The New Ranked Battle Is Here!

Hi! @saydie here playing Splinterlands everyday!

Beginning this season, a change was made to the Ranked Battle System which has been the same through many years and this change was made as a part of the "New Player Experience" with the goal of making the onboarding new players to the game easier. On this post, I will talk about the details that was made to the Ranked Battle System and what are the initial impact that it does in the game and value of the cards.

Ranked Reward Rework

On February 29, 2024, Splinterlands has undergone a system maintenance which has lasted for around 1-2 hours. As this was also the End of Season, claiming EOS chest has been impossible until the maintenance was finished which makes me wait for the update to be completed. Thankfully, it was worth of the wait for me as one of the chest I opened have 7k $SPS inside aside from the 40k $DEC that I won through the Diamond leaderboard but this also means that the Ranked Battle System was not the same as before.

^{My EOS reward.}

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The first thing that this update did was to remove the League Limits. Before, advancing from one league to another was optional but now, it will be simply a cosmetic to indicate the rating range of each players. With this, Leaderboards were also now removed with the exception of the Champion League. As a Diamond leaderboard player, I was mostly affected by this change but it was said that more leaderboard slots will be added in the future on the Champion League so maybe I can once again compete when this was added but for now, it will be hard for me to compete since I do not have Rebellion cards at max level.

On the other hand, this update also removes the Level Limits on Cards and the penalties for using Low Level Cards. This means that regardless of the league a player, currently at, they can use any level of cards and it will only be capped by the summoner levels. So now, even at Bronze, players might match with max level cards. At the same time, if a player have cards that are lower level than the league that they play, it will not deduct $SPS rewards from ranked battles and on RShres. Additionally, the $SPS Pools for each league were now removed and there was only 1 big pool allocated for Modern and Wild which significantly increase the rewards for ranked battles specially at the start of the season.

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Another thing that was changed with this update was the rating system. Previously, the game uses ELO Rating System for calculating the rating each player gets when they win or lose a match. Before, players with high rating was heavily punished by losing a lot of points when it lose against players with low rating while low level players gets significant boost when won against high level players but with the Flat Rating System, will only lose or get 20 points for each battle and can only increase to 40 points on win streak. The goal with this was to encourage players on the Champion leaderboard to play more battles and make the leaderboard more competitive. While I like the idea of capping the points deducted to 20 when we lost a battle, I wish that this system was implemented way earlier and also applied to other leaderboards to prevent leaderboard squatting in order to secure the $DEC price which significantly reduce match liquidity closer to the end of season.

^{Screenshot taken from Chessbox.in}

New Energy Costs, League Ratings, & Resets

With the changes on the Ranked System, Splinterlands also increased the cost for purchasing Energy, particularly on the lower league. I guess this was made in order prevent previous exploits that incentivizes players to stay on the lower league like previously in Bronze 1 where players can get up to 1.5 $SPS per battle while the initial energy cost was only 1 $DEC but I think even when they do not do that, players will not be able to exploit the system since whether they like it or not, they will be forced to move up in league when they reached the rating required for that league.

On the other hand, Splinterlands also now included the option to purchase Energy with Vouchers at the rate of 100 $DEC per vouchers. I believe this to be a good move since this gives Vouchers more utility which can help its future price to increase with its demand increasing.

There was also a slight change with the league rating particularly on Novice and Bronze which was made to help new player onboarding experience and the end of season rating resets was also changed in order to work with the new Flat Rating System.

Initial Impact of Ranked Rework on the Game

^{Daily Battles Metric Source}

As we were still very early on the season, we still don't have a clear picture on how this change has affected the game but from data of the first 2 days of the season provided by Peakdmonsters, there was a visible increase with the number of battles played compared to the previous days in particular on Wild. This might be because some Bot farms have restarted their accounts now that they won't be getting the any deduction on using low level cards as long as it was not a starter card which means the potential amount of chest that they can get also now increase. Meanwhile, there was no significant increase of battles on Modern but this might be because on some accounts with max level deck playing on lower leagues which makes players with lower level cards to temporarily stop grinding which is what also within the expectations of the Splinterlands team and a season or two was needed in order to normalize everything and players be placed on their supposed rating range.

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At the same time, since there is now only one big $SPS pool each for Modern and Wild, there is now a noticeable increase to the amount of $SPS we get from ranked battle specially for the beginning of the season. Right now, I am getting between 10-15 $SPS per battle as I am currently at Diamond II with x13.5 multiplier which I believe will continue to increase as I continue to climb. Currently, vouchers are priced at $ 0.049 each and multiplied by 3.25, it will cost around $ 0.16 while 11 $SPS was priced at $ 0.0289 gives me around of $ 0.32 so even when I purchased some vouchers, I still end with $ 4 earnings assuming I played 50 games with 50% win rate.

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Initial Impact of Ranked Rework on Card Value

With the card level restrictions by league now removed, ranked battles was now free for all so players will be matched with one another, regardless of the level gap between their decks as long as their rating was closed to each other, understanding this, some players knows that in order to be more competitive and earn more, they would need to increase the level of their cards and this has make the price of the cards into an upward trend as what was shown for the following charts of modern card sets.

^{Max Level Chaos Legion Set Value}

^{Max Level Riftwatchers Set Value}

^{Max Level Rebellion Set Value}

The biggest winner from this change was the Chaos Legion Set which was now cost around $2.2k USD in order to max. It's significant increase was unexpected due to its oversupply and with new players now possibly coming tot the game, the price of the cards might continue to rise so if you are hoping to level your cards, you might need to do it now cause card prizes might go crazy with the following days.

This was not a financial advice though and always do your own research before making important decisions. That was all for me. Thank you for reading my post and see you at the next one!

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All the image that I edited here belongs to Splinterlands.

Card abilities and rulesets from Splintercards.

All the battle links provided comes from my personal accounts and from the scholar account that I am using from Balthazar Guild.

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