As I write this, Splinterlands is undergoing its weekly maintenance. One of the things that will change after this maintenance is completed is a revamp of the energy system, known as the Energy Capture Rate until now. Hmm, looks like I have some work for SplinterGlossary.
The energy is what allows someone to play ranked battles, when it's above zero, and prevents that person from playing when the energy is zero.
This is a screenshot used in the presentation post:
Notice the energy bar below the Battle button.
I am not going to talk about how ECR worked until now. If you played Splinterlands, you already know.
The new energy system will have a max level of 50, every game played consumes one energy point, and it needs one hour to regenerate.
Thus, with a maxed energy one account could play 50 battles in a day until the energy becomes completely depleted.
Additionally, the energy pool - as it is referred to - can be refilled once per day by purchasing energy with DEC (or DEC-B!). The price varies "based on the maximum league between the player's current league, their season chest tier, and their daily focus chest tier, across both Modern and Wild play formats".
If fully refilled, the number of games per day could reach 100 per day, which is quite high. Even 50 would be high for me, but there are people who play more.
It will be interesting to see how many players will choose to fully replenish their energy pools every day.
With the new energy system, the influence ECR had on both the SPS rewards and the reward points is eliminated, and all games will be equal from this point of view, no matter if the energy is full or almost empty.
It's interesting because that was one of the elements bots exploited to play more games when ECR was around. By making 50% ECR the hard cap at which the bot stopped playing, it actually played more games, because the drop in ECR was lower with every game, the lower the ECR level, down to 50%. It was profitable, even if at 50% ECR level the rewards got slashed in half.
With the new energy system and every game costing exactly 1 energy, that exploit disappears.
To be fair, the same exploit could have been used by a person, didn't have to be a bot. But often people aren't as productive for a longer period of time. They get tired, distracted, frustrated, excited, etc. You know, emotions, some of the things that make us humans.