Changes to Splinterlands Ranking system

Greetings Splinterlands community! I'd like to offer some feedback on the new changes that were implemented in Splinterlands (and their effect on players like me).

I got started on Splinterlands pretty recently (June of 2020) at the recommendation of a friend from Hive who knew of my interest in games. It took me a little while to get the hang of it, but before long I was having a blast pitting my strategy against others on the battlefield. I understood that buying cards on the marketplace and buying packs from the store would give me a leg up, but that was only a piece of the puzzle. There was a lot of strategy involved in winning my matches and moving up in the ranks. If I played well enough, and deployed my cards wisely, I could beat some people even when they had better decks. Eventually, of course, I'd reach a rank where it was extremely difficult for me to beat the superior cards I was facing no matter what my strategy (it ended up being the lowest champion level for me), but that was all part of the game.

I had great fun, and ended up spending a couple of hundred dollars over the last couple of months building up my deck and enjoying my thousands of Splinterland matches in an attempt to move up the ranks.

With the new changes, however, the skill factor has been completely removed from the game. Your rank has no relation to how well you play, or how many matches you win, or how strategically you develop your deck - its strictly based on the total number of cards you have! If I wanted to be ranked strictly on the size and value of my collection, I'd be collecting stamps or baseball cards. There is no "game" left for me to play. I'm left with the decision to either sit at my lowly ranked for years and accumulate cards at a glacial rate or buy my way up with cash. This change seems like an extremely short-sighted decision aimed at benefiting those who are already established with massive decks of cards and a massive barrier to anyone new who wants to play (without buying their rank with thousands of dollars).