The current format of the de-facto one league is casing several problems, like allowing bots with low-level cards to harvest large chunk of rewards and forces well playing gamers to face opponents with much higher leveled cards further in the season.
Several concerns and solutions expressed @j6969 in his post The Incoherent Ravings of a Mad Man. He also proposes a league format change based on the DEC value of the cards, which is interested and worth further investigation.
Over a year ago I have proposed a League Format Improvement modeled on European football leagues.
In a nutshell, the differences to current rules would be:
- a number of team in each league is fixed
- a player cannot move between leagues during the season
- at the end of the season, a number of top players in each league are promoted to a higher league
- at the end of the season, a number of bottom players in each league are relegated to a lower league
Based on the current number of active players (accounts) I think the following could be introduced:
Champions League
- 200 players
- bottom 20 are relegated
Diamond League
- 400 players
- top 20 are promoted to Champions League
- bottom 40 are relegated
Gold League
- 600 players
- top 40 are promoted to Diamond League
- bottom 80 are relegated to Silver
Silver League
- 800 players
- top 80 are promoted
- bottom 80 are relegated
Bronze League
- 1000 players
- top 80 are promoted
- bottom 160 are relegated
Novice League
- all the rest of the players
- top 160 are promoted
The above numbers would require further investigation and fine-tuning.
Benefits:
With the above changes, I expect any starter pack only (spellbook) accounts would have a tough time to go over the Bonze league, and with a larger player base would be stuck in Novice, thus they would not be able to farm rewards in-proportionate to deck strength and value.
Players would be able to compete for Silver League Champion title etc, making the game more entertaining.
Developers would have more control over the number of rewards distributed each season
When the player base will get larger, each league can be divided to three sub-leagues, i.e Gold League to Gold I, Gold II, Gold III and the number of players (teams), promotions and relegations in each league adjusted.
I find this to be an interesting system, clearly better than the one we have now, and something to think about when we fix the reward system.
Thanks for posting.
Worth a shot or at least further discussion.
Your post here is very nice- make sure when you post more Splinterlands post you put them in the sm-post-promotion channel in Discord. Great posts are how-to guides to help new players and battling tips- teams and forms for new people starting out! :-) An upvote from SM-Splinterlands is on the way!
We just can't be awarding the same top 16 or 32 players in these tournaments. Maybe pay more places in the tournaments, 64 or 128, and pay less to places 1st thru 4th. 🤞