Flexibility is the Name of the Game

I stumbled with some players who consider this game no longer profitable at this time. But my experience tells otherwise. I think flexibility in playing this game is important. I want to share my story during the last two sessions of the current season to illustrate what I mean by flexibility.

Ending the previous season, I reduced my ECR down to 60% during my final fight. It took me two days to recover my ECR back to 100%. As I observed the top 100 players on the leaderboard, one has even played around 388 games already for the last two days, while I haven’t started yet even a single battle.

First Battle Session

Before entering the arena, I first prepared my “warriors” by utilizing the rental market. I rented cards amounting to 129 DEC. The outcome of the first 10 battles is 8 wins and 2 losses. And so, I started from a very low rank at 76,452 with a rating of 539.

After the first 10 fights, I rested for a while and surfed the web. I happened to read a thread on reddit that gathered 119 comments at the moment. The OP thinks that new players will soon find it difficult to enter this game due to increasing prices of cards. As I browsed the comment, I found two guys debating and accusing each other of lying because of DEC reward. One argued that it is not possible to earn 11 DEC per battle at Bronze league. The other one responded that there is no reason for him to lie and he even challenged the person he was talking to for a bet and he was willing to post a screenshot of his balance history. If the challenge will be accepted, I think his balance history will look like this:

So, the one who claimed that 11 DEC reward per ranked battle at Bronze level was not really lying. The above balance history is mine after completing a total of 30 fights and thus reducing my ECR down to 79.6%. Here is my statistics before and after playing the game:

I think the mistake of the other guy is making his own experience of the game as the benchmark in viewing the performance of other players. It is also misleading to say that rental fee is too high and you’re just feeding the “whales” by renting cards. These FUD guys argue that if you rent cards, you will no longer earn DEC but hand them to the “whales.”

Players who are so preoccupied with this DEC rental/earning issue should also consider factors such as the players’ choice of cards and his game performance. If a player is renting powerful cards with high mana, but could not use them in actual battle, then he is just wasting his DEC. Moreover, if he keeps losing the fights, how can you expect him to recover his rental? So, it is not just a simple talk about the impossibility of increasing your DEC because the rental is too high. As I mentioned above, I rented cards worth 129 DEC and so my total DEC was reduced down to 7,030 as I started the day’s battles, but after completing the 30 battles, I was able to recover my rentals and even gained 16 more DECs. I do not even include here the rewards that I received after completing the two quests, water and earth on the same day.

Second Battle Session

My second battle session has a total of 12 fights. I could not wait for my ECR to fully recover to 100% for my rental is about to expire by 2:00 PM today. With 92.67 % ECR, I started my second session for this season. However, after completing 4 battles, I noticed that my ranked battle rewards declined from 14.399 DEC to 14.263 DEC. To me, this is a signal to take a rest for a while. Due to decreasing ECR, I think that from this point onwards despite winning the game, the rewards will continue to decline. This calls for a change in playing the game.

After two hours, I resumed playing. My ECR when I stopped was at 88.70%. I did 5 more battles. The first fight was a draw. As a result, my rewards in the next win dropped from 14.263 DEC down to just 8.831 DEC. Winning the following two battles, I received higher rewards. But when my ECR dropped again to 86.80%, though I still won the next two fights, I received reduced rewards. I took a rest again for the second time. When my ECR returned to 88.00%, I played two more games until the rental expiration. Finally, I stopped when my ECR declined to 86.80%. So, just relying on my yesterday’s rental, I received a total of 129 DEC rewards after completing 12 battles.

And so, the overall results of my play today can be seen in the chart below:

To conclude this post, I just want to share three interesting fights:

This one is close!

Mylor versus Mylor – Legendary versus Legendary. Three Rare Monsters versus Another Three Rare Monsters Plus Two Common

Both Players Using Two Common Dragon Monsters: Djinn Chwala and Twilight Basilisk. Both Daria and Dragon Jumper made the big difference to invalidate Drake of Arnak’s additional shield. Though both players used Twilight Basilisk, but rzc24-nftbbg is using a level 2 monster.

Still not playing Splinterlands? Try it! It's fun!

Here’s my code.

Addendum:

Another disinformation I stumbled yesterday is about the vouchers. Someone wrote on Reddit that “for one voucher, you need 1,500 staked SPS.” That is misleading. There is this CL presale vouchers calculator. If you input 1,500 staked SPS, a player will receive a 0.50 voucher daily. And since the pre-sale period lasts for a month from 18 October to 17 November, any player who has 1,500 staked SPS will receive a total of 14 vouchers. He will only need to pay $50.40 for 14 packs instead of $56 due to the 10% discount.

Furthermore, someone is even confident that the game will soon die because of people posting negative things about the game. And another added that Splinterlands is no longer a $10 game, but a $1,000 game. There is nothing wrong to say negative things or criticize an NFT blockchain based game like Splinterlands. That is necessary for growth and continuous improvement. However, there is a big difference between criticism and spewing out nonsense and baseless statement. I think the problem with these guys is that they want big ROI in the shortest time possible. No wonder, many are scammed because of such mentality. They could not see a solid project in front of their nose for what matters to them is their ROI. I suspect that for them, patience and planning are strange and the farthest ideas in their minds.

Note: I first published a portion of this article on Torum under the name @rzc24defi.