Ranked Rewards Updates Follow-Up

As we have mentioned, the ranked rewards system in Splinterlands will be a constantly changing and evolving process over time as more data becomes available and as players continue to adjust their behaviors to the new system.

This post is a follow-up to the last ranked rewards update post here (https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/upcoming-changes-to-the-new-ranked-reward-system) and we will continue to post regular updates as we evaluate the data, listen to community feedback, and make adjustments.

Completed Changes

The following two changes mentioned in the previous ranked rewards update post were released on June 28th, 2022. Initial indications show that they have generally been favorably received by the community and are helping to move the rewards economy in the right direction:

  • Daily Focus Chests Based on Current League
  • Starter Card RShares Reduction Formula Change

Changes Planned for Week of 7/18

The following changes are planned to be released during the week of July 18th, 2022, after the release of the Modern & Wild format changes for ranked battles the week of July 11th, 2022. The first two changes below were already mentioned in the last update post, and the others are new changes just being announced.

New Daily Focuses

We will be implementing new daily focuses based on using cards with certain abilities, rather than just cards from a certain splinter/element. The plan is to add between 10 to 15 of these types of focuses. Each one focusing on a few different abilities with a common theme. For example, a focus based on playing at least one card that has either the Sneak, Snipe, or Opportunity ability.

These new focuses are to be added alongside of the existing element-based focuses so it will be possible to get either type of focus each day. Please note that not all of these ability-based focuses will be available in the lower leagues, due to fewer cards having certain abilities in lower leagues. We have evaluated each of the new focuses based on how many cards have the required abilities in each league to ensure that players will always have a reasonable number of cards to select from for their daily focus at all levels of play.

Daily Focus Mechanic Update

We are changing the daily focus mechanic such that instead of an "all-or-nothing" system like it is currently, each win will always contribute focus points toward their daily chests even if no daily focus cards are used. However, each card used that follows the daily focus will give a bonus to the amount of reward shares earned for that battle.

For example, if a player has a Life element daily focus, then they will still earn focus points based on the rshares earned from a battle win even if they use a different element, but if they choose the Life element and use Life cards in the battle, they will receive bonus reward shares for each Life card they used.

Please note that using focus-specific cards will provide a bonus to the overall reward shares earned, which will apply to focus points, season points, and DEC earned from the battle - just like the other bonuses that can be earned by using gold foil cards or older edition cards.

Additionally, the number of reward shares required to earn both the daily focus chests and the season chests will be increased across all leagues as part of this change to compensate for the increased amount of reward shares that will be earned from battles through the new focus-card bonuses.

Focus Splinter/Element No Longer Guaranteed to be Active

The above two changes allow us to no longer set the player's current focus element to always be active for every battle each day.

Going forward, players will need to have a more diverse selection of cards in order to ensure they will have cards from an active splinter in each battle. Players owning or renting more cards is something we are looking to encourage. We hope this change will help drive even more demand and value to the card market.

Changing Minimum Card Rental Time to 2 Days

We will be updating the rental system by setting a minimum amount of time that a card is able to be rented to 2 days rather than the current minimum time of 1 day. Rentals and payments will still be handled on a daily basis, the only change is that the minimum rental time for all cards will be 2 days instead of 1. This also means that if a rental is cancelled by either party within the first day, it will not end until 2 days have passed since the rental started.

After the minimum 2 days have passed, then rentals will still continue on a daily basis as normal for payments, cancellations, and extensions.

We believe that this change should have a minimal impact to most players - especially when combined with the other changes mentioned above - but it should help to reduce some exploits around renting cards for a single day and burning down the ECR on an account. Please note that we will continue to monitor data and it may be necessary to increase the minimum rental time in the future, but we wanted to start with a smaller change and see how it goes first.

This change is also separate and unrelated to the new season rentals feature announced in the last ranked rewards update post. This feature is still in the works and is discussed in more detail below.

