SPS Governance Proposal - Split Ranked Battle Reward Pools By League

in #splinterlands2 years ago

The Splinterlands team would like to propose a change to how the SPS rewards for ranked battles are distributed. Currently, everyone who plays ranked battles competes for the SPS rewards from one of two pools - one for Modern and one for Wild battles. This means that players in Bronze league are earning rewards from the same pool as players in Champion league.

While higher rated players will earn a larger share of the pool each battle due to earning more reward shares, this can still be overcome by running multiple accounts in lower leagues. This goes against our stated goal of always encouraging players to gather more assets and rank up a single account rather than spreading across multiple accounts.

In order to address this, we would like to propose that the SPS reward pool for ranked battles be split out by league in a similar way that the SPS rewards are split by league for focus/season loot chests. Instead of two pools (one for Modern and one for Wild) with 900k SPS per season each, we propose that the pools be set up as follows:

Modern Battle Pool% of TotalSPS / Season
Bronze10%90,000
Silver15%135,000
Gold20%180,000
Diamond25%225,000
Champion30%270,000
Total100%900,000
Wild Battle Pool% of TotalSPS / Season
Bronze10%90,000
Silver15%135,000
Gold20%180,000
Diamond25%225,000
Champion30%270,000
Total100%900,000

Please note that both tables above have the same numbers, we just split them out to clearly show that there are separate pools for modern and wild battle formats for each league.

This means that when a player in Silver league wins a Modern ranked battle, the amount of reward shares they have earned will be compared against the total reward shares earned in all Silver league Modern ranked battles over the past 24 hours to determine what percentage of the current Modern format, Silver league reward pool (135k SPS per season) that player will earn.

We believe that this change will go a long way towards properly aligning the incentives in the game with the intended goals and behavior which will ultimately be to the benefit of the entire Splinterlands community.

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A number of players have asked for more data relating the the proposed ranked battle reward changes above. The following table shows the number of unique accounts and % of total SPS earned by league and battle format over the past week (8/24 - 8/31):

ModernPlayers% of SPSWildPlayers% of SPS
Bronze52,3231.06%Bronze141,5896.44%
Silver111,21281.84%Silver118,70425.92%
Gold15,04213.18%Gold18,50638.72%
Diamond1,6013.72%Diamond2,80717.71%
Champion2020.20%Champion82311.21%

As you can see, the most glaring issues are in the Modern format battles. The goal of these changes is to encourage more players to buy/rent higher level cards and participate in the higher leagues rather than spread out across a large number of accounts in lower leagues.

One of the most important things for voters on the governance proposal to note is that even if this change gets approved and implemented, it does not mean that it's set in stone forever. As with anything, if it doesn't have the intended effect and/or anything needs to be tweaked, then we will listen closely to the community and put up new proposals for additional changes going forward.

In the future we also plan to propose additional changes that build on top of this base. For example rather than fixed reward pool sizes per league/format, they could be dynamic based on the number of players or other factors. We are also looking at proposing changes to the collection power system or other ways to help properly group players into the appropriate leagues.

Players in the higher leagues should be rewarded more than the lower leagues, period end of statement. The bottom line is it takes more capital, time, strategy and skill to get to the higher leagues so players who get there should be rightfully rewarded. It also gives newer and existing players a goal. If you want more rewards buy/rent better cards and fight/grind your way up the ladder.

I think this is a horrible Idea. It can lead to a lower league being more viable than a higher league. Look at modern, bronze right now: With the numbers you propose, bronze players would get more rewards (10%/50000) than silver players (15%/110000). What a punch in the face if you just spent hundreds of $ to get your silver summoners etc. just to find out that it's overcrowded and you actually get less now... (i know chests are better...but still what a fail that would be)

It can't be that just because more people come in and spend more money to get to silver or gold, all the players already there will get diminishing returns because their league is becoming overpopulated.

Please look at competitive games with working mmr/elo ranked systems, where does the majority of players (the casuals) end up? silver/gold. And yes it's a bit different here (towards pyramid) because of the paywalls between leagues, but even your numbers here suggest this is how it's gonna be.

This is gonna lead to "either bronze or diamond+" situation where you kill incentive to rank up to the populated middle class.

If you think diamond and champion need better rewards, then start by increasing rewards for champion wins by 15% and diamond by 10% or whatever, but don't experiment with the sledgehammer like this. This a step backwards towards a ridgid and primitive system that would need constant adjustment depending on the amount of players in each league etc. And changing league depending on where the rewards will be best depending on the reward pool and population is only feasible for players with (a) loads of money to spare or (b) automation (splitting accounts, rental bots/assist...)

Also: How many of the people voting actually read this and understand the severity of these changes? because the title of the proposal ingame does not reflect this at all.

Thanks for giving us the numbers so we can have a better idea to base our vote decision.

Well I think the big problem here is you made modern include Untamed which has some of the most overpowered Summoners in the game. Therefore new players aren't interested in levelling CL up because they'll get smashed anyway.
Honestly, changing the term 'Modern' to represent just CL, RW and related Reward cards would see a much more competitive format IMHO.
And I'm 100% sure people would be 'pushing and shoving' to upgrade cards to compete for the higher rewards. But sadly CL summoners are no match for the Untamed ones, so why bother.

The problem is while the new system is in effect, it will increase and consolidate SPS power with the whales (champion players) disproportionally to everyone else. This will make any secondary vote to change what is beneficial to them, but not necessarily the economy/new player experience that much harder to pass.

"The goal of these changes is to encourage more players to buy/rent higher level cards"

Am I the only one getting tired of hearing this statement? You're not encouraging people to play in higher leagues, you're stripping all the rewards from the lower leagues so they don't have any other option unless they want to stop earning or exit the game.

Thank you for being forthcoming with the current numbers. It does foster a sense of trust and teamwork the more transparent things are. I have to assume the total number of battles in each league led to the disparities we see? I cant make sense of the 38% gold in wild vs 13% in modern unless the wild players simply played a massive amount of battles?

