Rank Reward now live

We've had 4 and 1/2 days now with the new rank reward system let take a look at it and address some of the talk I've heard from people.

Lets start with the bad / the ugly...

Daily focus, personally I think this is the primary dislike for the new system. You are forced into playing one splinter for 24 hours. While most people see this as a bad thing without it you loss the reason for people to level all the different splinters in the game. I feel this is the primary for the previous daily and now the focus quest. While Matt said on the town hall where he talked about the new rank reward system he would love to add a lot more focus, right now it's just splinters.

But lets say they add a sneak, snipe, healing, stun, trample, etc type focus. Then a person really only has the need to level one type of splinter as long as that splinter has those type of cards. Worst case you are back to a two splinter deck.

When I first started this was and still is common advice, level up two splinter for bronze or a league and then move into bronze or that league. Depending on the splinters and the cards you leveled for that league it could take you into higher league with enough random CP to meet the requirements.

Personally, I think this is where all the dislike of the overall changes to the new rank reward changes is coming from. People were used to playing 1, 2, or even 3 leagues higher than their cards could support, maybe even their skill, and with little effort. All that mattered was getting 5 win for the daily quest then you could play more for random bits of DEC, especially as long as you got to the league you planned on finishing the season.

What this did was cause people to bot a lot of their accounts or put no really effort in to playing unless they were going for the leaderboard. So then those people with only 1 or 2 splinters built up were able to advance leagues and get far more rewards then they were before. They were also able to achieve higher league with minimal effort.

While this change has had an effect on the bot, though I suspect once the bots have been updated they will be back what it also has done is to make people actually play the game and play it well / efficiently.

And now the good...

In my opinion the players that like the changes or lets say have less frustrations with it because there are a large amount of players that like the changes but have frustrations with it. Are the one who build even splinter deck and / or were already playing in a league equal to their skill and card levels.

I' have flushed out decks for bronze and have been working to get silver level decks. Up to this point I play in silver 2 which is where my card power supports. I'm currently working on taking my cards from that flush out but not necessarily all cards maxed out for bronze to flushing them out and ultimately maxed out for silver. I have a few cards max silver but need the summoners, which I just got my first max silver summoner in Kelya.

So I'm going to show my rewards for end of season for silver 2.
The tool I'm using to show my rewards can be found here.

This isn't actually bad rewards for silver 2, I didn't get any power got a lot of cards and decent chunk of DEC.
As a compare my daily chest previous was around .05 to .10, I actually got the last 2 days around .40 cents each day from the cards inside which is still very possible now and I'd say even more so to pull Uraeus or Renova both of who boosted my rewards for those last two dailies of the season. I did manage to get some of the new reward cards which was great.

Now lets look at my rewards for the first 4 days of this new season. I rented summoners and cards for the splinter that was part of my focus. For day 1 I remember going 75%, day 2 was more 65%, and day 3 and 4 around 65 - 70% win rates.

Because I finished in silver 2, I start the new season in bronze 3 and only got 4 chest even with rented summoners and cards to get a 75% win rate. A new reward care but nothing special. 4 chests compare to my previous daily of 3 chests but the value is almost double the previous value daily chests.

I've made it back into silver and climb towards silver 2. Again I rent a summoner but not many cards for the focus splinter and get a 65 ish win rate but now I made 6 focus chests. This time I get 2 potions and a small amount of DEC so still about double the previous daily chest value but with 2 more chest only about .04 more worth than day 1.

I'm fully back into silver 2 now, rent a summoner for my focus though I still only get about a 60 - 65% win rate because the competition is heating up. I do many 7 chest this day and with some good card pulls there is Renova I get almost 6 time my previous daily chest average.

I decide to rent into silver 1 as I already almost have the rating and the rating cap is pretty big now in the new season. This will remove the silver 2 rewards for the comparisons I had planned but at this point that comparison would only be number of chest and you can see that different in between day 3 and day 4.
I rent a summoner and some cards for day and I manage $2.01 for the focus compared to my daily chest average I was getting before the change of around $0.11. This is big, part of that came from the GF pull worth over $3.50 by it self but it did off-set 3 potions nicely.

Season Chest

• Day 1: 4 focus and 4 season.
• Day 2: 6 focus and 11 total season
• Day 3: 7 focus and 19 total season
  60 wins out of 90 battles, 66.66% win rate
• Day 4: 13 focus and 30 total season
• Day 5: 5 Focus and 34 total season
  86 out of 126, 68.25 win rate. I haven't done all my battles yet for today.
  
  I'm already double the season chest I would have gotten from the previous system.

Conclusion

Days 1 and 2 are I think where more of the frustration comes from if you didn't finish in the top of the league you were playing in you get bumped back down a league. I think will take some getting used and require people to play more to rank up then to play for the daily focus. I'm not sure if people are renting though the more people that do the more expensive rentals will become but renting for my focus has greatly help me complete focus chest as well as season chests.

So what can we do for the focus chest and the huge drop at the start of the season and / or should there be something done. I've already earned double the season rewards and we are only 4 and 1/2 days in the new season. I was able to win more chest each day then the previous daily system but I did rent to make sure I could. I'm currently probably spending as much DEC as I earn the first couple days but as the season continues I'm back to making DEC even with the rentals. Learning to play with the cards better to continue win streak will definitely help but what will also help is continuing to level my cards to be able to play at the max silver level. Renting summoners and 1 or 2 cards can change some battle but when the rest of my cards can't keep up I will still lose other battles.

For the focus two idea I think help is make all battle award 25% of the reward shares earned with +75% for using the focus so you can work on winning but the focus still matter. Dual focus I believe is another great idea. Skill based focus I feel will be just as limiting in bronze and silver where not all card have abilities and / or don't have access to all the abilities yet.

Another idea is not drop player as far as after the end of season so the first couple days will still worth while when earning chest. This wouldn't change chest gains as the season continues since it will be capped by the league a player can achieve.

Another is give players the option to down grade the chest they are earn (doing so may drop them a league or division in a league also). This help if a player has climbed too far ahead of their cards and / or skill without the penalty of spending season to get back to the right league.

But overall lets keep in mind we are 4 days into the new system, I believe the splinterlands team will monitor the changes closely and make changes are needed but 4 days of data isn't a lot it will take a couple season if not more to see where things shake out as the community is still figuring out how to play the new system also.

Signing off

Come join the Splinterlands community.