After a few weeks just enjoying the new Chaos Legion set drop, I am now getting back to my Splinterlands Draft Format proposal. I have been revising and updating this idea for a new game format inside of Splinterlands and will be presenting a rough front end, back end proposal for the format.
Support! Before I start, I want to ask for your support. If you like the draft idea, animated foil variants, or other game format proposals please upvote my content, leave comments, send me in game donations to @williamhessian (which I will use to help make more content) and most of all send this link to other players who might be interested in the format. If we show that people like this idea it is more likely to be adopted by the devs in the near future.
Splinterlands Draft Front End
What you see above is what a player would see once they pay the entry fee (the price of 6 packs plus entry fee) which I am deciding would be $30. The entry fee could skew higher or lower depending on reward pool, or if you already own the packs. There would be two draft modes, Pass Draft or Pool Draft. Pass Draft would have the player select one card from a pack and then pass the remaining 4 cards to another player and repeat the process until you have selected all 30 cards for your deck. In the Pool Draft mode, the player would open and keep the entire contents of the 6 packs. The player would then have 25 minutes to review the 6 rulesets, the contents of all 6 packs and build 6 teams to best fit the 6 frays. As you can see in the graphic, the player would toggle through each pack to see the contents and also click the battles to create teams and assign monsters to a specific fray. The concept would be similar to Guild Brawls, except you would have a limited pool of cards that would change in every draft.
Summoners
As we all know, summoners do not appear in every pack, and without summoners you cannot submit a team in that splinter. Therefore, I propose that all Starter Summoners would also be available for the draft. Opening summoners in the draft would be a little unsatisfying, yet they are valuable so still a good pull even if it doesn't directly contribute to your draft experience.
Back End
The coding that would be needed to create the draft portion of the experience is mostly already used in the game. Pack opening and randomization would not change, and the "create team" coding (see below) would work exactly the same as brawls except the drafted cards would be from the "draft #123" pool of cards. For that reason, cards that are opened within a draft would be instantly delegated to "draft #123" and could not be used outside of draft until the event ends or until the player decides to drop from the event (which can happen at anytime). The player would have full control over their cards, while still maintaining the ability to play in the draft tournament and potentially win prizes. A player may also join as many draft tournaments as they wanted at a time as each draft would have its own # and could run independently from others.
Create Team Selection
In the graphic above, we see a sample of the "Create Team" screen. The player has already seen their 30 card pool, and reviewed the 6 game ruleset. In this example, we have a 30 Mana battle with Lost Legendaries ruleset which means no legendaries can be played in this fray. The player has selected Thaddius Brood as their summoner and has 7 cards to select from (keep in mind I forgot to edit out the quantities of cards). The player would select their best Death Splinter lineup with these seven cards and then lock in the team. The player either did not open any Neutral cards or they already used their Neutral cards in another fray.
Back End
The only coding trick with the "Create Team" interface would be making sure the correct "Draft #123" cards are appearing in the right spots and that they disappear from the pool once assigned to a fray, because each card can only in one fray per draft. If all 6 Fray are not filled when the "Battle" button is selected it will send the player to the "Line Up review" screen (see below) to review the cards and the 6 fray rulesets. The player can toggle between rulesets from the Create Team selection, as each Fray would have its own multi-selection process (select summoner, create team, locked) which would be altered and changed anytime before going into battle. The only way to go into battle without all fray being selected would be to Surrender from a specific fray, as you can see in the first screenshot above.
Line Up Review
Upon submitting the Battle button on a fray, the player would then be prompted with this Line Up Review screen. The Line Up review would very clearly show the player which monsters were submitted to each fray and the rulesets, mana and Elements available for each match. Keep in mind, I just used a screen shot of my battle log which has Untamed and other monsters and also repeated the exact rulesets as this is just to give an idea what it would look like. From here the player can really examine their selections and also review the Unused Cards tab to see which monsters did not fit into a line up. The Fray Castle on the left would light up orange if a Fray has yet to be entered and be black if the fray was surrendered. A player can also review the prize structure to determine how heavily they may want to weight a certain fray, or if they would rather balance out their monsters across all of the frays.