Thanks for this, with this follow up data, I think I can vote to agree for this proposal and hope we can further adjust it in the future.

The earning potential per league could have some conditions like in sps staked base limits (e.g. in bronze league since its almost the entry and training area/level, they can earn 50% - 75% of what they can fully earn even without staking sps and will increase earnings upto 100% of what it is base on staked sps earning condition in bronze. In silver, they will earn 40% - 60% if they do not meet the required sps staked then just increase to maximum if conditions are met and so on for higher leagues. Something like that.

I appreciate the numbers @yabapmatt. This makes my vote a yes a well. I still think the proposed numbers need a tweak (specifically treating diamond and/or gold players to a similar % as the champion level) but overall it is an important improvement from the current system.

Made it waaay easier to vote "yes" now. Thank you!

Why only the data from the last week of a season ?
Why not from a full season ?
It's clear that in the last week of a season their are much more player in Champions League than after rating reset, so it would be better to see the data for a whole season not only for the part where the most player could join champions league already.

Well, we don't have a full season of SPS rewards yet. 8/24 was the first full day with SPS rewards. It was implemented mid day on 8/23 (US eastern time).

Thank you for putting the numbers here

so you plan to increase the rewards of the diamond/champion players tenfold, modern champion even thirtyfold. and you completely ignore how much more they already get through the boxes?

I don't think we've "ignored" anything. We want to encourage as many players to get into diamond and champion league as possible. That will help increase the scarcity and value of the assets considerably which should benefit everyone at every league.

What ever happened to the requiring staked SPS to earn? I'm really surprised you launched SPS rewards without that requirement?

You may be right. But did you stop to think that by lowering the rewards for low end players you might effectively be hampering their chance of success? Let's continue to reward the rich and strike the poor? Well Some of us don't have the resources to compete with those who do. So the gap between the whales and the noobs are widening even more. Why do we have to increase the rewards for anyone? just make the rewards even % of the pool. And then if the pool runs out because there's too many in bronze, THAT will incentivize them to move up. And I have a couple thousand invested in this game. So please don't misunderstand where i'm coming from. I'm thinking of legit new players struggling to make it in the game much less enjoy it.

I think it's important to note that "they" don't plan to do anything. They offered the idea to the community and everyone is free to vote on the proposal. If you don't like the proposal, you can throw your staked SPS into the ring and vote against it, and in case there is enough opposition, it won't be implemented.

I'm a silver modern player and all I see this doing is reducing my rewards making the investment I put in worth less and making it harder for me to advance. It also consolidates more SPS wealth to whales. So the rich will have even more power to influence proposals.

I think this is a good idea and I guess we can vote to change it should it turn out bad :)

I hate to vote against the very first proposal (and I'm sure it will pass as the largest holders are the ones at the top). But I think this is a very flawed solution. I do like the rewards to go higher as we rank higher, but not 30% of the daily rewards going to the top 10 to 200 players every single day, when there are 10's of thousands of players in the few league below. (please don't say "well just rank to champ", because that is a zero sum game as its clear the rules are set so that only a few can be in champs... ie it doesn't scale at all).

There are so few players in Champion because of the way the rules are set. We have less players in Champion now then we had when we had 1/10th the accounts we have now. While I think the larger players should get more, I don't think they should get so much more (I estimate this will be hundreds if not thousands of % more per match than Diamond or Gold players (because Diamond/Gold have Almost ALL the players since the bots move everyone up and the game made rules to restrict just a few hundred at the top.)

I am for nerfing no card bots, and I'm even 100% for limiting the payout by league, I think that's great. But when we have as little as 10 players in Champ, to give those 10 players 30% of the daily prize pool is gross and unnecessary. I for one will consider leaving the game if it turns out that only a handful of players get the rewards while the masses struggle for peanuts.

Please re-evaluate @yabapmatt and @aggroed ... If the proposal comes from you, then you know people will vote for it. Sadly I think this will have the opposite of what you intended. Instead of people leveling up to get the rewards, then many like me could end up cashing out (I have not done so because I loved how you spread things around since the early days). But the amount given to the few champ players takes us back to the old days where there were many fights about a top heavy system. Remember that you at most have 200 Champ players and its a lot to ask them to carry the whole infrastructure so please don't piss off the other 399,800 players in the game.

Its regretful that I post this because I love most of what you do, but this is something I'm passionate about.

Respectfully giving you my input.

Hey @davemccoy - if the proposal isn't what you would like to see done then you should definitely vote against it, and not feel bad about it at all. That's the whole point of the proposal system. I would hope that proposals don't just simply pass because they come from us - rather if we see a strong push from the community for something and we also agree that it will be beneficial, then we'll put it up for proposal (and hopefully soon others will be able to submit proposals as well).

As for the number of players in each league - I just posted some data on that as a comment under the proposal post. It's definitely significantly more than 10 but it is very low, which is one of the problems we are looking to address. The incentive is just not there right now to get into champion league. Even for people who have the money to do it - it's often much better to bot thousands of accounts in Silver league.

The goal here is to change that, and really push players who have the ability to get up into diamond and champion league, which should mean a lot more card combining. If it really is the case that champ league players get huge rewards, then you can bet people will rent a max level set of cards (which is pretty cheap) to get in on that, which is exactly what we want.

My general philosophy is that we set the rewards to where we want them to go, and then the players can go get them. There is nothing stopping more players from getting into Champion league other than lack of incentive to do so.

Anyway, I'm not trying to change your mind. I think it's healthy to have some dissenting views on proposals. I was asked today in an internal meeting "what if the proposal doesn't pass", to which my response was something like "then we'll go back and talk with the community more and come back with a better proposal".

Also, even if it does pass and the changes get implemented, they're not set in stone. If certain things aren't working out then we'll talk with the community and publish a new proposal to change it.

Thank you for taking the time to address my concerns Matt. I also appreciate the data you posted as well to give everyone some more information on which to base their vote. I understand why you are doing this change and I appreciate the fact that you will evaluate it over time to make sure it met your goals.

