One of the biggest issues for any game that gives out rewards with real value is ensuring that the economy is set up in such a way that those rewards are limited by some external factor that cannot be manipulated. If they are not, then players will inevitably "farm" the rewards (whether via automated "bots", or with real users) and the entire system will be unsustainable.
One area in which the Splinterlands game is currently failing in this regard is with the Loot Chest rewards given out via daily quests and season rewards. These are currently limited only by account, which is an easily manipulable factor. As a result, we see many large, and continually growing, groups of accounts set up specifically to farm these rewards.
If left unchecked, issues like this will undermine the Splinterlands economy, so we feel that it is in the best interest of all players and stakeholders to address it as soon as possible.
Since this is a significant change that will affect most players, we wanted to give some additional notice about what we're working on and planning and allow ample time for feedback. Please keep in mind that this is still early in the design and development process, so everything is subject to change before release. We will provide another update closer to when the changes are scheduled to be released with the full details.
Collection Score
Currently, the amount of Loot Chest rewards are determined by a player's league (ex. Silver II), and a player's league is determined by their ranked season rating. The issue is that it's relatively easy to get to higher leagues with nothing more than a small set of level 1 cards - or even just the "starter" cards - which should not be the case. To address this, we plan to introduce a new requirement to get into each league called the Collection Score.
The Collection Score will be a measure of the size and level of each account's collection of cards. Then, in order to move to the next league, players will not only need to get the required number of rating points, but they will also need to have a high enough collection score.
The collection score is planned to be calculated by simply taking the sum of the DEC burn rate of all of the cards that the player owns that are not delegated out or listed for sale on the market and cards delegated to the player.
The plan is that the Collection Score will only limit a player's league, not their rating. For example, a player might have a rating of 1400 - which would normally place them in the Silver II League - but if they only have a collection score high enough for Silver III then that is the league they will be in.
Many of the details around this are still TBD, and everything here is still subject to change, but as we mentioned above we wanted to give everyone a heads-up about what we're working on and we will provide another update with much more information when it is closer to being released.
League Leaderboards
The collection score change will also enable us to add another feature that has been heavily requested by some players for a while now - separate leaderboards for each league.
This means that players at all levels of play can compete each ranked season to be the best in their league and earn some extra season rewards similar to the Untamed booster packs given out to players who top the overall leaderboard each season in the game currently.
We plan to release the collection score change described above first, since that's an important issue that needs to be addressed asap, but then our next focus will be on getting the league leaderboards added in as quickly as possible thereafter.
There are still a LOT of details around how exactly the league leaderboards will work which we are in the process of figuring out, but just as with the collection score change, you can expect a more detailed update before it's ready to be released.
Player Feedback & AMA
As always, we welcome constructive feedback about these changes (or anything else) from our players. In fact, all of the changes described in this post were a direct result of player feedback themselves.
The Splinterlands team recognizes that the game would not be anywhere close to where it is today without our amazing players, and we listen closely to all feedback and take it very seriously.
We are also planning to do an AMA with @yabapmatt on the Splinterlands Discord server at Friday, June 12th at 2 PM ET / 6 PM UTC, so if you want to discuss these upcoming changes or anything else related to Splinterlands, we hope to see you there!
P.S. We know that it's almost time for the next Legendary Summoner airdrop and that some Reward Edition cards are nearly sold out, so stay tuned for updates on those in the near future!
Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!
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NOTE: All rewards from this post will go to @steem.dao (the Hive Development Fund account) to support the ongoing development of the Hive platform.
First, I'm very excited to see you addressing this issue. And I think I will like the solution a lot, but obviously want to see how it is implemented like everyone else.
Just as importantly, I love the fact that you made the statement below and it shows that you guys are paying attention to the community (which is a MAJOR PLUS)!
Keep up the communication and thank you very much for the update!!!
I get the sentiment of the changes and overall agree. The only feedback I would have is to not make the collection score requirements too large. The goal should absolutely be to hold the “spam” play to the lower tiers but there should be very little distinction between the score requirements for higher tiers. If someone can skillfully play lower ranked cards and beat opponents with a higher collection score, they shouldn’t have the feeling that there is a “paywall” to advance into the next tier.
Well this is where the "league leaderboards" part will come in. If you are skillful then you can rank on the leaderboard for the league that you're in and earn additional rewards that way, which can also help you reach the next tier of collection score / league.
This is why League Leaderboard is implemented right?
Great solution, Matt!
I can't see any fairer solution than this.