Adding Merits as a Chest Reward

SPS rewards will be coming to guild brawls in the not-too-distant future, and as a result we expect to see increased competition in the frays and higher demand for the gladiator cards!

In order to help encourage more players to join guilds and participate in brawls, we will be adding Merits as a possible chest reward across all leagues. We expect Merits to be found in approximately 10% of reward chests. For this change to occur, we will be decreasing the percentage of chests that currently contain reward cards by 10%. This change will help slow the distribution of reward cards and hopefully help them retain more value going forward.

The number of Merits received from a chest will be randomly determined in a similar manner to how the DEC chest rewards are calculated. As always, higher league chests will contain far more Merits, on average, than lower league chests.

Finally, the "Merit Bonus" from the guild store building will also apply to Merits earned from the reward chests - so make sure to upgrade your stores! For example, a level 3 store will result in 40% more merits that are found in reward chests!

Higher Potion Quantities in Higher Tier Reward Chests

One additional, smaller change is that higher league reward chests that contain potions will give larger amounts of potion charges, just like they give larger amounts of DEC tokens. For players who purchase packs, potions can be very valuable, and going forward getting into higher leagues will provide significantly more potions from reward chests.

Future Changes

Season Rentals

We discussed the plans for season rentals in the previous ranked rewards update post so you can read more details about it there, but we wanted to mention it again here so everyone would know that it's still on the roadmap.

Replacing DEC rewards with SPS

As most of you are probably aware, the year long SPS airdrop is quickly coming to an end. Shortly after the airdrop ending, we hope to implement the SPS rewards for ranked battles in order to reward players with SPS tokens for their participation in the game.

The plan is that all of the current DEC rewards for ranked battles - including tokens awarded for ranked battle wins and in focus/season reward chests - will be replaced with SPS tokens. This way there will no longer be a huge supply of DEC tokens entering the market from ranked battle rewards which will help stabilize the price around the value at which we accept them in the shop.

There is a fixed supply of 7.5M SPS tokens per month allocated to ranked battle rewards, and this supply will be portioned out between ranked battle wins and focus/season chests, with a separate pool for each chest tier.

All of the exact details about the SPS ranked battle rewards will be provided before it is released, but we expect that it will significantly help towards our goal of incentivizing players to move up to higher leagues in the game rather than using multiple accounts at lower leagues.

Finally, please keep in mind that even at current market prices the overall value of the 7.5M SPS per month available for ranked battle rewards is significantly higher than the value of the DEC tokens currently awarded through ranked battles on a monthly basis, meaning the overall amount of rewards available to players will continue to increase.


Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!

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NOTE: All rewards from this post will be burned.

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Looks like good changes, other than the two day minimum rental time. I only ever rent for 1 day and this is bad for me. I think this will have the opposite effect and people will just rent less, because it's not worth it anymore.

I think this will have the opposite effect and people will just rent less, because it's not worth it anymore.

THIS.

Then again, if they lose half of the renters, they'll still reap some benefit as the bots will still rent the cards out for two days, but a lot of the smaller accounts won't. I think it might just be better for the bots...and those with really high collection power.

It for sure looks like a nice step forward, please bring back the 23h refresh clock instead of the current 24h which is super annoying as it doesn't allow for a stready daily routine pushing the time a little bit further each day. Or allow some kind of auto-claim refresh function.

I agree.

Another solution would be that a new focus would always automatically start after the time period is over (even if one didn't already claim the focus rewards).

I suggested that here.

This is really a very good suggestion- As with this change you have no longer the chance to fullfill your daily in more than 24 (23) hours, why not to start a new focus automatically. Also with this change it could be possible for the player to collect his reward, like for the season chests, their you also can claim your rewards not important if you start some battles in the new season or not.

