Now that we have had one full season with the new ranked reward system under our belt, we have been going through lots of data and player feedback and are starting to design and implement some changes to the system.
The first two changes (detailed below) are planned to go live during the next maintenance window on Tuesday, June 28th:
Daily Focus Chests Based on Current League
We will be changing the daily focuses to award chests based on the player's league at the time that the focus begins rather than the highest league achieved during the previous season.
For example, if a player is currently in Silver league when they start their daily focus, then they will earn Silver chests from that focus even if they had reached Gold league in the previous season. Please note that this will only apply to daily focuses. Season reward chests will still be based on the highest league achieved in the previous season.
Starter Card RShares Reduction Formula Change
Currently, the starter card reduction is applied to the overall Rshares earned. For example, a player with a rating of 1,000 and using 1 starter card out of 4 would earn 750 Rshares as shown below:
= 750
However, this linear reduction does not incentivize card ownership or renting as much as was intended. After some discussions, it was determined that it would be far more effective to apply the starter card reduction to a player's rating in the equation. With this change, the same example above will now result in approximately 421 Rshares instead of the previous 750:
= 421.875
Future Changes
There are a number of other changes we are also considering and working on implementing but that will not be ready until a little later on. We still wanted to give the community a heads-up about these changes so everyone can be aware of what is planned and provide additional opportunities for player feedback.
New Daily Focuses
We are working on implementing new daily focuses based on using cards with certain abilities, rather than just cards from a certain element. The plan is to add around 10 to 15 of these types of focuses, with each one focusing on a few different abilities with a common theme. One example would be a focus based on playing at least one card that has either the Sneak, Snipe, or Opportunity ability.
The plan is for these new focuses to be added alongside of the existing element-based focuses, so it will be possible to get either type of focus each day. We look forward to these new types of focuses adding much more variety to the teams that are fielded in ranked battles.
Daily Focus Mechanic Update
We are also considering changing the daily focus mechanic such that instead of an "all-or-nothing" system like it is currently, each win will always contribute rshares toward the daily focus chests even if no daily focus cards are used, however, each card used that follows the daily focus gives some type of bonus to the amount of focus points earned for that battle.
For example, if a player has a Life element focus, then they will still earn focus points based on the rshares earned from a battle win even if they use a different element, but if they choose the Life element and use Life cards in the battle, then they will receive bonus focus points above the amount of rshares earned for each Life card they used.
Season Rentals
While not directly related to the ranked reward system, the rental market is a key component in the overall economy and the increase in rewards has provided a lot of additional value to renting cards. One of the reasons we believe that this has not been reflected in rental market usage and pricing as much as we had hoped is that it is quite difficult to manage and get stable, predictable pricing for large rental collections with the current daily rental system.
As a result, we are working on implementing a season rental option. With season rentals, card owners would be able to specify whether or not they would like their cards to be available for full season rental. Then renters would be able to rent those cards for the entire current ranked play season. This means that the rental cannot be canceled by either party until the current ranked play season is over - or rather the cancellation can be submitted at any time, but it will not take effect until the current season ends.
We are planning to still price the rental by number of days, it's really just a change to when and how the rentals will end or be canceled. This way if you start a season rental at the beginning of the season, you will pay for ~15 days worth of the rental, but if you start a season rental with only 3 days left of the season then you will only pay for 3 days worth.
We hope that this new feature will help more players take advantage of the opportunities to earn via card rentals since it will provide more predictable pricing and less management and oversight in dealing with daily cancellations.
Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!
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