This should make lower collection player don't feel left out, because I got this feeling when I'm still struggling on Gold League last year. I felt the party was only for Champion League players only, because lower tier basically just dust compared to them.
Now, if lower league has their own Leaderboard and rewards accordingly, I believe we just solved this discrimination. Lower tier players will compete fairly and gain their rewards according to their own scale Leaderboard not to Top Level leaderboard.
Love it.
yes this is how feel i would absolutly hate it if i couldent progress because my cards werent quite good enough even if i am good at the game
I sold all my cards about a year ago.
In July or August I decided to start over and built a new deck. At the beginning I didn't spend any money on it.
Because I still knew the game mechanics, I was able to move up to the silver and later the gold league. This quickly gave me more cards and I was able to expand my deck. Then at some point I started putting money back into the game for boosters and single cards (I bought 205 booster packs alone).
I would not have done that if I had been stuck in the Bronze / Silver League forever and only ever got one card.
It would be different with the collection score. I would have gotten stuck in the bronze league and I probably would not have found the fun of collecting again as it would have been too long.
I don't think the collection score would affect me negatively since I have almost 949000 DEC burn value. But I care about the young players that we all depend on.
Big Farmers like TH12 can easily equip many bot Accounts with a big enough collection. So I don't think this collection score will affect farmer like him.
I doubt that this collection score will help.
I completely agree with you!
thank you
This change is not supposed to affect players who have purchased large card collections. There is no problem with them earning a significant amount of rewards in that case. The issue we are looking to address is people who are able to farm a large amount of rewards with little to no investment.
Okay, so this change is not aimed at TH12. Are there any other changes planned that affect farmers like him? It cannot be that a player gets 70% of the rewards of every tournament. It's pretty depressing. One reason why I don't play tournaments.
Or do you see no problem in the behavior of TH12?
And here is where the plan fails, if the th12 botnet isn't a problem Idk what is a problem then. You have even the novice tournaments being farmed by these bots and also they have a service to provide those pesky low levelled bots that you're so concerned about.
But no, these guys seem untouchable. Meanwhile other users that play their accounts manually are being stupids for not using a bot that would give them better rankings. Meanwhile this botnet play between each others to make a better ranking and that isn't a problem for you neither.
You got some big balls to say this.
Completely agree with Matt and understand the ractio at the basis of this update. One important point is (not checked other comments, maybe someone else already pointed out):
One obvious solutions:
I don't see what people gaining good reward with low investment would be an issue.
If they get good reward with low level cards it means they have skills to play, so they deserve the rewards.
Also if you want to get high return for low investment it is better to buy one starter pack with some untamed packs, rather than 2 starter pack. The daily reward is exponential as you move up leagues. Therefore it is better to have 1 high ranking account than 2 average accounts.
I think this is a great idea. I'm a little bias because I have a nice collection of cards. I can see other accounts not so happy about this move. This also will make cards worth a bit more as more people will be making purchases in the near future.
Really nice to see that this big issue of reward farming is going to be fixed. I had almost exactly the same idea in mind and love the solution. It will also be nice to have collection values as part of the game. Seeing your collection grow over time is really fun and an addictive mechanic. It probably won't be easy to find the sweet spot to keep farmers out without discouraging players who just start playing when they see low initial earnings.
Some ideas, instead of 'limiting rewards' for low-value collections it could be called 'reward bonuses' for higher-value collections. Also, players who hold a lot of extra cards in their collection just as an investment for the future should not be punished for it being faced against stronger opponents with fewer more optimized cards.
Some more suggestions to improve the game (I made a post on it a while back here)
On the bright side, the ones that do pull through (including myself) getting to a certain number of games tend to continue playing loving the game and many also end spending money. Some kind of easy fun tutorial that gets new players to understand the game which also gives them rewards (that unlock the moment they purchase the summoner's spellbook) or rewards for reaching a certain number of ranked games could do wonders.
Anyway, great to see the game is moving forward and the effort that is being done to make everything sustainable. Thanks and Keep it up!
Nice, like the changes :)
Why add up "ALL" of the cards. Why not add up 1 of each monster/summoner?
Why does it matter if they have 10 of the same cards (or have 500 of the same useless cards delegated to it to make the qualification) ... it literally has NOTHING to do with how they play the game... only one of those cards (the highest) can be played at any given point in time.
Yes i understand the argument is toward owning lots of cards ...not to play but simply to facilitate demand... just seems like a lazy system that seems a bit greedy.
