To say that 2021 is off to an amazing start for Splinterlands would be quite an understatement, and most of the new features we have planned for the year aren't even released yet! None of this would be possible without our amazing community of players, which is why we're happy to announce the following changes which have mostly all come as a result of your feedback.
Guild Brawl Updates
The new Guild Brawls feature has been live since the beginning of the month and we've spent a significant amount of time evaluating how they have gone and discussing the various settings and mechanics with players. As a result we have a number of changes to announce that are planned to go live before the next guild brawl starts this Friday, April 23rd, 2021.
Increased Brawl Cycle Time
Going forward, both the "prep phase" and "battle phase" for guild brawls will be extended to 2 days rather than 1 day. The "results phase" will remain as 1 day for the time being, which means that once the changes are released there will be a new guild brawl every 5 days instead of every 3 days as they have been.
We hope that this helps give guilds adequate time for planning and submitting their battles.
Reduced Crown Costs for Building Upgrades
As a result of increasing the amount of time each guild brawl lasts, we will be reducing the crown costs for building updates so that the amount of time it takes on average for guilds to be able to upgrade their arena (and soon barracks and shop) will be closer to what we originally intended. The updated crown costs will be as follows:
| Building Level | Old Crown Cost | New Crown Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 2 | 150 | 40 |
| 3 | 400 | 100 |
| 4 | 500 | 250 |
| 5 | 1000 | 400 |
| 6 | 1250 | 675 |
| 7 | 2100 | 1000 |
| 8 | 2500 | 1700 |
| 9 | 3750 | 2250 |
| 10 | 4500 | 3500 |
Fray Changes
The "frays" that are available in the guild brawls will also be updated primarily to reduce the number of gold foil only frays in the lower arena tiers. The higher arena tiers will still have more gold foil only frays (as well as just more frays in general), which we feel is appropriate for the higher level guilds, but it is clear that for the lower tiers there were too many gold foil only frays which caused a significant number of guilds to be unable to fill those spots.
There are also some other changes to the frays including some adjustments to the league level caps and allowed editions which we feel will also help more guilds to be competitive.
We hope that this change will allow more guilds to fill more fray spots and make for a better overall experience for all participants.
UI Improvements
Finally, the following list of UI improvements will be pushed out to the Splinterlands website which should help players to get a better idea of what is going on and prepare for the brawls:
- Show a count of how many active guilds are in each Brawl Tier (this is shown as a tooltip when hovering over tier stars, and as a line of info in the Brawl Settings pop up).
- On the prep stage, show a count of how many guilds have entered a particular Fray (shown as a tooltip when hovering over the Fray number).
- Show fray info tooltip when hovering over guild member names on combat & results screens.
- Show W / L / D record for guilds on ALL tab of results screen.
- Show some basic historical Brawl stats on Guild About page for previous 10 Brawl cycles (Brawls entered, Average Fray fill rate, Average Brawl Rank).
- Fix for minor display glitch on guild members list screen.
Rating Points Update for Ranked Battle Wins
Over the past few seasons some accounts in the lower leagues have been able to gain an abnormally high rating and easily claim top leaderboard positions for their league by playing very large numbers of battles especially earlier on in the season, likely via the use of an automated script or "bot".
Part of the reason this is possible is that in the current rating system the minimum rating point increase for a ranked battle win is 3 points. So these accounts are able to advance 3 points at a time no matter how far ahead of their opponent they are in rating. In order to try to address this going forward, we will be changing the minimum rating increase to 0 for Bronze and Silver league ranked battles and only when the winning player is above the maximum rating level for their league.
This change is planned to be released at the start of the next ranked play season which begins on Friday, April 30th. As always, we will keep a close eye on the change for a few seasons after it goes into effect to ensure that it is achieving the desired result and we will make any changes or adjustments if necessary.
CUB Payments Now Accepted!
Splinterlands is excited to announce that the CUB token on Binance Smart Chain is now accepted as a method of payment within the game! CUB is the token for the CubDefi project which is part of LeoFinance - a fellow Hive-based application and community for finance and investment.
Players can stake various cryptocurrencies on cubdefi.com (including DEC) and earn CUB tokens which can now be used to purchase Credits in Splinterlands which can be used to buy cards, packs, land, and more!
Roadmap Update
The following is the latest high-level overview of the Splinterlands development roadmap. Please keep in mind that the dates listed are estimates and are subject to change, as are the items in the roadmap themselves.