You guys have always communicated with us about the issues, whether we agree or not. For that I am very thankful!

Thank you for voicing your concerns in an eloquent and civilized way as a large stakeholder - unlike others here who are attacking the "greedy whales". Apparently there is much more to the proposal than meets the eye, both in terms of how it can push for combining more cards and actually making less Bronze/Silver accounts (freeing rewards for those who remain) and on the other hand increasing Bronze rewards over Silver rewards. It feels like we will have to come back to this and adjust over time. !1UP

I agree they will adjust over time and thank you for the very nice comment Flauwy!

Be interesting to clarify what happens before anyone gets to Champion.
Do the rewards just stockpile?

yes I'm interested in seeing that too! :)

I am for nerfing no card bots, and I'm even 100% for limiting the payout by league, I think that's great. But when we have as little as 10 players in Champ, to give those 10 players 30% of the daily prize pool is gross and unnecessary. I for one will consider leaving the game if it turns out that only a handful of players get the rewards while the masses struggle for peanuts.

QUOTED FOR TRUTH. A few players in CHAMPION getting as much rewards as thousands of players in SILVER AND GOLD combined is very unfair. It doesn't incentize me to level up. It incentives me to rent out my cards and find another game.

But is it really thousands of players in silver and gold, or a few players with thousands of accounts? I believe a majority of rewards for the lower leagues are going to a few people with a lot of accounts.

It's obviously thousands of players. Not even sure why you're even asking that question to be honest.

Just some calculations, 270,000 sps / 14 days(avg season) = 19284 sps per day for champions.

The real problem is that unlike all the other leagues, when you drop rank after a season, champion is the only league that won't have players in it to soak up the rewards. This will give a perceived unfair payout to the first players to get back into champion versus all the other leagues.

So, lets say that there are only 10 people who get into champion, they will each get 1900 sps, or roughly 64 sps per game. And that's per day. Now, lets say there is 100 people that eventually get into champion, well that's still 190 sps per day or 6.4 sps per game. That's still more than twice the earnings I'm currently seeing in champion, and it's taken me nearly two weeks to even get into champion.

I'd like to see some data of how many players are in the champion league for every day of a 14 day season, perhaps the reward curve isn't very crazy as we might fear. The other thing to keep in mind, is that even if there is only 10 players getting 1900 per day, at current market values, that's only about $100. Perhaps it's by design that the top players are getting payouts like this, but now that we have a DAO proposal, the community will be able to decide if it's too much.

Completely right and at begin of the season it is even worse. After rating reset nobody is in champions league and how many player will move up to champions league in the first hours of a season ?
So after 24 hours maybe 2 or 3 player in Champions League share at this moment 30% of all rewards in the game ?
This suggestion is really not well thought out and it should not only be possible to say "yes" or "no" here, because the intention goes in the right direction, it's just very badly done technically.

Yes, that's my concern as well. I guess we will see when its live soon.

Yes we will see, In my opinion if they want sort out the Champions League player than they should award them the full season and not only in the last days and before all rewards goes to a very small group.
How they can do it ?
In my opinion very easy - they should just change the rating reset rule, every Champions League player (not important his rating at the end if he has at least 3700) should set to 3700 and he will be from first day on in the Champions league. A player with 4800 has than 3700 and a player with 3700 also.
Ok they can do other rating resets, so that not every player he has the same rating if they want but 3700 should be the minimum rating. Than this change can make sense.

Fully agree with Dave here. That said, i think there is a solution to get more champ players. I think the part where players can choose to stay in a league below their CP should disappear. Auto advance should not be too hard to implement and that way the players with small (owned) decks may also have a shot on the leaderboard position instead of players with over 500k or even over a million cp rule the bronze. silver or whatever leaderboard.

Wouldn't it be already enough to have the pools split, but each of them get the same share?

Bronze: 20%
Silver: 20%
Gold: 20%
Diamond: 20%
Champion: 20%

I would assume that the amount of players gets less and less the higher they are ranked. So naturally one would be incentivised to climb to a higher league. This way people in lower leagues would still earn less than in higher leagues, which would prevent mass botting and encourages card leveling to climb further

yes I think a lot of people were thinking something like that. The good thing is that both Matt and Aggy have both said they will review the implementation and see if there needs to be a tweak. We will see soon enough I think!

Taking the "decentralization" out of crypto one win/reward chest at a time. Great game, but summed up it is terribly top-heavy. The paywall, even at the rental stage, to go from sliver I to even standing a chance in diamond is pretty huge.

That's what I'm worried about, we will see when the proposal gets implemented soon. I hope everyone pays attention whether they are right or wrong on this topic.

Dave, are you sure Champion is limited to the top 200 players? I thought it was literally anyone who got a rating above 3700? Couldn't that technically be hundreds or thousands of players?

Last season I finished with a rating of 3,751 and I was ranked 317th.

I think you're right. It's only the leaderboard that shows a limited number of players.

Aggy said that he will get us the info after the full season of this being implemented so we can all see the numbers and then vote again based on feedback. I know at some points during the season it is a dozen or so, but it does pick up in the last few days. But the way this will work is based per day, so that's why the data is very important so we can see exactly what it means.

Aggy thinks this will propel a lot of people to rank up into Champ, we will see if that is correct too based on the actual results.

ps... I just hit Champ and I'm 224th, so in a few hours we will see the total!

I'm in the camp of I now want to rank up. I've been getting meh returns in chests for a while now, and if you want to look for another game I'd understand. Just rent your cards out and make enough dec to play any of the other games coming to hive while DCA (DEC cost averaging) into cards with bids. I mean if you pull out out and push the market down a little bit for all the cards you sale I personally would like to thank that player. haha
!pizza

Who many it will be 24 hours after season reset ?
2,3 or 4 ?
They should than get 30% from whole rewards for this day ?