I always knew you are a man of logic. :-)

Another idea would be to allow the player once to prelong the quest for some minutes, maybe 15 or 20 as it is in my opinion no really great experience when you are shortly before filling one more chests, maybe you need only one win and than the time run out. With the former reward system this was in another way, their you really could play till you have all neccessary wins not important if this happens in the 23 hours or only afterwards.

I find good that you like my idea, next time please leave a like there ;)

What, please? :)

Nah, Everyone claims when they want to. What good is a new Focus if you don't have 100% capture. You will gain nothing

This is what I was thinking. The new system is better for me because I don't have to wait for a specific time to start a new Daily Quest.
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Am with you on this one!

Yes I agree. only 23 hours each new focus 😁

100% slowly the schedule is just getting more and more out of whack

If you take away DEC from battle earnings and reward chests there is no more inflow. Giving out 7.5M SPS each month will just shift the problem.
Yes, you can convert SPS to credits to spend them on the market and the seller is then given DEC (so there's your inflow again) and we got a SPS-credits-DEC symbiotic lifecycle. This just makes three currencies depending on each other and makes the market for these currencies more vulnerable and less stable in my oppinion.
In addition the outflow of DEC through guild buildings and market fees is unchanged.
There is your bottleneck.

You just wrecked the price of SPS.

It was a future hope token to be 10 times more valuable than DEC when it was introduced and instead it is now replacing DEC?

Yes, changes need to be made to the ecosystem to get it more stable but this is a slap in the face of everyone trusting the initial intention of SPS and investing in it and its hope/future promise.

this is a slap in the face of everyone trusting the initial intention of SPS and investing in it and its hope/future promise.

https://sps.splinterlands.com/rewards

The original intention of SPS, as stated in the whitepaper from day 1, was to have a 7.5 million rewards pool for ranked play. This is and always has been part of the distribution plan of the 3 billion sps.

it did NOT state the intention to REPLACE DEC

New SPS tokens will initially be added to the various reward pools

But instead they are replacing it.

Ok, just listened to Town-Hall and I have to reconsider my position.
Thanks to @yabapmatt for clearing things up, that helped me a lot to understand what the actual plan is.
Please consider doing the Town-Hall first and then post its content, would have saved me a day of agony 😉

Is there a really good reason for keeping DEC rather than just letting it just flow out of the ecosystem and go away? It doesn't seem to have a use that isn't filled by one of the other currencies.

very interesting and innovative changes to the game and economy. If I am understanding this correctly, this will slightly reduce the total amount of nfts printed, but give all players a way to start building gladius cards likely before they ever need them which eliminates the worst hurdle of the system (fighting others with gladiator cards when you have none). Rewards guild system upgrades.

I love the sps rewards from battle!

Great work and I cant wait to see the changes in action!

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With DEC no longer being awarded for ranked rewards is there a plan to allow buying/renting splinternalnds cards using SPS? It'll be a shame to every time convert SPS to DEC just to buy/rent..
also with terrablock the bridging fees are not insignificant any more so always buying dec externally and bridging is not the best option either

SL allows credits to be bought with SPS so you can always buy credits at the price of SPS which is a much better way to rent or buy cards.

Lots to digest here I really like the moving parts. I hope everyone is patient with this it seems as though this could lead to impressive and drastic improvements.

Thanks DEVS for being the most nimble dev team in the business and reacting so quickly with a very legit answer to the issues.

These are good changes. Separate league pools will be very important to incentivizing higher league play. The inclusion of merits will also be very useful to increase attention towards guilds and DEC burn and reduce card inflation.

The team has to plan carefully about how players can earn DEC going forward. Players rely heavily on DEC to rent cards for ranked. With the above changes there will be needs to rent more cards across splinters for at least 2 days.

Maybe centi-SPS (1/100 of an SPS) could be used for renting?

