pieces regarding the new rewards system we already knew from the previous town halls, but without the specifics.

That's a post worth reading for anyone involved with Splinterlands as a player or investor, but what's the main idea behind it for everyone else?

The old system provided the opportunity for anyone with a 10$ investment to potentially earn an unlimited amount of rewards. Not everyone took advantage of that issue, and an individual player doing it wouldn't pose a problem. But when enough are doing it, some automating it for a huge number of accounts, this becomes a problem.

The whole ranked rewards upgrade was built from the idea to mitigate this problem and incentivize players to rank up instead of playing at the lower levels and farm rewards.

We will see the impact of the new rewards in practice, but at this point, this seems like a very well-thought-out system that will likely do its job.

Owning cards to play or renting them is highly incentivized, instead of playing with ghost cards which will reduce the amount of rewards one receives going forward.

If players who use many ghost cards (those cards given access to by the spellbook, without owning them) start buying them, their market price will grow.

Since we are talking about a huge number of accounts, a price impact on modern common and rare cards is likely. I've seen some people betting on this and buying some of these cards off the market already.

The other aspect I haven't seen talked about as much is the impact of the new ranked rewards system on the rental market.

Effects of the New Ranked Rewards System on the Rental Market

There are two ways the new ranked system will affect the rental market.

On one side, just like the card ownership market, the rental market will most likely see pressure on renting common and rare Chaos Legion cards, but also Untamed, because they are both part of the current spellbook offer of ghost cards.

On the other side, we might be witnessing a change in the rental patterns. There will be little incentive to play hard at the EOS and not at all during the rest of the season.

When the new rewards come into effect, also the rule about your league at the EOS counting for the season rewards is replaced with the highest league attained during the season. This way you can continue to play after achieving a high league, and it won't be a problem if you drop from that one, from the rewards point of view. I'm still unclear if in the new system, your starting league the following season will be based on your league at the EOS or your highest league achieved throughout the season. This also can impact how people play the EOS after achieving their target league.

At the same time, the new system with reward shares and their new formula

makes it better economically to play throughout the season instead of for a day or two at the end to rank up to the league you desire.

That's because you don't have a fixed amount of rewards at certain levels. It's based on your season reward shares.

And if you don't have enough season reward shares, regardless of your league, you won't be pleased with your rewards.

At the same time, if you play a lot for a few days and not for the rest of the season, your ECR will drop significantly, dragging your Rshares earned lower.

And another interesting fact is that bonuses (win streak, guild bonus, GF bonus, alpha bonus, beta bonus) affect not only your DEC rewards but also your daily focus rewards and season rewards (i.e. number of reward cards).

That being said, I see it very likely that we will move from an EOS high rental demand (which makes rental prices soar) to a more even distribution of this demand throughout the season without an EOS boom. But a significant increase in the rental prices during the season.

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