I think this proposal will go a long way towards preventing bots from lowering the rewards of human players, and will incentivize people to build a high level card collection on a single account vs multiple lower level accounts. I'm not sure I fully agree with the exact distribution per league (personally I would go for an exponential rather than linear distribution); however this is another huge step in the right direction, so I will be voting "yes".

i find it very sad that you always act as if you want to destroy bots, but in reality you only want to destroy a certain type of bots, namely the bots that keep the rental market running, the bots of the whales play until diamand, you obviously do not want to destroy! you just have to look at who uses the archmage bot and advertises. this is very sad!!!!

I'm still not over his "the Waka pre-sale is super secret/under wraps until the sale goess live, specifically to prevent the sale from being botted.. and then bots the sale himself" stunt he pulled earlier this year

What is the archmage bot?

Can we make 2 more options for the proposals???

Option 3--> Yes, but reformed

Option 4--> No, but reformed

Then have other threads or enable the idea of single line or idea alteration of proposals.

Absolutely agree with this. Fantom is already doing something similar and I love it.
!PIZZA
!LUV

Agree that this would be an interesting system but I guess that you can always make a proposal to tweak the current one's distribution or anything else.

I agree with the premise here but the amount in Champion is too high. Getting to champion is an incredible achievement and requires tons of investment so they deserve to be paid out well but champion is just not something that many people will ever be able to do no matter what. Giving the few people who can afford to that big of a slice of the pie is not really in line with aggroed's the smallest fish to the biggest whale idea.

Because of player distribution, champion doesn't have to have the highest percentage of the pool for the players in champion to make way more than anyone else in the game. I think if anything, we should be encouraging players toward something aspirational but achievable like Gold. We can call gold the middle class and give the bulk of the rewards to them as a whole, while still rewarding higher league players better individually.

Maybe something closer to:
Bronze 15%
Silver 20%
Gold 27%
Diamond 18%
Champion 20%

I don't have access to all the numbers to know what this would look like in practice but I'm guessing if it were broken up like this you'd still have progressively more going individually to people in higher leagues.

Does anyone have the stats of games played per league?

PS: if we're going to be voting on this stuff, we should have access to relevant stats

I agree with the premise here but the amount in Champion is too high. Getting to champion is an incredible achievement and requires tons of investment so they deserve to be paid out well but champion is just not something that many people will ever be able to do no matter what

I agree completely with this part of your point... There are so few players in Champion because of the way the rules are set. We have less players in Champion now then we had when we had 1/10th the accounts we have now. While I think the larger players should get more, I don't think they should get so much more than Diamond or Gold players (because those have Almost ALL the players since the bots move everyone up and the game made rules to restrict just a few hundred at the top.)

What if the game ended the diamond level and made champion 6 levels, combining it all to a mega level max level league? Much more match liquidity at higher levels and you could play anyone in champion level and would incentivize people to become champion level decks but not "piker level" or minimal level champion accounts to have any substantial chance for earnings. 55% of the game earnings per match would go to max level decks, the other 45% to level 1 up to about 60% levelled up cards under that current proposal.
Based on current abuse if they cut bronze and silver by a factor 3 (or 1/3) and they earned 3 and 5% and then distributed the difference to make gold more highly compensated and a bit more to champion, making it much more lucrative to level up, assuming match spamming/abuse is reformed.
Long story short this is new proposal is definitely on the right track addressing in game comp abuses in a major way but is less than perfect imho.

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i think bronze is fine as suggested, maybe go even lower than 10% and put it all into silver instead. to me bronze leage is more like a tutorial stage where you arent actually supposed to earn anything. you test out the game and see if you like it or not. if so, you buy into silver. i cant imagine any player being in bronze actually enjoys it longterm since most cards have hardly any abilities and gameplay is rather dull. getting the masses into silver should be the goal imo.

They tried removing bronze rewards once and didn't work out well for anyone. A big reason for the new ranked rewards was to fix the mistake of alienating new players.

There need to be very strong incentives for people to try to get to Champion.

If that's the only consideration then we should probably not stop at 30%. What about 80% or 90% instead?

I think 20% could still be plenty of incentive, especially when paired with the supercharged chests and just the prestige of playing at the highest levels.

Plus at some point tournaments will bring in outside cash and those highest players will be there to gain the glory and winnings.

Champion is never going to be the lifeblood of this game. I think we can reward the highest levels and still keep the game balanced.

Maybe my wording was too strong. I agree with what is proposed and wasn't saying there needs to be more for Champion than what is being proposed.

I'm not sure I agree with the seemingly arbitrary 2% hit to diamond but you're putting some decent numbers out and I think we're largely on the same page. The lifeblood of the game is from Silver-Diamond, the rest are outliers. Call them whales on one end and people without sufficient skin in the game on the other, either way, they aren't the core of the ecosystem.

Fully agree with the PS....

Exactly this. My percentages might not be perfect but as you said, the point is to reward those who make up the core of the game.

There will always be ways to reward the top 100 players through chests, tournaments, sponsorships, and whatever else they can think of but SPS is supposed to be about giving the players ownership in the direction of the game, not just the whales and bot farms.

Reading the reply I find one issue rather interesting:

"there are only so few modern champion players, they will get so much rewards"

well

right now, about 10-15 bot operators suck the game using 150.000 bots, taking 80-90% of the rewards straight out of the economy.

Do you prefer having those rewards go to those who invested 5-6digits and to build a competitive collection, or to those who just spin up bot farms to leech out the rewards?

I might be biased being a big collection holder here, but also please dont forget that right now I feel like a cash cow paying the bots with the money I brought (and do bring occassionally, though the bear hit me hard as well) into the game, and besides being a competitive player, ofcourse I cant ignore having zero ROI when playing my cards or maybe 5% when renting out the high end value cards.

I wouldnt mind those rewards going more distributed to regular players on silver/gold though, but when holding that discussions got a very clear response that there will never be any form of verification (my idea would be a bot-detect system and if an account is suspected to bot => verify to be a human, just as google does with you when suspecting you to be a bot). Having the bots fight for just a part of the rewards instead of sucking the whole economy + setting strong incentives to increase the competition (and to not sell but stick around and play the game!) on higher leagues is the next best.

well, who can afford such large bot armies? probably the top whales, which is why nothing will ever be done about it!