Back End
All of the coding for the Line Up review would work just like the Battle Log on the regular Battle Screen, and also similar to how Brawls' look when assigning your teams. The only trick will be making sure a player can easily go in and edit each team, and remove monsters from one line up into their "Draft #123" pool in order to reassign to another fray. As long as the right reminders were in place to make sure players cannot accidentally forget a fray when submitting or accidentally lock in cards that they may want to move later; this should be a pretty straightforward coding structure.
Rewards
How should the Splinterlands Draft Tournaments reward the player? I have considered a few different structures, but I think I have a pretty good proposal for the rewards. When a player submits their 6 frays, they are instantly paired up randomly with 3 line ups from other players for each fray. This means your teams will fight 18 battles, 3 for each fray. If your teams can win 4/6 frays you win a prize (weighted towards the entry fees, perhaps packs, DEC or SPS or a combination). If you happen to win all 6 frays you win a much larger prize, and qualify for a Champions Draft, which would be a tradeable entry token that can be used to enter specialty draft tournaments with bigger prizes (perhaps with special promo or reward cards etc). Any fray that wins all 3 battles would also be entered into a special gauntlet style tournament for that specific ruleset where the undefeated line ups battle each other until their is only one ultimate line up from each ruleset, the players wouldn't need to do anything as they line ups are already submitted and the auto battler would just need to be run. The match up and prizes for the Ultimate Line Ups would come at the end of each season, and then reset the Ultimate Line Ups from there. To summarize, there are three ways to earn prizes, two for winning at least 4 frays, and additionally for winning all 6 frays, and the third way would be for going undefeated in a specific fray and then outdueling all other undefeated line ups in the end of season gauntlet.
Rewards Back End
In order to maximize efficiency and fluidity of the format, Mavericks would be given two weeks to play this format and populate multiple line ups for each ruleset. When a new player submits their draft lineup three pre-drafted lineups for each ruleset would then be pulled randomly and assigned to battle and be instantly viewable. Each draft line up submitted would also populate a new line up to be pulled from the database after that draft concludes, thus removing the previous pre-drafted lineup with its own and allowing a consistent pool of line-ups to be ready for future drafts. Collecting the undefeated line ups in a database to be pitted in a gauntlet at the end of the season may take a little work, but would be a really fun end of season reward for all the people that submitted strong frays during the season.
Hivemind
Lastly, here is where I would love your feedback. I think you can tell I have put a lot of thought and effort into clarifying what my idea of a Draft Format in Splinterlands should look like. I think this make opening Splinterland packs even more fun than it already is, and to tie pack opening in with tournament play is something that I would predict to be a win-win for all. Yet, I know there are hundreds of ideas, tweeks, changes that could make the idea even better so please leave me a comment with your ideas and let me know. Let's spread the word and make Splinterlands Draft Format happen! Oh and if you are a Splinterlands Dev, hit me up, I would love to join the team and make this format happen @williamhessian
I dislike the brawl format for draft. I find it tedious. Rather you fight one match at a time (like ranked) from a pool of people with similar records.
On topic of people keeping contents from packs, that will devalue packs significantly. (Infinite print basically.) So I think it would be better if people don't keep the cards outside of draft. (Hearthstone Arena does this.) Plus, cheaper entries as a result so you can play it more.
I think a cheaper Phantom draft idea is a great option.
I dont think this would devalue packs, because these would be the same as the general sale packs. It shouldn't add supply, but just be factored into the regular release. If they wanted to do Untamed or previous formats it would be pretty expensive, so maybe those could be phantom style.
My worry with Ranked play style games is that it ends up just being the luck of the packs, versus some deeper team building strategies. I also think utilizing more cards would be better for the game. Thoughts on those issues?
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