Gold just feels bad - state of rewards

I have been playing Splinterlands for over a year now and I am really enjoying this game. The one thing that is annoying me is the rewards in the Gold league. It is becoming very hard to get those daily and season Focus points, especially when playing at top of the league. Therefore we are not getting many chests and therefore not much reward cards as you could in the Bronze or Silver league.

Let me explain!

Bronze League

For one day of playing in the Bronze league, starting from Novice, I earned 25 season Bronze chests while having fun with the Fire and Water teams. And those were very cheap teams. I would say that I got both for around 150-200 DEC for 3 days. On top of that I got 13 daily Bronze chests for one day of playing. So if the season is 10 days long, I could get over 230 Bronze chests in 10 days, and that is huge.

Yes, rewards are not as good as in the Gold league but still, from 230 if 30% of them are cards that would be around 76 cards in a season.

Gold League

As I already said Gold league is no joke, and rewards are not that consistent. For season chests I earned only 2.46 USD in 58 chests. Yup, that's right, not a lot of money for the whole season. It is especially frustrating if you consider that I invested over 4000 USD into my Gold account while my Bronze account is worth 400 USD with rented cards or 180 USD with owned cards(where I do have a lot of duplicates that need to go so 130 USD would be more realistic).

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Another problem is that the Gold league is really competitive, like really competitive. Once you get into the top 150-200 it is more or less a 50% win rate and that limits your rewards drastically. Yes, you can rent some cards but the return is just not there as you need to rent 100 + DEC cards for at least 2 days which makes your expenses quite high. A lot depends on Focus that you get. The ones that are focused on certain splinters are good as you can get plus 60-70% on Reward Shares, but those focused on Anti-melee, Healing, Flying, and so on are just bad and you are lucky if you can get plus 10% on something like that.

Combined with the highly competitive scene it makes a real nightmare to play in the Gold league and you invested a lot of money so you could get more returns. Sometimes you can go in Diamond only at the end of the season.

Diamond League

Well, Diamond league is something else. It is a way better league than Gold but it is really hard to get into Diamond, especially in the Modern format. Competition in the Gold league is really strong and sometimes you have just stuck 100 points from Diamond. It's frustrating, but at the end of the season, I am usually over 3000 points which is enough to be comfortably in Diamond. 1 USD for 8 chests on a daily is really not bad.

Or 0.34 USD for 2 chests on the daily quest.

Solution

If you ask me. Gold league rewards need some push. Rewards will be split by the league and you can check everything about that proposal on the following link:

https://peakd.com/@sps.dao/sps-governance-proposal-split-ranked-battle-reward-pools-by-league

but I think that something more than separate SPS pools is needed. I guess that Merits and Potions drop rates could be reduced in order to give Gold league more chance of dropping cards. 33% or 50% for each looks like a decent number.

Another possibility is to have a different drop rate regarding of league tier that you are playing at. For example, Gold I should have better drop rates than Gold III league. It is way harder to play in Gold I than Gold III and you need a way better deck to get a decent win rate.

Summary ##

I hope that there will be Rewards 3.0 as Splinterland's economy still needs some tweaks. I think that Gold feels the worst if you look at invested/rewards ratio. Yes, it should be way better with the new SPS Reward split between leagues but still drops from chests in the Gold league are disapointg. I hope that Splinterlands devs can do something about it. I am not looking into some crazy amount of rewards but just a little tweak so it does not feel so bad.

It is the perfect time to buy some cards and rebuild your deck. Packs are not selling as fast as expected so prices are stable. I expect them to go down even more once we sell more packs. But there is always a possibility of new players joining and buying tons of cards, so be careful. If you are not playing #splinterlands yet, now is the perfect opportunity to join while you can get all those amazing cards at special prices. Come and join Splinterlands Discord and find out more.

Official Splinterlands Discord: https://discord.gg/A6yNcVqbU6

If you are new here

If you are new here, #splinterlands is the amazing #NFT trading card game with the #play2earn model. That means you can have a lot of fun AND you can earn money (DEC - Dark Energy Crystals) at the same time. If you don't have an account yet consider registering with my link. If you sign up with my referral link, please DM me and I will send you 100 DEC that will help you start with the game(of course if I see you on my referral list).

https://splinterlands.com?ref=vjekich

Have fun and see you on the battlefield.