Please note that we are prioritizing a significant number of back-end security and process changes as a result of the recent hacking incident which may push back some of the other items on the roadmap.
- Mobile App Tutorial - Q1 2021 (COMPLETED)
- iTunes Store Mobile App - Q1 2021 (COMPLETED)
- Guild Brawls (v1) - Q1 2021 (COMPLETED)
- Security Review & Updates - Q2 2021
- Guild Brawls (v2) - Q2 2021
- New Card Delegation & Rental System - Q2 2021
- Praetoria Map Release & Land Claims Redemption - Q2 2021
- Major new thing we haven't announced yet - Q2/Q3 2021
- Land Expansion Release - Q4 2021
- Boss Fights - TBD
- Achievements - TBD
Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!
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This is maybe true in novice or bronze league, but I can tell you that in silver league it gets preaty hard. Since you need a win rate of over 92% (you gain 3 points per win and loose 36 per loose) it is preaty hard to climb with a bot in silver league. The problem I see now for this league is that it will be nearly impossible as a non bot player to climb the leaderboard, because most of the time in match making you are paired with people with way lower rank and so you would get 0 points and then if you loose against this player it is even a harder hit. In my opinion this change is only reasonable if you make the match making so that you only face players of your rating.
I agree. In addition, this will make you want to play a lot for the first 2 or 3 days of the season (so you can get as high as you can) then stop in the middle, and only start playing again with 2 or 3 days left when more people of higher rank are playing. This means that for every 15 day season, I can only safely play 5 of those days.
If I have a 2000 rating, there is no reason for me to be playing against people with a 1300 rating.
Just to give you an overview: In my last 66 ranked battle I only played 7 times against a person where I won more then 3 points. And in those battle I only won 34 points(7+5+4+5+4+4+5). During those battles I also lost 1 time and lost 36 points. In the new system I would have in total -2 points in rating and that with a 98,5% win rate and around 2h of time invest. Does this seams balanced?
isn't the problem here more that you do not have players of your rating to play against, rather than the rating system? i understand that this can discourage you from playing, but the system needs to accommodate for more exploitative play patterns, yes?
There are player of the same rating, but the system simply muchest you with the next player of the same league it can finds.
smart move lowering the crowns for advance and lowering the number of gold foil spots. One of our guilds has zero people who can do gold foil so we'll always be at a disadvantage but at least more people will be able to play by default.
Way to stay nimble @splinterlands this will be fun to see how it shakes out. I personally enjoy people needing to at least "humor the possibility of thinking about possibly, maybe, considering" building a gold deck or acquiring one through rental. I think the game will loosen up and become more dynamic when there is more reasons to acquire and hold gold cards, since they are 25-50X rarer than the regulars, rather than being just stores of DEC if the tournaments don't align with a high end gold deck. Otherwise cool stuff, loving just about all of it, I wish the community would open up to at least finding better ways to reward gold card hodlers.
excellent updates... Great job to all the people involved with making the process smooth and exciting. I especially love this item the Roadmap (even though I have not idea what it is):
Thanks for all you guys/ladies do for the game and the community!
It's the big announcement that we've announced that we're going to be announcing when we're going to be announcing it very soon. Seriously. We wanted to announce the announcement earlier but held off due to the hack incident and some other stuff, but the announcement of the announcement is going to come very soon barring any other unexpected things coming up.
What is it with Devs and pre-announcments. Us poor plebs are going mad with anticipation from all angles. 😂
Some nice updates here and hopefully it will make it easier for us to brawl. I think for now we are still trying to figure out the best way to participate and make the most of it.
haha... yes, lots of speculation for sure!!!
hahaha... its a good way to build excitement! I am looking forward to it, there's a lot of guesses as to what it is so part of the fun will be seeing who was right! :)
All aboard the hypetrain! Seriously though, it's a smart play and given what's already announced for it to be the major thing? That's exciting.
Overall exciting updates on the progress in the roadmap and I like the changes to the brawls. The longer cycle definitely helps alleviate the pressure while still keeping it alive. Interested in the CUB payment option, I think that combined with the staking is a great way for players to be able to gain items.
The Cub part is awesome! I'm not in a guild, so the guild brawls don't mean much to me, but it does sound like a cool idea.
Great move on CUB adoption!
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