Hello there! @saydie here, playing Splinterlands everyday!
Recently, Splinterlands has launched a new program called the Scholar Showcase. These are a series of tournaments where aspiring scholars will battle against one another to prove their skills to the huge card owners, and potentially, hire them to play their accounts. To make sure that every players will play at an equal playing field the tournament uses ghost cards so that everyone has access to the exact set of cards at the same level, making it a pure, skill based competition.
At the same time, each of the players performance can be easily tracked through https://spl-scholar-showcase.streamlit.app/ which is a tool created by beaker to help the owners connect with scholars and in my opinion, the site did a great job on what it is meant to do. If you hover anywhere in the area that I boxed, you can also see the number of wins and loses. Anyway, here is my overall performance in the last series of tournaments.
First of all NO!, I am not aspiring to be a scholar, at least not this time. But there is nothing wrong with me stating to build my scholar portfolio right? Because playing another account may mean that I might need to stopped playing mine, given that I can only spare a portion of my time to play the game. Maybe , that will change in the future so I am not completely closing my doors.
So if not to be a scholar, why do I entered the tournament you ask? There are multiples reasons such as the ability to play all cards at different levels and to test my skills against other players. Aside from that, the best I can give my feedback about the program is to participate on the program. I also have some concerns players participating with multiple accounts in order to potentially boost their performance through win trading or hog as many scholar spots for themselves which I expressed in this comment.
To give you an example, using the scholar showcase site, we can track multiple players at the same time by typing the player's IGN on the search box and boy oh boy, look at that. Two accounts with almost identical name. Coincidence? Nah, because if you look enough, at the blockchain, you can see that these two accounts does have transactions with one another.
It was easy to figure it out because the player uses an almost identical name but that was not always the case. For instance, there are more varieties in the following accounts so you won't have an idea that these accounts were related with each other but all of these accounts were connected to xclie and the reason that we know that is because those accounts have been investigated for potentially botting in modern.
Too bad, both of these players have such terrible winrate that any card owner will employ them. However, if they can enter with multiple accounts, then what is stopping me or any of the same players from doing the same thing if it could increase the chance of getting a scholarship. All we need to do is to make sure that the accounts that were created does not have an interaction with one another so it will not be traced to us and it will be difficult to know were multi-accounting.
That wasn't all the issue that I find within this program. By using inspect tool in the site, we can see the breakdown of each of the tournaments a player participated and their stats. Again, the site is doing a good job of what its meant to do which is to show players data.
However, that also does not tell the full story. To understand what I'm trying to say, let me show you my battle results from the Scholar Showcase: Adept Modern by which I got 86% winrate.
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Among the 18 wins that I have, 12 of those are won through my opponent not submitting their team. This was not exclusive in this tournament. For that, I'll give you the summary
| Tournament Name | Rank | Total Battles | Total Wins | Total Loss | Opponent Flees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SS: Adept Modern | 4 | 21 | 18 | 3 | 12 |
| SS: Adept Wild | 6 | 22 | 17 | 5 | 4 |
| SS: Intermediate Modern | 23 | 20 | 13 | 7 | 9 |
| SS: Intermediate Wild | 1 | 19 | 18 | 1 | 10 |
| SS: Advanced Modern | 7 | 20 | 16 | 4 | 9 |
| SS: Advanced Wild | 5 | 20 | 17 | 3 | 7 |
| SS: Expert Modern | 10 | 21 | 16 | 5 | 8 |
| SS: Expert Wild | 27 | 19 | 7 | 4 | 2 |
| Total | 162 | 122 | 32 | 61 |
Holy molly! Among the 122 wins that I had, 61 of those came from surrenders or 50% of my battles. To make it more clear, I made it into a chart where it shows how the surrenders correlate with the amount of battles that I won and the total battles that I fought.
That is a huge issue when a huge portion of the battles won came from surrenders because the idea of the program it to showcase the skills of the player so we expect that players will compete with one another to be on the top, not because they get free wins.
Some Suggestions To Fix The Issues
🔸Add KYC requirement on participating players.
This will not only reduce multi-accounting of accounts but will also adds additional safeguard to protect the assets of the card owners. Scholars having some sort of verification is the least thing that they should be willing to do if they want to get the trust of card owners.
🔸Include a tournament fee.
As much as I want the scholar tournament to be free, the huge amount of players not submitting their matches makes the tournament not competitive. That's just how it will turnout if there was no downside in not submitting battles in the tournament. This is something that we should already learned when tournaments used to not have an entry fee.
Additionally, I think it would be better that to have a stats reset for the players maybe every 3-4 months because for example, a player only has 40% win rate during the previous tournament then try to study the game more diligently to the point that he is beating the players that used to beat him before and increased his win rate for that tournament by 95%. Because the previous tournament is included with the recent one, it will pull the overall winrate of that player reason for him not to be chosen as a potential scholar, even though he bested all of his opponents.
Closing
And those were my concerns and suggestions about the Scholar Showcase program. I participated on it, I saw how it goes and share my thoughts on how it can be improve and be more competitive. There may be other ways to go around this that I haven't think of so if you have a suggestion, feel free to drop a comment on this post.
Thank you and see you on the next post!
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