I reached Champion 2 in Splinterlands. Now, usually that might not be something to call home about but with the new collection power mechanic id say its something worth talking about.
My deck is worth about 250k which would have meant i wouldnt have been able to enter the Champion tier.
The CP mechanic was created to keep out bots with low level cards and for now its working.
Every game i play is tough as hell.
My strongest team is lvl 6,5,4,3,2 and most at Champion 2 and 3 have lvl 8-lvl 10. You have to be extremely focused and anticipate the opposing team, remember what your last teams were so you can try and guess how he will react to your cards as well as taking into account the fight rules.
Honestly, It has been much more fun and frustrating as well when you mess up against your equal. At champ you really cant be losing against your equal. Unfortunately i feel this high level of quality gameplay will be short-lived.
Problem going forward.
Its extremely cheap to rent cards. I needed another 250k DEC worth of cards to be able to play at Champ level and what i did is simply rent 3 GFL for 20 days for an extremely cheap
$3
It is far cheaper to rent a few GFLs than a team that will take you to Champion tier meaning that after a few weeks we could potentially end up where we were.
If the base investment to play this game is $5 and the ROI for bots far exceeds that, then to the players running bots investing a few more dollars for the month to rent the cards that would take them to the highest possible level (Gold maybe) really doesnt make any difference.
This will only not be the case if the RENT market gets drained and there simply isnt any supply.
By far the easiest way to do that would be by killing the rental market, something i would not want, or by having the market explode so much that the demand is extremely high. The effect would be the same.
Id go with the second option.
@splinterlands needs to host @peakmonsters in-game and the first improvement made needs to be "TEAM RENTALS" (@peakd).
If a newb can spend a dollar or two to rent a team without having to learn each card and how everything works that helps a lot.
Make it easier for new folks, not harder, i keep repeating that.
I know id be much more inclined to buy a team of lvl 10s if i didnt have to pick up every card separately.
The collection power mechanic needs more tuning and honestly i dont see CP right now as anything more then a minor obstacle to the min-maxers.
Exploiters. I mean lets be honest. Thats what they are.
Those that run the bots exploit Splinterlands and are hurting all of us that hold DEC and cards. None of us can compete with the shear volume of games that bots can play.
But @aggroed doesnt want to boot them from playing the game which he could so easily do. Instead the community is paying for it.
Shame.
Dev time is wasted on pointless mechanics, the community is hurt by this, has been hurting for the last 2 years, just ban the fuckers already. What are you waiting for?