Hard to implement alas without punishing small players, so limiting the bot card printing rewards and having them sell cheap cards to real players is best we can do for now.

I think if we keep nerfing Bronze rewards, we will get less new player retention.

Instead I propose this to encourage players to have skin in the game.

make it so any player with less then 1000 SPS staked, treat all their cards as "Soul Bound"

Make it so they cant sell those cards, trade those cards, or delegate those cards. until they have 1000 SPS staked.

No one who plays for more than a season or several should really be in bronze for that long anyway. That's how I feel, anyway. It's not that hard to climb up to Silver at least.

Please let the next 3 proposals be 1) to ban the arch mage bot, 2) no more 12 mana fights (lowest should be 14) and 3) hire a white hat exploiters crew with SPS bounty rewards.

All the excuses I see for OK'ing the arch mage bot are BS. They will sell more and the bot will get better and this is supposed to be a game for humans not bots. New player experience will get killed by this bot.

The 12 mana fights are a form of griefing and it is much closer to a coin toss than a fight. Nobody wants to play a game where they are constantly getting griefed by bots and the cockroach 12 mana fights.

Also since this game let bots print money for so long (and people with multiple accounts) then after that time (too little too late) forced them to consolidate they did just that. They just consolidated, bought legendaries and are now blocking anyone from progressing passed gold.
You don't know what bot China has and they have a history of exploiting blockchain projects - everything from bitcoin to Electroneum (mining empty blocks to get the rewards and back up the mempool).
You have to stay ahead of exploiters not 2 or 3 steps behind, if you don't they consolidate and re-up on the exploiting.
People with multiple accounts must KYC why they have them. A white hat exploiters crew would find all of these details out and you could stay ahead of it.

I am still undecided on how I plan to vote, so I invite those who are for and those who are against to convince me on how I should vote with my 3 million staked SPS.

In general, I am in favor of the overall concept to encourage the use of higher level cards. As for the actual numbers, I am uncertain but it was stated by Yabapmatt that the numbers are not set in stone and they are changeable in the future.

My two biggest concerns are:

#1. Ratings inflation continues to be a major problem (and has been for years) due to rating being non-zero-sum as a result of win streaks. Saying you are a "Diamond league player" doesn't mean much if it could apply equally to a max level deck or a bronze level deck. If you are a bronze level deck that regularly beat max level decks then sure maybe your skill justifies you being in diamond league. But if you are a bronze level deck that got to diamond league by beating up other bronze level decks, then that's mainly due to ratings inflation and not really skill. If I vote "no," then I would be willing to reconsider my vote once Splinterlands does more to address ratings inflation. If I vote "yes," then it's under the assumption that Splinterlands is going to do more to reign in ratings inflation (otherwise I would be change my vote if this is not addressed).

#2. @pouncingpanda brought up a very valid point. For many years, many of us have questioned the need for Diamond league as opposed to Champion league (since they both have the same card level limits). So if the proposal passes, isn't this essentially 55% of the rewards for max level decks? Maybe it's time to get rid of Diamond league? Or to change Diamond card levels to somewhere in between Gold league and Max level?

I welcome polite and civilized discussion and arguments on why I should vote in favor or against the proposal.

After a lot of discussion and thought, I am going to have to vote NO on the current SPS proposal.

It won't change the end result, there are enough votes to pass. But for the sake of principle, I will have to vote against.

As previously mentioned, I am generally in favor of the concept of separate pools for each league. And I do recognize the need to incentivize players to level up their cards. However:

#1. The numbers are too distorted in favor of max level cards. Essentially 55% of the pool is for max level (Diamond + Champion). If you consider all the many incremental changes that have steadily favored max level cards (I wrote up an analysis here: https://peakd.com/steemmonsters/@byzantinist/splinterlands-to-max-or-not-to-max), then I agree with several other players who feel that this distribution goes too far in favor of max level players.

#2. Ratings inflation still needs to be addressed. However, I am hopeful that Splinterlands is working on a solution.

#3. The current SPS proposal presupposes the existence and purpose of Diamond league. At first glance, 10%/15%/20%/25%/30% might sound like a reasonable progression.

But when you realize that Diamond and Champion league both have the same level limits and it's really 55% for max level, this all brings up the long-standing question: What is the purpose of Diamond league and should there really be a Diamond league?

I think one of my next projects will be writing up a blog post exploring what I think Splinterlands should/could do with Diamond League.

just look at the current distribution, and you want to take away 60% of the silver modern players now?
https://chaoscommander.retool.com/embedded/public/f0baa9cc-b114-46ad-95b3-7d3a3f45142b
avg sps.png

reading the majority of the comments and having made up my mind about my small vote (only 1% of your power) let me share my thoughts with you, without troubling your head with much details

i play Splinterlands from day 1 ...i know how to play the game, my deck is not strong
only the last few months i begun to build my deck up to silver level
...so far i was using novice - bronze deck
i do climb though high in leagues.. GOLD 1- DIAMOND 3
..most of my fights are against stronger opponents and i do win and climb the leagues just because of skills

i enjoy the game, actually i'm in love with the game
i really don't care if they reduce my rewards cause i'm not playing for the rewards...i'm playing for the thrill of the game
BUT with this proposal i feel like ,i'm getting neglected..i'm feeling like SKILLS have no room in Splinterlands cause SKILLS get punished

anyway i want to be 100% sincere , i do feel the proposal is a bit unfair but that doesn't mean i will stop playing the game or i will go against the game, CAUSE AT THE END OF THE DAY i play the game cause i love it as a game and i really enjoy it when i'm destroying higher level decks using skills and this is something that will not change

thanks for giving me the opportunity to address you with your comment

I am for the concept, it's brilliant but against the end numbers. I'd much rather see more of an exponential jump earlier on to level up--along with adjusting the ability to spam battles outside of the site (aka bot win trading, etc). I think each match should have to wait at least 1-2 minutes for each account to be able to submit and play a match from the prior time before the last. The "hiding out" of bots playing each other within seconds of each other at strategic times of day is an absurd exploit that needs to be addressed. Rewards at bronze/silver need to be approached as "starter or demo level decks." All just my opinion but this is a great move in the right direction just not the exact move needed.

