Splinterlands rage quitting alert! Is the ranking system broken?

During the last days we have seen how it is increasingly difficult to face players who have a similar ranking to ours at the time of battle. As a consequence, every time we win a battle our ranking increases by +3 or +4 points, but if we lose the battle, our ranking decreases by -34 or -36 points, approximately. Sometimes, after battling and winning about 12 battles and losing only 3 battles, your ranking drops around a hundred points. This is already quite frustrating, but when you analyze that the player who has won the battle, which is almost always a bot, wins only the ranking points and 0 RP and 0 DEC, then this starts to leave you with a rather unpleasant feeling. If you make the mistake of continuing to play and battle under those conditions, everything inevitably ends up turning into a rage-quitting of serious proportions, especially when you realize that you have lost 400 ranking points by winning 70% of the battles.

Apparently the problem with the point allocation system lies in the fact that there are not enough players online at the moment, and the system ends up matching you with players that are way below your ranking, which are usually bots that play continuously. And as you know, the points allocated for winning or losing a battle are proportional to the ranking difference between those two players.

Personally, I have no problem battling bots except for the fact that there is no limit to the number of battles they can do in a day. Being automated systems, they can spend all day battling, because even when they don't earn RP or DEC, they continue to earn ranking points, which in the long run places them in higher ranking positions. However, the logic and algorithms of those bots is quite limited, and in the end they are simply players who have X probability of winning a battle. But if a player battles every 3 minutes, even though he has a very low probability of winning, he will begin to accumulate points and climb, and if there are thousands of those players, in the end they will end up having an average ranking where all those players will accumulate. I think we've all run into those tiered bottlenecks, where we get stuck and can't move up the rankings until we get past that gap, where we no longer have to deal with players in that ranking area.

Until now, my strategies to avoid those bottlenecks were quite simple and efficient, but in the current situation they are no longer effective. And as I gather from all of this, either there are fewer and fewer human players allowing for a more homogeneous distribution of players across all rankings, or the number of bots has increased dramatically in proportion to human players. In both cases this creates a shortage of players with a ranking position outside of those bottlenecks. Whatever the case, the result is the same: the players have to deal with the bots that are mostly in those bottlenecks and that have a much lower ranking than the player. The bots are ultimately creating a crab-in-the-pot mentality, not allowing anyone to move up the rankings. I don't see any result other than huge rage-quitting from human players if this situation continues in the future.

Until now, my main strategy for dealing with these bottlenecks was quite simple:

• Wait until all the time has elapsed before clicking on the battle button. Before the recent changes I waited even until 5 seconds after the timer was up to click battle. Now I just do it when it reaches zero. This simple strategy dramatically improved my win rate in that jam zone. A good percentage of battles are won because the other player quits. Simple interpretation, if it's a bot that reads your cards it doesn't have time to react. In principle, according to the latest changes in Splinterlands they shouldn't be able to read your cards, but there are always ways to exploit a weakness in the system and the best way to prevent them from taking unfair advantages is to not leave time for them to analyze you. Maybe it's paranoia, but if I wait until the end my win rate increases dramatically, and above all, I face teams that are perfectly assembled to defeat my teams much less often.

But in the current situation, where the bots have created a crab mentality and do not allow you to advance in the ranking, the only healthy solution I have found is to simply not fight. So now my new additional strategy is to analyze the points I gain or lose with each battle. If I am earning between +15 and +25 points for each battle won, I continue to battle. If I start getting just +3 or +4 for each battle I stop battling for several hours or until the next day. It's that simple. It makes no sense to battle against thousands of congested bots hundreds of points lower than you in the ranking, because you have everything to lose.

All of this leads me to ask myself, is the ranking system broken? And my conclusion, perhaps unfounded, is yes, it is broken. It's broken because it's a system that tries to rank players who have a wide diversity of skills and abilities in the game, and that rank should produce a homogeneous distribution of players throughout the ranking. But the bots do not have such a diversity of abilities and skills, but there are thousands of them with exactly the same algorithm, and therefore, the same result for all of them. And since bots are the majority of the players in Splinterlands, the ranking system ends up doing more of a step-like distribution, which is in correspondence with the different bot algorithms that exist. If bots were highly diversified in their algorithms, this problem might not exist.

So, in the end, the problem is the bots? No, I think the problem is the lack of diversity in the algorithms of these bots and the success that some of these algorithms have, which manage to attract investors who create tens of thousands of accounts with the same algorithms. The best strategy in my opinion is to use those bots as tools to ensure a more enjoyable experience in Splinterlands. To that end, I think there should be a team of people dedicated to identifying the weaknesses of those bots, educating players on how those bots can be beaten, and trying to minimize the impact that bots have on distribution of players throughout the entire ranking. On the other hand, bot developers will see the need to update and improve their algorithms more and more, which in the long run will tend to create a diversity of algorithms that will be healthy in the development of the game.

if you have read up to here, wow! Thank you very much. Sorry for the length but this is what happens when I start getting +3 or +4 points per battle.

Greetings to all and I hope to fight with you in Splinterlands

Posted using Splintertalk