Hello, there! 
@saydie here, playing Splinterlands everyday!
For a while now, you can play Modern Format without any concern for league caps, meaning a player is not locked in a certain league and can play any level of cards, regardless of their rating. So even at Wood League, you can play max-level cards to quickly advance to a higher league, and you can play level 1 cards in Champion League if you want to. I can't exactly remember when the league caps were removed, but I remember it was around the time before Rebellion was released. But yesterday, in a Discord Announcement, Dave, Splinterlands CEO, announced that they might be able to bring Modern Brackets next season, with the complete details about it being posted later.
But the question is: "Are we really ready for Modern Brackets?". So I want to share my thoughts about it.
Are We Ready For Modern Brackets?
Brackets was a new league cap system that was first introduced in Survival Mode and upon Proposal # 268, the community has voted to bring Brackets into Modern Format.
With this system, players can choose between different brackets, each of which cards will be capped at certain levels. Meaning, you won't be able to play your cards if they do not meet the level required in the Bracket, or your cards' level will adjust with the Bracket if you choose a bracket with lower card levels. If you were renting cards, this might affect you if you rent the wrong level of cards, but the ones that will really be affected by this are the Reward cards.
Right now, I have maxed all my commons and have my rare collection close to maxed out, but it will still take quite a while before I max my epic collection, while my legendary units are still below the level where I could play them if I entered a Champion Bracket. At the same time, this problem will always show up once a new reward set is released.
Under Survival Mode, players were locked into their chosen Bracket until the end of the season, but it is said that the option to advance Bracket will be available in Modern, though they will have to forfeit their rating. But if they so choose to stay in a certain Bracket, they could infinitely increase their rating until the season ends, and regardless of their rating, they won't be matched with players from a different Bracket, even when they have the same rating. There might be some exceptions in Diamond and Champion League, since they can both play with Max level cards.
With the introduction of Brackets, there will also be a change to Modern Format's reward system computation, because by removing league caps, the format also centralizes the ranked rewards in one big liquidity pool, but now, there will be an allocated SPS and Glint reward pool for each Bracket. Depending on how it was implemented, the amount of SPS and Glint I get from winning battles may either increase or decrease.
Now, to answer the question above? I think that we are still not ready for this upcoming change in Modern Format that will divide players into different Brackets and thus will make matchmaking more difficult. Indeed, there will be liquidity bots that will be added to make matchmaking smoother, but I see time and time again where the liquidity bots will just stop providing liquidity matches. I do not know if it is a bug, a problem with their server or when a new mechanic or ruleset was added in the game, but every time the liquidity bot was turned off, matchmaking became really terrible. Also, for some reason, the liquidity bots sometimes take too long before they send a team, as well as to place their tactics, which resulted in the time taking longer. At times, the bot will also surrender for some reason, but not before consuming all the time, or if they submit a team, aside from their Archon, the rest of the units were underleveled. Could be fixed once Bracket was brought to Modern, but there was no way to know now.
I also participated in the Liquidity bot test in Survival Mode under Bracket IV, with cards capped at gold level. I chose this Bracket because I thought it was best to know how the liquidity bot performs against Gold League players, which is a much easier entry for players, and one thing that I noticed is that the higher your level is, the longer you have to wait for the liquidity bot. When I was around Diamond I - Champ III rating, matchmaking took more than 2 minutes, and for some reason, the liquidity bots would sometimes use Foundation cards, including Archons, which would immediately cap the units at silver level. I do not know if this also happens in Bracket V and VI, but if it does, at least increase the level of the Archon to match the Bracket that it was being played in.
Closing
In summary, most of my doubts come from whether the liquidity bots could provide smooth liquidity once Brackets was employed in Modern Format and play competitively, but not to the point that they were too overpowered that casual players would find it difficult to defeat them, given that not every player has the same card collection.
Thank you, and see you on the next post!
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