RE: Closing This Chapter on the Alt Experiment, with Thoughts on the Changes.

Love the perspective you have given. It provides a first person view of experiencing the changes.
My son only crept into Bronze because of me gifting him cards & sharing my chest rewards.

The reward issue seems to echo the struggle that Dota2 had in PC Gaming.
It is a FreeToPlay game, but you really do need to spend at some stage to get the most out of it.

There was a period where the Marketplace was very good value. I'd win an item that was worth a fair bit. I could play & earn enough $$$ to buy other Steam games.
But, there was some exploitation of the economy & they had to make some drastic changes, like non-tradable items, cool down period of items before you could sell them (several months) etc .. to try and stop abuse of the wonderful system.

Actual Human players invest alot of time into playing, thinking about playing, immersing themselves into the game.
That, in itself, is worth something.

I spent money joining the Dota2 Player Compendium which, for $10, was great value.
It also got you to watch live games, get to know the players, complete quests, and so on - resulting in mega prize money for the professional players.

Here is the rub for Splinterlands.
I didn't stop playing DOTA because of the Market shenanigans (because I loved playing) or some toxic people - I left because of Patch v7.0. They changed the game to be like competing products.

It destroyed all of the most important things I liked about the game.

Splinterlands needs to find non-bot ways of rewarding players on lower levels.
An example would be, to complete different Splinter quests in a series of tutorials & receive a common card reward, participate in things that Bots cannot do.

In that way, it immerses real players into the lore, the game, the fun

• and they get a small reward in return.

It is hard to write bots for that.

Sometimes entertainment products forget that we are also competing for people's time too.