Not quite sure about this idea. If SPS can be used for rents or everything else we are using DEC to buy now, DEC will lose its value (not to mention it's far from the intended conversion rate of 1000 DEC = 1 USD).

the min 2 days rental is a big change.. will it encourage more players to play or will it be the opposite? im guessing the majority of players rent 1 day.. this will drive more ownership in cards and probably push card prices up

I think it's going to be opposite. One gets daily focus for 24hr only and renting a card for 2 days which one don't know the next focus will be same is absolutely loss. If the focus changed next day, you just rented another day for nothing but a loss. This is going to make higher leagues renting even more destructive as max level cards costs huge to rent and you just throwing another day of rental for nothing. Buying could be a solution but it's unlikely for average players to do as it's still going to cost over $20k to get some decent set of cards which one can't afford. Only good for age old players who got all those cards at max level and no need to worry about buying or renting.

I have to agree here. I don't rent a lot of cards but when I do it it's focus related. A two day minimum just gouges me.

I prefer renting for multiple days to play in a higher league.

I have to over rent to protect myself from a cancelled rental which may drop my end if season league finish.

Problems on both ends.

I'd prefer a contract that is unbreakable.

The terms should be settable,

  • Max length of rental
  • Min length of rental
  • Open to cancellation
  • Unable to Cancel
  • Price variance % increase/decrease to cater to significant market ups and downs to keep a longer rental reasonable for both parties

Setting fixed Minimums should just be a default, changeable depending on users motivations.

i don't rent cards myself, but isn't this bad for renters if they are now tied to the cards for 2 days for the daily quest?

and where do the sps for ranked battles actually come from? is that only for a limited time because sps are limited, or are they printed infinitely?

and won't this change contribute to a sharp drop in the sps price?

Ranked battle sps has always been planned and is in the white paper. There is a set amount allocated to this. As stated in the article and in the white paper, the pool is 7.5mil a month and i would imagine will go on until this particular distribution method ends as stated in the whitepaper. Sps still only has a max supply and this was always the plan to be implemented once the airdrop ends. It will also be part of guild brawls at somepoint.

okay, thanks for the tip, it's been too long since i looked at the whitepaper. 🤐

Linked already above, but I post it here as well. 65 months distribution of SPS in Play 2 Earn fashion was planned from the beginning on.
https://sps.splinterlands.com/rewards

Hoard DEC.

Maybe in 1 day will back to $1/1000 in actual

For the first time, I disagree with the majority of the changes, including the 2-day rentals and dropping SPS (a governancy token) instead of DEC (an in-game currency token). I think both those changes are horrible for the game environment.

This is huge, what an update!

Funny thing is that you guys are creating a metaverse more valuable each day, but it is not reflected in the price of the assets in game. This lead me to think that the metaverse is still to complicated for the avarage joe to understand. This game has now become 3x of what it was back in november when the price where 3-4 times higher. Lets look at this in three years from now, you will most likely change even more of peoples lives.

Thanks and keep up using your brains at top level.

Cheers!

after the airdrop we will see the actual price of SPS

Ye mate! Most likely we will get the right price then.

This is huge, what an update!

Funny thing is that you guys are creating a metaverse more valuable each day, but it is not reflected in the price of the assets in game. This lead me to think that the metaverse is still to complicated for the avarage joe to understand. This game has now become 3x of what it was back in november when the price where 3-4 times higher. Lets look at this in three years from now, you will most likely change even more of peoples lives.

Thanks and keep up using your brains at top level.

Cheers!

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BIG dump coming in SPS. because it is no more need to stake to earn in ranked rewards.

My impression is that the rules are getting more complicated. Those who play the game long enough absorb the gradual changes. But what is it like for new players?

I think its actually the opposite. It feels more complicated to someone who's been here a while and has been adjusting to changes every few weeks. To someone new, I don't see anything in here that's more complicated than before except maybe adding merits to chests.

Does playing neutral cards stifle rewards in the new system if you get splinter focus?

That's how I read the change; unless your daily focus was 'neutral' - in which case, you'd never earn enough rshares to get your chests. This is sounding complicated and dumb.

