RE: Splinterlands: Why Gold Foils Should Be Viewed As A Blessing

I hope you don't mind me responding to your comment before old man Dave gets back from his long slow walk😛

I completely understand where you are coming from with your comment, and share some of those concerns in general. It's true about the bots being able to use them to their advantage, but so will real players (as you said). I think that's where collecting early data and then using it to adjust the thresholds based on the results of the different testing phases will help alleviate some of those concerns, going forward.

At the very least, it will partly solve the huge amount of level 1 decks sucking up a big proportion of the in-game rewards, so in that instance - players will be highly incentivised to level up more accounts (and more crucially their summoners), and that's a good thing....otherwise they will linger at the very bottom because of collection power limitations.

You are not wrong about a gold foil deck having an advantage and being able to climb higher up the ladder with the same "levels" of cards in direct comparison to a regular foil deck. I do think however, that there is a long term view being being taken into consideration with this method of calculation, by weighting gold foils at their higher DEC value as part of the collection power. As usual, it always comes back to more players in the game, as one of the long term needs and considerations to be taken into account.

However, there will also be the scenario, where if you climb too high up the ladder with a lower level deck, then you will get beaten at a much higher percentage due to the different playing tiers that are being implemented. There would therefore also be less incentive to climb higher up the ladder as opposed to winning at a much higher rate at your own league level. It would also make earning DEC and completing quests a lot more difficult overall, if you were to climb too high.

It's a delicate balance between a great playing experience for all levels of players and the game economy. Especially when it comes to the value of your cards and overall deck in general. The card market is still an important part of the game economy and if that fails, then the game fails long term as well. Allowing gold foils to be part of the calculation would create more demand for them, therefore increasing their value both from a monetary perspective and game-play perspective - especially when all the expansions and different game modes get implemented into the overall game structure.

Players will want also want to buy more packs and find more gold foil cards both in packs and by completing their quests.

That will also create some good opportunities to advertise the game to a wider audience. Higher card values (long term), should attract more players, through in-game rewards and specifically bigger tournament prize pools.

Of course a lot of this is theoretical in nature, and there are pro's and cons no matter how you implement collection power.

I am certainly not an expert or have a ready-made perfect solution as some other claim to😉

I am personally just going to wait and see how it plays out in the early phases, before being overly critical and judging the overall pros and cons.