This collection score has so much more use ability... you can know how "good" / "valuable" your opponents actual team is. Users can feel great they beat a player with a 10% higher collection score. But with this lazy method a player still won't know because you're counting even the "other" useless/reptatitive cards. The collection score really would be useless for comparative analysis to a player if done with "ALL"
This is an awesome change to do collection score... but please make it really useful... it could be so much better for the players and not just lazy-semi-greedy.
Yea, in retrospect details about how the collection score might be calculated should have been left out of this post since nothing has been decided yet. Adding up the BCX values of all cards was just the first and definitely simplest idea and not necessarily what we will end up going with. Your suggestion makes a lot of sense and is in line with what a few other people have also proposed.
Agree here. Collection score could be a tad more sophisticated - ie high bcx summoners (1 from each splinter) would encourage diversity in that players collection.
It was better to fix the system using Summoner level + Card Level instead of collection score alone.
I am just thinking if it pushes the demand of (cheap rewards) Gold cards for collection scores.
That would make much more sense to me.
Collection Score actually a bad decision. You can delegate to bots the necessary cards for rating that are simply not needed in the game. for reference, a new bot on the starting set during the day gains the level of silver 2. if you increase the distance between the leagues it will be more efficient.
according to the parameters of the cards themselves, it is not particularly profitable to invest in their growth from the first level to the next 3-2-2-1 as there are no special advantages. moreover, it constantly occurs when a unit wins with the 1st level of the opponent’s card with the 4th level, simply due to the best arrangement, because they do not differ breakthrough in parameters. this imbalance entails an economic model, which is justified to play at level 1 and bots than live and fullmax decks
If they change this to allow one card per monster/summoner that maybe could fix that.
technical stupidity. during the season I can rent cards, delegate, change the deck. and how will it be fixed?
just as a bot can play with a starter kit for the season and at the end of the season when they will record the result, get delegated fullmapscards.
and if you take into account the cards that were played, the bot can have 100,500 cheap androids and play them one at a time.
in essence, this will be a dead end solution that will complicate the code a bit for bots and hit live players again.
I like the general idea.
My main concern is a player gaming the system by stacking large numbers of cheap cards (say, Rusty Androids).
Other note: A collection score can be used for tournament seeding/sorting.
I don't think this will be an issue. For one thing, it could provide a use and demand for those cheap cards, but also you'll be matched against opponents with similar collection scores, so if they have a more diverse set of cards then you'll probably just lose. So ideally it will be better to take whatever you might have spent on a bunch of Rusty Androids and get a bunch of more useful cards that will actually help you win battles.
The overall goal here is really to incentivize growing your collection in the intended way vs creating multiple accounts or "stacking" cheap cards. It may take a few iterations to get there, but we'll keep working towards it.
The point is that you might not be allowed to transfer all the rusty androids to other N-accounts to alter their collection score just before claiming the rewards
Is that means player playing with all delegated cards (team share or heroen account) will grt less collection score?
No, cards delegated to your account will count towards your collection score the same as if you owned them:
Thank you for showing me how not to do it))) This will not work, so you will only scare off new players and strengthen bots
What are the exact collection values for each league? Announcing this early will help players adjust better.
I'll be waiting for the update particularly concerning the collection score because it still needs disambiguation. It sounds like this will adversely affect people with leased and delegated cards but like I said, I'll be looking out for updates.
I like the idea of separate leader boards for each league. Especially considering that the collection score might end up making me spend a whole year in diamond 1 😄
Love these updates!
This kind of changes are a bit risky but I will keep an open mind. Any improvement to the economy is welcome.
Great Idea!
Would it make sense to say that the required collection value is somehow related to the monster level for combining?
Which means a whole collection of Lvl 8 monsters equals to Champion level 1 for example?
I would love to see the same levels for monsters and leagues.
Is it correct that people with many duplicates will end up with a relatively high collection score, compared to the strength of their collection? Considering the separate leagues, perhaps there can be an option to only count the cards that were actually played in that specific season.
All of these details are still TBD, but we're considering all of these factors and will work on a solution that makes sense.
I am excited to see this live.
cool
I think the collection score is a great way to go.
Thank you so much for league leaderboards! Can't wait to see that feature!
Nice to see you thinking about so many levels of players, we have to keep the folks with not much cash having fun too! Keep up the great work!
Thanks for adding multi leagues, its going to be allot of fun seeing who the best player is in each league. As for the Collection Score, total DEC value likely isn't the best way to go as it feels as if its another step in the pay to play direction.