It would be nice to see some actual numbers compared to current payout.
I make ~0.35 SPS per win in Silver I wild right now, maybe 0.41 if focus is in my favor.
How would that compare to the proposed change given the current numbers of gameplay (i.e. games played in 24 hours and reward shares distributed)?

I suspect you will earn much less, it's just that the few champion/diamond players no longer have to share with the majority!

That is the question.
Right now it's all in one pool.
So the question is: does the sum of all reward shares of all champion players over the season make out more or less than 30% compared to the overall reward shares of all players over all leagues.
Ask the same question for every league in relation to the table above.
If that question is answered we can compare the two systems objectively. Minding that it is based on past numbers from let's say current season and these numbers might change with players/bots changing behavior.
Those numbers are available to the dev teams, it would be good, if they were made public.

The SPS-per-win data should be paired to the deck-value.
In diamond I get 1 SPS/win with a deck 11k$ worth.

Yes but not so fast. If the overwhelming majority of players are spamming garbage value of cards in bronze/silver, and they have no ROI incentive to move up then yes, that is correct in a TOTALLY BROKEN SYSTEM. By separating the glut of these accounts and incentivizing them to move up the logjam is busted and human accounts that are consolidated are no longer punished to earn at a penalty level with a consolidated higher level account.

I agree. I would like to see some examples of expected rewards at each league.

Honesty, accountability and seeking what is right are all very absent in many things in our lives much more than ever. Thankfully these are the principles the toughest pound for pound blockchain game out there always falls back to the above principles when all else fails. Thanks in all seriousness Splinterlands Team for teaming up yet with "The Saltiest Focus Group" known to modern business to continually slowly but surely answer in game problems that develop or may develop in the future.

The new percentages might not be perfect, but this is definitely a move in the right direction. We need to incentivize players playing at the highest level they can.
Sure, for a few seasons there might be ludicrous rewards for champion players especially in modern, but the fact it's going to be so profitable to play there will drive people to get a part of that pie.

That said, I am more in favor of a system that pays out based on total deck power and rating (proof of stake/investment + proof of skill) If it worked this way, there would be no issue with low level accounts leaching rewards from invested players.

I consider that it is a viable idea, however I do not agree with the % distributed, we all know that bronze and silver are the leagues with the most players, it is a fact that increasing the cards and power is the objective but 30% for the smaller group? 5 lvl, 100/5 = 20% each,I think.

PS: I must admit that with the data on the number of accounts that are in low leagues, I have changed my mind, it has made me see that the calculation is not what I thought. Anyway, I appreciate the data, it has made me see that your math is better than mine hahahaha. We better try how everything goes, and may the force be with us.

I like what is trying to be done, but I voted no. Gold - Champion could have an even split in Rewards and still be individually more rewarding because each league up has lower player counts. For instance, based on these numbers a Modern player moving from Gold to Diamond would still get a 9x+ to SPS rewards, and a Diamond moving to Champ is seeing almost 8x on that. The pool doesn't need to also be bigger. I'm becoming worried about the new player experience. Maybe we could have a solution in focusing on tournament rewards for new players as a way to focus rewards into an area without botnets operating (but maybe bots will start focusing on tournaments then.

I've spent thousands building my CL deck and used to enjoy the game a lot. But at the moment it has lost all of the fun and this likely change seems as though it is just going to make it worse.

This whole voting is swayed to the whales because your voting power is based on your SPS holdings. I get that this game is not democratic but if you want a real vote then give everyone one vote of equal power and I bet things would be much different.

This game is a pay2win game not a play2earn game. I don't have a problem with this fact I just think it is deception in the game missleading people to think they can come in and start playing and earning. You will not earn anything from the game unless you spend money, the more you spend the more you have the opportunity to earn. I think that those who spend a lot should be rewarded more then those who don't with out a doubt. With that being said the average person can only afford to pay so much so this game will always be controled by the rich.

A little more then a year ago when the SPS airdrop started I was wondering how things were going to work out for this token and I got to say that I am probably one of the few who doesn't like what I see.

I got to agree with a few of the other comments on this post in that if things keep on this heading I will be renting out or selling my entire deck and finding a different game to play.

There has got to be a better way to balance things out in this game, not everyone can afford to come in and spend ten thousand dollars for a champion league deck.

Good intention, bad proposal.

How about this for a little idea. What if it was set to equal amounts in each pool? Rewards would increase because the amount of players would be less in each league as you rank higher. That would still incentivize people to move up knowing that they will be splitting the pie with fewer players. Just a thought.

Why are diamond and champion even two separate leagues?

What are the number now? Without that this proposal is meaningless

I get that this is being proposed to further hamper bots and encourage people to move up in leagues. However, I fail to see how this change is in alignment with the vision of wanting everyone to have a fair chance; freedom, happiness, and prosperity. Is this vision just lip service; or does Splinterlands really believe it? I see this change as further monopolizing the game for the whales and those that already have disposable income. We already have that happening in the world around us. I had hoped Splinterlands would be different.

It seems to me that Splinterlands has two conflicting visions. One vision is to create a strong desire to buy and level up cards and move up in leagues as high as possible. The other vision is to help people everywhere, including those that have less disposable income. I'm not sure if they can co-exist. Unfortunately, greed usually wins out.

I don't believe in free handouts, but the rewards for an individual person or account at bronze or silver is already low compared to the higher leagues. Silver and bronze is where most people reside would be my guess. The real issue seems to be bots and multi-accounting.

