My answer to this question used to be a big fat 'No' ever since I maxed out my deck many years ago, maybe, just maybe if you are in it for the very long run I would say. However, the recent changes are starting to getting me to rethink my answer. Sure, we are still a long way from perfection, but we are definitely heading into the right direction.
The Splinterlands team is working very hard at making the rewards for playing the game proportional to the investment made to reach a certain league, something I have been advocating for since the start of this game.
As an example, take a look at this seasons rewards for me. I always start in Diamond at the beginning of the season and proceed to champ for most of the rest of the season and lately this is where the rewards have been starting to pay off. This season they also implemented the staked SPS mechanism for winning battles and reward chests. This came as a substitute for DEC rewards, which was literally being overprinted in the daily and seasonal rewards by bot farms in the lower leagues. It is almost like the Dark Energy knew this change was coming and wanted to say goodbye with a farewell present, because just before they made the change I hit my DEC jackpot:
In all my years of playing this game this is by far the largest amount I have ever gotten out of one chest. Now, you would think that changing the rewards to SPS might have stopped my luck for this season, but nothing can be further from the truth.
To my own surprise a couple of days after the switch to SPS rewards, I hit my first SPS jackpot:
As you can see, this was even a higher USD amount than my DEC jackpot. So, I can easily say that this season has been my best season ever in terms of USD rewards value. I used to play ranked only to get as high as possible on the leaderboard at the end of the season, because that's where the DEC rewards were to be found (and also the highest level of competition) if I was able to get into the top 50, which by the way I have been successful in most of the times. The rewards that came out of the chests the 14 or 15 days leading up to the final day were underwhelming to say the least and so I focussed more on tournaments. Now, I am very happy to see that finally after many years the rewards a long the way to the final day have become worth chasing the highest position possible at each given moment during the season.
On top of that pretty soon the SPS ranked rewards will be separated per league (the first SPS proposal is being voted on as we speak), which will even improve the returns of the higher leagues and hopefully push everyone to combine their cards to higher levels, which in its turn will move the whole economy up.
And as a bonus what also has changed is that now we get a multiplier of potions instead of just one in a champ chest, which is actually kind of useful knowing that Riftwatchers is around the corner and I am most likely going to purchase quite a bit of packs.
To sum up: this is the total value of my chest rewards (a shoutout to @spl-exchange and @genepoolChlrn8r for providing these beautiful reward summaries through their rental service called splex.gg, which by the way is such a useful tool for renting out your extra cards):
1226 USD
That's awesome for a season of playing the most fun game in crypto. Now, I know this won't be the standard going forward, however as you can see EV has gone significantly and I should be getting around 510 USD each season going forward. And that's with the SPS price being at an ATL.
As always I am super impressed by the actions that the Splinterlands team takes in order to create the very first sustainable crypto gaming economy. This game is miles ahead. Miles! I tell ya!!
TC
Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice, always do your own research. This is for documenting purposes only.