Yes. But there will be an extra focus at the same time, that is based on the skills of the cards you use, not the splinter. The relations are not yet clear but it could be that your 1 neutral card has a skill that will deliver your team an RShare bonus that may compensate for not being in the focus splinter. The optimal card in that case would have that same skill AND be of the focus splinter.

Keep it up developers, long live splinterlands.. Playing since August 2021 up to now 😍😍🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩


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Wow. That's a lot to take in. I'm not totally sold on the 2-day rental but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I'm also a little confused about what this means for the DEC economy. I'm sure this will be discussed in the townhall tomorrow but how is dec now distributed into the economy? Is it just the burning SPS feature we heard might be coming? Is it still in chests? Some other way I'm forgetting?

Massive changes happening in a week without any details released. Plus, it is happening in the middle of a season.

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sounds exciting :)

We do need the option to set up rentals that last for multiple days without the option to cancel, but there's no need for a 2 day minimum.

Overall, I think this is a good update, but this may kill or boost the rental business, which points to the goal of owning cards.

How will we generate DEC now? If we just stop generating it it's price will shoot to the moon again because we need for Guilds, card purchases etc

Rent for two days? For what?

I don't always play with the same equipment, so it seems very risky to me. Having cards there that I'm not going to use doesn't seem to me.

If the minimum rental will be two days, the minimum of the Focus should also be two.

Sounds like a good update as long as you're not a new player and already own all the cards you need. Changes mid-season are always fun too.

I am curious to see how I will change my strategy....on the surface, the non-availability of the rented focus and 2-day rent seems like a horrible thing. But CHALLENGE ACCEPTED...let's see if with efficient renting you can still make this profitable...

Does the SPS Airdrop will start again after the completion of the 365 Days? Because/If not the Dec will touch ATL Price, Which can afraid the market.

I do not like changes with focus and rentals.. now to rent for the diamond I spend around 3k dec per day and bearly break even. Now not only I will have to pay for 2 days but it will be much harder to rent anything as prices will go up. Not to mention there will be fewer rewards and SPS price will probably crash :/

I have a sneaking suspicion the SPS price devaluing is somewhat intentional & those that can Hodl SPS may reap a great benefit. SPS & its tie to BSC / governance implies its capable of something greater then DEC can manage. Due to the importance of SPS it stands to reason you would want to minimize its usage until distributed in sufficient quantity.

I think the recent updates are fantastic & cant wait to see what comes next for Splinterlands.

Anyone else lose some of their season chest and daily chests after the update? 😌

After a couple of days of this, I have a couple of observations.

  1. Y'all can eat an entire dick and some balls with that two day minimum rental shit.

  2. The daily quest rewards are almost non-existent with level 1 cards. There aren't enough cards with abilities to make it worth trying.

Overall though, for my experience, it's probably a little bit more fun not having to focus on the focus. But y'all can still eat a dick with the 2-day rental stuff.

What's the benifit for binding two days rent period!!? A level four or five summoner is required to use up leveled splinter cards and daily focus now is based on splinter group, a change now arrive later that daily focus will be based on the splinter ability, this will cost more as the ability and summoner met the level requirements which lead more renting cards from market and expenditure more. I think that will be one kind of wrost for my using dec that i have earned or rewarded. A most successful daily focus reward feed back is seven to eight each potion of alchemy and legendary and gets only 20 to 30 dec rewards where rental cost to complete this focus is over 120 dec. I think rental days should be one days and once you selected maximum number of days cannot cancel the duration of days by either parties. You have to careful for selecting number of days. I think everything will be accepted and only the two days rental issue, and rental cancellation be done after first periods of rental days end which may from either parties.

In a earlier townhall it was mentioned they will be offering a burn mechanic for sps that gives players dec at the time of the announcement it didnt seem like it would be a major benefit to do so but now we can see how it will likely be very benefitial to increasing value to sps

I'd assume card burning

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