Splinterlands: Does the Splinterlands team understand their own formulas?

I know it's actually a heretical question, but I'm really asking myself this when I read the following post:

https://hive.blog/splinterlands/@splinterlands/sps-and-dec-liquidity-provider-rewards--one-more-ranked-rewards-update

** There it says: **

Going forward, when a player wins a ranked battle and their ECR is below 50% at the start of the battle, their ECR will be reduced by 5% instead of the typical 1%. There will be no change to the ECR formula when ECR is above 50%, which takes about 70 battles in a day to reach, so this change will have no effect for the majority of players.

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** Let's do the fact check: **

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Let's assume that a player starts with a new account that comes with an ECR of 100%, then he can indeed play 69 battles: 100 × 0.99^69 = 49.98% until he fall under 50% .

To put it bluntly, it's not that I would complain that there are only 69 battles and not 70, I would very much accept that.

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** No, the question is rather what is on the 2nd day?**

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So let's assume that the player now pauses for 24 hours and every hour his ECR increases by 1%, then he is rounded up to 74% and if he now plays 70 battles again he is (without the change) at 74 × 0 .99^70 = 36.6%. He would therefore be massively affected by this change on the 2nd day (and also on each subsequent day).

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How ​​many battles can the player play?

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Now let's assume that the player starts every day with 74% ECR and then plays until he falls below 50%. This would then be 74 × 0.99^40 = 49.5%. **After the 39th battle he would be at exactly 50% **if he played another battle now, but it would mean that the ECR would not reach 74% the next day and at the latest then he could play the 40th battle no longer play.

**So it's not at all the case that after this change a player can play 70 battles a day, this is only possible on the very first day with an ECR of 100%, but the player can (permanently) only play 39 battles a day. **

The attentive reader might now ask a question:

"Yes, but you didn't take into account the ECR regeneration between the battles in your calculation - doesn't that change anything?" Yes, you payed attention very well, I actually assumed that the 39 battles would all be submitted at once, which of course is not possible at all and this actually changes something, but the change only means that even fewer battles can be played, because from battle to After a battle, the ECR regenerates a bit, so the ECR consumption in the next battle is higher than the formula above shows.

So let's say, for example, that the player plays a battle every 6 minutes, i.e. the ECR regenerates by 0.1% from battle to battle, then he would be at 72.5373% for the 2nd battle (instead of 72.5274%). and after the 3rd battle are 71.9109% (instead of 71.8021%). This series could now be continued and at the end there should be a few battles that can be played even less, but I leave that to the reader and am happy if someone presents a well-founded calculation here. I don't want to say that this change shouldn't come or anything like that, but in my opinion the Splinterlands team (if they have understood their own formula and its effects) should play with open cards and not name a utopian number of 70 battles if this is actually only possible in a single day, but what you can play every day.

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I really cannot play more than 39 battles a day without falling under 50% ECR ?

This is a very good question and the answer is "Yes you can" and this point is again a disadvantage for the human players against the bots.

It is very easy: You should not let grow your ECR to 74% like I suppose, you should keep your ECR as low as possible, so you can play your ECR down to 50% and if you than start a battle you will reach 49,5%, of course you should stop now to don't be affected from this change and wait 30 minutes, after 30 minutes you reach again 50% and it means you can start your next battle and so on ... So if you all arround the clock start exactly every 30 minutes a battle you can play 48 battles. I think it's clear that nobody will play like that.

Whats your opinion ?

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