I know everyone thinks that the problem is the bots, but if a person pays 1k$ and puts a bot, it helps the economy, because it invests, the problem is if you make 10 accounts, farm and never buy a card in the market to improve, even if you have only one account and you never buy a single card, and you just sell and sell, that doesn't help the game. That's what I think, and I agree with the rewards being divided, but not with the amounts agreed there. However this had to be implemented for testing.

so that the lower leagues have less and the few players who are above in champion no longer have to share with the rest? sounds to me like a very bad idea!

Right, let's make sure that accounts with pennies worth of cards, zero SPS, literally near-zero skin in the game continue to grab a huge share of the rewards. sounds to me like a very good idea!

Good thing that this is a stake-based vote, which allows you to influence the outcome via your SPS holdings. I am sure your friend @bronko will support you with that vote with his share, since your account hasn't staked any SPS itself.

Irony off

I hope you realize that there is still whooping 25% of all ranked rewards paid out to Bronze and Silver, if this proposal is successful. Not too shabby, considering the low entry level to reach Bronze and Silver, don't you think?

my cards have a value of over 2000 dollars nevertheless i sit in silver because the jump to gold costs even more, so you would punish players like me with it, so stop with your propaganda!!!

Propaganda? Funny wording for someone using multiple accounts to write troll-comments here to influence the other readers. Accounts that didn't invest into the game but fed your @bronko account with free reward cards and airdrop points over the past year.

have you ever thought about what effect it would have on the rental market if the lower leagues are no longer profitable?
or what effect it would have on new players?
everything is not calculated, the main thing is to be greedy!

it is a fact that the rule is only there to push more from the bottom to the top!
so the rule is to the disadvantage of the majority!

there changes also your destruction attempt nothing, you can calmly continue to stalk my accounts, that changes nothing to the facts!
But it is clear: if you want to enforce something that harms the majority, then you probably have to act like this! ;)

You don't have to own every single card you play with. There is a rental tool--see peakmonsters.

maybe should return to old fc since rent was two days and less 5% after 50% ecr,considering there is much high value of dec as on now.

If the information is easily available elsewhere I'll apologize for the stupid question in advance. My question is this: How many active players are in each pool?

I hover around the gold/diamond rank for wild so while my opinion is naturally going to be biased towards that range, I can't help but wonder if the champion rank needs a greater percentage of the total share than diamond or, possibly, even gold. It seems there are far fewer player in champion as compared to diamond, and especially gold, that even with the same sized pie it would naturally pay a great reward at champion.

Think about it, the same sized pie with fewer pieces cut = bigger sized pieces. Do they need a bigger pie too? Plus champion has other incentives, like better chests, etc.

I think this proposal is perhaps a step up from the current situation but I'm not convinced I'll be voting yes, even if that is pissing in the wind, considering the current vote tally.

would be interesting to see how is that 900,000 currently distributed through the leagues.

dao.png

that is what is proposed, but what is the distribution at the moment. are people in bronze getting ~ 15 now or is gold getting 15% or 25%...

Splinterlands can learn a lot from Gods Unchained it seems. I'm curious if this change may result in Splinterlands becoming a Pay to Win kind of game. Why not work with a point system, whereas Bronze players get lesser points in regard to Diamond players as they are higher skilled? By doing so, bronze players who play - a lot - can still achieve the same, or even more rewards than a Diamond/Champion player that plays a few games. This way, the reward pool wouldn't be divided into multiple pools that are only accessible to ranks. It would also be possible to have a dynamic reward pool that is pegged to active players every single month.

That would just help the large bot farms, playing more.

Isn't that how the Rshares already work??

I like this proposal, I'll vote 23,812 VOTE POWER in favor of it.

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Cut those first two levels by a factor of 3 and see what happens. 3 and 5% for bronze and silver would incentivize major leveling in game and flip the broken dynamic of hoarding level 1 cards and renting them to the growing bot farms for yield fully destroying the lowest levels of the game for any human crazy enough to play a low asset deck in those levels right now. Land is very likely going to be a cure all for what the game is suffering at the moment but of course that is not going to full release anytime soon.

they only provide an argument ``incentive to move up''
you can already see that this is all about greed and it was not thought through to the end. let's imagine that your argument becomes true, then we are all sitting in diamond, then it will be pretty tight with the rewards.........

The very fact that the defined goal with the rules would end in disaster if the goal were really achieved shows that it is a deception!

Cool! I thought 20% per league would do the trick but liking this one more 😆. Figure you guys know what you are doing so will most likely vote yes.

Basically, I find the proposal worthy of approval and I can also understand the arguments of the bronze and silver players. Whether it remains at these percentages, we will see. In general, there are always adjustments and some things are still trial and error at the moment. So patience is needed for the time being.
Now I would like to let other thoughts flow in here. I have really invested a lot of money (for my circumstances) in this project and I see it as an investment and not as a game just for fun. For this I have game consoles, this is for fun and will not bring money. No one gets upset about it.
The fact that Splinterlands is a pay to win game should be obvious and as in any other investment, the return should be linked to the investment. There must be a difference between those who invested the value of a house and those who invested the value of a used car.

I for one believe the distribution seems fair but maybe consider lowering bronze to 5% and increasing silver to 20% to be in line with gold since the difference in card and cp requirement is minimal, not considering staked sps since it is not a requirement yet.

The 30% in champion seems fair but with such few people there it seems less likely that it will yield what you think for now. That is that more people will push and shove to combine their cards in order to be a champion, or to rent a competitive daily focus champion deck.

Of course, Aggroed has mentioned that we will all see the data and analyze it to see where we stand and I am for that.

I voted to approve the proposal as it moves reward distribution in the appropriate direction: benefitting those who have given the largest amounts of time, attention, and resources to grow this ecosystem. However, given the large disparity in upper vs. lower league headcount, the specific percentages are imperfect and over-correct the problem a bit. Additional adjustments will be needed, but the spirit of this proposal is spot on.

The following is a one-day snapshot of daily active users on 8/29/22 provided by chaoscommander. "Users" identified by reward claim 8/29/22 from both Wild and Modern.

