Verdict: New Ranked Battles

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Hello Splinterfans!

It has been over a week since the new ranked battles format has dropped and I thought I would give my feedback after playing for the last week.

doing battle in silver II


I was very excited to test out the new ranked play as the game was getting quite stale for me. Even though I think I have a pretty good gold deck (in wild it gets to Diamond I), I was spending most of my season in silver league trying to get into gold where I want to play and utilise my deck fully.

Are bots and battle helpers used in modern? Maybe I am a bad player and am missing some meta rebellion cards, but I think either that or the algo is punishing me with my low win rates when I was playing under the old ranked system and it taking so long to get into the gold league.

Therefore, it has been some fresh air that you can now play your cards with all abilities regardless of the league they are in. So it has inticed me back into playing more games. It has been fun because I have had a higher win ratio and more unbalanced games I guess.

When people play, for us to enjoy something, I think we need to have a higher than 50% win rate to keep us interested and motivated. Otherwise, it just becomes frustrating and not satisfying.

However, with the changes, there is also the flip side that even in bronze or silver, you can face some almost maxed out decks that you have no chance against. Do you hit the brick wall faster?

I still didn't make it into gold yet, with 5 days of the season left. So it hasn't helped me in that way.

Before, I would upgrade cards to gold level, but now that I can use cards from all levels, I am incentivised to max upgrade, even though this is outside of my planned budget. Yet we still have a league structure, but I cannot play in my desired league anymore. It is a bit of a weird situation in that way.

facing a maxed out Quix the Devious in silver II


The current ranked battle earnings seem also pretty bad as they seem more based on how much SPS you have staked instead of how much you have upgraded your deck. It seems we have just flicked from making leveling up your deck important to now the SPS token is important. Is there any balance that can be reached?

my current earn rate in modern


I do think it is important to have staked SPS to get earnings, but there seems to be no consideration of your CP anymore which is an important factor for real players and less for bot players. With the leagues gone and unless you can get to diamond and champion, will you really get very much earnings? Something is not balancing here.

Are we just having a case of power creep because there are so many cards and sets? For an established game like Splinterlands, this could be in some ways expected. However, now you would need a quite powerful deck to play in bronze and silver if you want to do well and have fun. This was the same beforehand I guess too, so maybe there isn't so much change there.

Summary

It is maybe too early to give a final verdict, there seems to be many pros and cons to the new ranked play system and it seems to have split the community like I haven't seen before.

Whatever you introduce, there will be some who will like it and some who don't. I think the main thing is to make a fair eco-system and support real players as much as possible and probably there in lies the real crux of the matter, bots are still having a big negative effect on the game and you can't enhance one thing to entice new players and keep existing ones happy whilst you have the elephant in the room.

Thanks for reading.

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24 comments
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(Edited)

The current ranked battle earnings seem also pretty bad as they seem more based on how much SPS you have staked instead of how much you have upgraded your deck.

I think this is just the idea. SPS above deck. However I think they're also trying to make players know that deck is as important as staked SPS, but the competition out there makes it frustrating. You're playing in modern so I expect it'll be even harder.
I think I'll just stay in wild. I don't think I'll exceed silver one if I'm to play there.
Playing a maxed out summoner in silver 2 is just devious

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Yes, that seems the priority. 1)SPS 2)Deck. I hope that they will find the right balance.

It is still very tough out there to battle. Is that bots or real players? I dont know for sure.

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I heard there are still some battle helpers in modern. I think it's also got harder in wild. However, I like to think it's still choas out there and we need some weeks to balance things out.

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Yes exactly, it is still too early to tell if things are better or worse.

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one of the problems is we dont have the players. if there were more players playing it would be better but now its kind of more towards max out / renting max vs the people that were invested in bronze/silver/gold

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Yes, everyone must now max out but not everyone wanted to or has the budget for it.

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not its because we lack the players haha if we had more players we would get everyone with a certain level deck at least thats what i think. its just we dont have enough players so keep getting matched against max players since they havent made it back up or maybe slowly going up cuz they are lacking the skills. its bad on topi heard as well cuz people keep fighting each other over and over

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Yes, that's a good point..

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gotta see how they playing out. royaleagle said they banned some bots in modern >.> now lets see how they weed out the battle helpers

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Yeah, I can't see how that can be done. But it needs to be more rewarding for players to play than using a bot. The Devs themselves run bots too though so..

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O.O ya but i think they do it in wild which is accepted. we made it tos to not have it in modern?

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Yeah I'm sure

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Ya hope splniterlands gets it together. 1 dollar easy for 1 billion marketcap and this is still lower than axie

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Yeah, it's do-able!

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LETS GO 1 dollar wuold be amazing. itd put me at almost 20% toward being a millionaire ahha

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I don't know how you can play in Modern, without some of the key Rebellion cards it would be tough. I've stuck with Wild because it's just easier even though there are bots.

We really do need more players, I think they should consider ways to attract new people into the game.

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