My suggestion for the issue at had is Summoner/Monster levels. For example .... anyone who wishes to battle in the Diamond league would need to have at least one maxed summoner and X maxed monsters. This would stop any level one and other weaker teams from reaching Diamond +. The same concept can be applied to all the league levels. This suggestion would also allow those with a mixed bag of leveled cards and Skill to still compete at the highest of levels.
Wouldn't it be easy to lease couple of high level gold foil epic or rare cards to boost the collection score. Imagine bots owning level 1 sets but 3 leased gold foil epic cards. That will give them a boost of around 40k Dec and thus place them to a different league.
This is a huge Progress!
I always wanted that League Leaderboard since I struggled on Gold League, it felt like I was left out from the party which only available for Top Champion League players. (Well, now I'm on Champion League, too)
Lower tier League should have their own way compete with their league, The Tournaments already got this rules, but it should be on rank based too.
Yees, I trust your reasoning behind the first change, and welcome it. Also, the second change is great news, as I have been slowly getting higher and higher with each season, but can never seem to get up into the realm of the "Top 50". It surely would be nice to have some bonus "Untamed" packs to add to my "one pack per day" opening habit. Finally, although I am enjoying the new "anytime" tournaments, and they serve their purpose weel, they just don't have the same "timing" element as the original tournaments. That is, I enjoyed being able to sit for an hour or two and play a more "real-time" tournment. I would like to PLEASE with you guys that you provide us a MIX of the anytime and regular tournaments. I think this would best appease players of both inclinations (of which I am one).
very important and this will ensure that people who have invested heavily are assured of fair game and hopefully, we will see the bots which farm the rewards slowly back off from higher leagues.
I also hope that something is done about tournaments - like higher league should not be allowed to play in the lower league because this will only thwart the rewards of new players who do not have experience and cards that match the skilled players. I have nothing against them personally but if you observe, you can see them continuously participate in every single tournament and get away with the rewards. Otherwise, just reserve one tournament per week only for league wise games.
I hope you won't find my input haughty.
Stay blessed :)
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I think the collection score will be pretty bad for the new comers.
The most fun part of the game for me is to try doing the best with limited level of cards. The is always a fun part of the free to play game: try to go as far as you can without buying too much power-up. I have quite low deck value but I usually always reach the diamond II league.
I don't think it is an issue to let people with low level card reach high league. It means the game leave enough rooms for skills.
I think the collection score will make the game less skill focus and more cash/investment focus.
I think some rules against multi accounts would be more productive.
Geez, I've been wanting separate leagues for like EVER! So lets do this!
Hopefully, each league will come with the opportunity to earn a small amount of packs for the best player(s). (even 1-3 packs is enough)
Maybe allocate
1 pack for Bronze
3 packs for Silver
5 packs for Gold
10 packs for Diamond
And the balance goes to Champion
The value of the game isn't in reward cards but rather cards that make you feel like you are growing your deck. I really missed this when it was taken away, and i suspect it'll improve the new player experience even if they are competing with bots.
Anyway I'm looking forward to these changes when they hit the ground.
@yabapmatt
I think this is half the solution definitely... However, there are tonnes of bots with high level cards too, we have kicked out a few bots from our guild that were in diamond 1 to champion 2!!!
There're some things that could be done quite easily that would allow us to limit the number of bots to stop the economy from crashing...
#1. IP Limiter = say 2 accounts per IP (this is already done by lots of games that are monetary based such as online poker etc.)
#2. Number of game watcher (if a user plays more than say x amount of games then it could flag the account for members of the team to moderate)
#3. Simple username checker (for example we have bots simply using 1, 2, 3, etc on the end of their name) hbk1, hbk2, hbk3, etc. Again, flag for manual action.
#4. Heat map checker (like used on websites to track where the user is looking, where they are clicking etc.) This could be used to easily identify bots as they will always click the same place with little natural movement.
#5. Recaptcha (no not the am I human one) the invisible one that you don't need to do anything with.... It's actually pretty good and will limit those bots down...
#6. Block users who post with blank referrer agent... simple trick used by websites and will limit bots.
#7. Track down the Telegram bot owners, join it, get the code, implement a script to stop that script working....
If we're still getting botted after this then I'd suggest a honeypot trap.
Honestly, with that lot implemented then I honestly believe you'll reduce bots by about 80%+ and in no way does it alter the game to the real users.
Hope this helps,
Peace!