125 Champion Players
556 Diamond Players
3689 Gold Players
27,085 Silver Players
75,129 Bronze Players

The below chart is described in minute 5.46. Tales from the Crypt Mancer is the primary source for this post. His video 8/30/22 here explains the daily users and reward proposal in detail and furthermore, professor Tales breaks down the financials with detailed payout estimates for $ Bronze to $$$ Champ. - the clip starts at min. 2.46. The below chart is discussed at minute 5.46

tales sps.jpg

References:

  1. Data Drives Change Dashboard by ChaosCommander: https://chaoscommander.retool.com/embedded/public/7768ff35-7562-4bb6-b447-93deb2aa9b36

  2. Tales from the Crypt Mancer primary source for this post.

This kind of change is quite great but im not quite sure about the amount per league in it. If there would be a better parameter for amounts than just a fix amount there, it would be better.

I get the main point of this is to limit the possibility of bot farms draining the reward pool for higher leagues. I want to vote fully agreed to this but there should be a vote for modifications first before implementation.

I will vote yes but I would prefer another more equitable distribution like:

Bronze: 15%
Silver: 17.50%
Gold: 20%
Diamond: 22.50%
Champion: 25%


It would be nice to see some DATA 📈 in support of the next proposal, so that the discussion has a solid starting point based not on personal feelings, impressions and interests. Then anyone can integrate with further data in comments.


Just a HINT to everyone: let's stop thinking ROI and rewards are the best way to gather and retain new players. Splinterlands is a funny game and is more important for new players to play and have fun, find a nice community and an engaging platform. We need those kind of new players, not the greedy ones.

I heard some numbers about silver and gold earnings and I find them pretty close to the diamond ones that I get with my deck. They definitely don't reflect different power required to play in different league, neither the market value. Infact several old champion players are now renting out their cards or selling them and are playing in lower leagues with smaller decks.


So I'll vote yes to the proposal. 👍🏻

the whole proposal was made based on feelings, there is no data and you find that serious enough to vote for it?

Are you seriously thinking that the team made this proposals basing on feelings? I have stated the opposite: lots of comments here are based on feelings. Hence I asked the team next time to share their data.

the team has commented, there is no data, they want to collect it now and publish it at the end of next season, then the proposal is already long over!
https://discord.com/channels/447924793048825866/906426246328623114/1014315331487019119

Of course they can't predict the future, but the proposal is based on data gathered until now

but we all miss this data and no one could give us this data! a few players have analyzed data themselves, and this data says something completely different, the data says that the higher players currently get more than after the change!

Yeah we get more, as everyone I think, but still not enough (to justify the playing of an entire collection)

i vote in splinterlands :)

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Is there a difference between a 'whale' with one large account competing in higher leagues for better rewards, and a 'whale' with thousands of small accounts trying to earn all the rewards in lower leagues? My vote is for the one who takes time to learn to be the best at the game, not the one who learns to take the most from the game.

Congrats on achieving a functional governance proposal which will be the envy of most games/ organisation, looking forward to see more in coming future.

My view on this proposal is like tcg shop owner facing issue on proxy cards at ALL events.

Maybe the underlying problem is rental/delagation itself. The low cool time makes it easy to spam temp ownership at multiple accounts, hence any extra reward cards those account acquired will be sold cause there's no usage. I presume passionate players will keep their current reward cards(at least 3 of them) vs farmers ( maybe a pelacor bandit only)..thus I like to suggest :

(A) I would like dev look into possibity of Staking reward cards base on rank for everyone wanting to Continue earning. ( just like land uses creature to produce items, reward cards be used to generate earnings).

Example : Silver rank need lvl 5 common staked, Gold need lvl 8 common staked, Diamond lvl 9 common, champion lvl 10 common staked.

( initial idea is every splinter should stake 1 card base on rank to earn reward: 6 splinter to stake and neutral card act as joker / replacement).. For each missing stake card, deduction of reward be implement like 16.67%

(B.) Rented/delageted card may need to increase cooling time if (A) were to implement. ( to prevent multi account usage of same card on same day). Dev may make un staked cards usable after 1 month ( like sps un stake), but that's going overboard.

Just my simple thoughts.

I don't think that Modern and Wild should have the same pool size. Wild does need a larger investment so there should be more reward.

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I was just about to buy some silver summoners ... and now you want to encourage me to go horizontal with bronze bots??? ... ok..if I must..

Could we please have the number of voters (For and Against) not just the number of SPS on the Proposals page. It would be interesting to have this information.

as long as there are rewards up for grabs, the bots are going to snag it up. This will solve nothing. Every upcoming change proposed or talked about in the town hall IE. staking tied to earning as well just increases the cost barrier for new players to even start the game and earn something somewhat meaningful that will at least let them compound rewards into growing their account. I respect the continued effort, I don't know what the final solution is going to be or should...the balance of the war against the bots and the collateral damage of losing new players is a tough one to tackle!

I would like to simplify each side into an argument for maxing the size of the economy or maxing rewards for Proof-of-Skill/Gameplay/Brain, but really, it's more complicated and both are related. The percentage breakouts will need to be adjusted as the rental market prices adjust to these % breakouts. There are very many skilled players that would do really well in Champion if the rewards outweighed the rental cost; although, rental prices would go up as rewards do, the question for a Champion deck renter is the rental cost spread over game skill. Believe me, there are Champion deck renters (i.e. I get beat by them regularly), even with today's Champion rewards, that are skilled enough to cover their rental costs and make more profit than if they rented out a silver deck. Imagine then, how many more skilled players rent when the the rent cost margin to Champion reward gets large enough where Champion league gets more players to better distribute rewards. I believe this rent cost margin to Champion rewards will get larger with this proposal, allowing more players into Champion, which provides more opportunity and promise, which are the drivers towards a bigger economy, always has been.

Needs a followup proposal to have two recharge pools
One for modern and one for wild as it is there is limits to playing and maxing out in one league or other and this will just be more obvious when this proposal passes.

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