I know we should wait a couple season before drawing the conclusions about the new Modern Bracket experience, but in this post I am going to talk about what I see so far and how I think it is going to evolve over the next few seasons.
Additionally the new Modern bracket system has revealed some really easy to see and quite interesting statistics about the number of accounts that are playing manually. And I said a number of accounts, because some of these accounts are piloted by the scholars so the actual number of humans playing is even lower...
The Brackets
Let's talk first about the big picture that we can see from this brackets image above. As you can see I have selected bracket six which is the Champion bracket. As you can see there are 261 players that have signed up for this bracket and reward pool for this bracket is 53% of the total SPS rewards that will be distributed at the end of the season in the Modern league. The Full Reward players is the number of players that is required to sign up before in order for the reward pool not to be reduced. So as you can see the Champion reward pool is going to receive all of the rewards that are allocated to it.
The Diamond bracket is also going to receive all of the rewards allocated to it as 227 players out of 200 required have signed up. But the bracket receives 25% of the total reward pool for modern so rewards are going to be lower, though because there are less players to the required minimum the actual rewards received by players could be a bit higher compared to Champion.
Gold Bracket will also receive the full 12% of their rewards because 318 players out of 300 required have signed up. You can already see the trend the lower the league the less actual player count exceeds the required minimum.
Silver bracket is very similar with 813 players that have signed up compared to 800 required and the reward pool is half of that in Gold bracket at only six percent.
Bronze bracket is where things change drastically. There are only 284 players out of 1,200 minimum required for the full 3% rewards of the total pool. Wood bracket shows a very similar situation of 240 players out 1,200 required to get 1% of the total SPS pool.
What conclusions can we draw from these numbers? Well the first thing that comes to mind is that Splinterlands has a very top heavy player base. The main problem is the lack of beginner players that this bracket chart clearly illustrates.
Another interesting thing is that we can count the accounts that have signed up to play in Modern:
So the grand total of accounts in Modern this season is 2143 and some of them are operated by the same scholars, so the real number is probably just under two thousand...
The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same
Coming back to the Champion bracket, I dropped from the highest league last season of the Champion One to zero rating, which was drastic and as you can see I am still climbing out of that and am currently at 2700 rating in Gold Division 4. Funny thing is that I am normally in Champion One at around 50th position and right now I am ranked at number 54 on the Modern Champion leaderboard while having a Gold league rank. Funny how things changed so drastically but I am still ranked at around top fifty.
Another thing as you can see from this picture is that there are no players in top 15 who are not professional Splinterlands players aka Scholars... Same names just repeating, takes away all the credibility from this leaderboard when the same name is three times in the top fifteen like Rukawa.Red. The leaderboard really needs some fixing...
Another thing that stands out is that quite a few scholars in top ten have over 300 battles already in, how can they even play this many battles already. I have only 147 and if I played all my energy to zero right now I would have only around 180 battles. Eddieboy scholar has played 343 battles already, was he able to buy energy at the start of the season for Glint before that option was disabled?
As you get lower on the leaderboard towards where I am you can see that some non-scholar accounts start to show up, but the presence of the scholars is still very heavy...
The win rates are fairly uniform and between 63% and 83% with lower win rate players having more battles already in.
As you get to the very bottom of the Champion leaderboard you can see almost no scholars, just the regular players. The win rates here are mixed some are really high like 89% but the number of games played is low like 39 and some are much lower like 58% win rate and good amount of battles at 127.
Diamond Leaderboard
What jumps out at me on the Diamond leaderboard is a total absence of scholars in the top fourteen. Diamond leaderboard looks a lot less competitive and the number of battles is in a more reasonable range. The win rates are comparable to those in Champion top fifteen though might be a bit lower.
As we get lower towards top forty in Diamond leaderboard we see some scholars. Though these are some different types of scholars like MarkBoye, I used to meet MarkBoye accounts in Modern, but they were easy to defeat as they featured lower level cards unlike the ones played by top scholars.
As we get even lower we see more MarkBoye accounts I think MarkBoye accounts are actually great for the game as they provide easier wins and make it more fun for the players to play. It does amaze me that MarkBoye is playing this many games on this many accounts, this must be his full time job :)
At the bottom of the Diamond leaderboard we see that only seventy seven players qualified for the leaderboard so far, that quite a bit less than 100+ that have already qualified for the Champion leaderboard.
Gold Bracket
There seem to be just one scholar in the top fifteen for the Gold bracket leaderboard, the number of games played and win rates seem reasonable.
Players in Gold leaderboard also play less games as only seventy have qualified for the leaderboard despite over three hundred that signed up.
Silver Bracket
Silver bracket top fifteen has a couple scholars which is interesting. The win rates are fairly high here and the number of games played is reasonable as well.
Over eight hundred players have signed up for the silver bracket and only 145 had 100 or more battles so far...
Bronze Bracket
No scholars in top fourteen of the bronze bracket. Number of games played is reasonable and win rates are normal as well.
Only 46 players have played 100 or more battles so far. Level of competitiveness seems to be dropping with the bracket level.
Wood bracket
This is the lowest bracket in the game and we have some strange things happening, it seems we have a bot at number twelve position on the leaderboard.
We have another bot at number 29 and in general this clearly looks like the least competitive bracket.
Conclusion
To summarize what I can see from the new Modern brackets: We have around two thousand players playing in the Modern league. The player base is very top heavy and most competitive in Champion and Diamond brackets with competition level dropping as you go lower in brackets.
The most players are in a Silver bracket, Bronze and Wood brackets are very small compared to what they should be which reveals our current challenge in acquiring the new players for Splinterlands.
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