Welcome back to another installment of Game Theory Saturday. Last week, I talked about ways of growing your Rising Star account as efficiently as possible. Today, I want to focus on another one of my favorite games: Splinterlands!
Putting everything that is to be said about the game and its mechanics into a single article would go way beyond the scope, though. Instead, I want to do a series of articles aimed at newer players that should help to understand some of the underlying mechanics behind Splinterlands and also give some ideas about how to best deal with them.
For today, we'll take a closer look at the Dark Energy Crystal Capture Rate (ECR from here on).
Usually when I do these kind of articles I start off introducing the game I'm talking about. In the case of Splinterlands though, I'm going to skip that part as it is the single most successful blockchain game there is and most if not all people reading this will have probably at least heard of it once. In case you really don't know anything about the game, there are plenty of articles to be found on both Hive and Publish0x to give you some ideas on the game.
In Splinterlands, every ranked game you win rewards you with a certain amount of Dark Energy Crystals (DEC from here on). The exact amount you receive depends on three factors:
- The amount of DEC left in the reward pool
- Your current rating
- Your ECR
As a rule of thumb, the more matches are played, the less DEC remains in the reward pool and thus less DEC is paid out. That's why you'll earn less DEC in the last days of a season when everybody is trying to rank as high as possible. Obviously, the higher your rating the more DEC you will get for a win and there's not much you can do about that other than winning more games. This leaves us with the ECR as the only factor that we can interact with. I'll let the game explain how it works first:
The Energy Capture Rate (ECR) limits how much DEC each player earns from each Ranked match win. Every Ranked battle played reduces your ECR and it regenerates over time. At 50% ECR you will earn half of the DEC for a win as you would if your ECR were at 100%.
I don't know about you, but to me that sounded rather threatening when I first found out about the ECR. Only gaining half your DEC? I don't want to miss out on potential gains! Nobody wants that! But to better understand how the ECR is working, we need some clearer numbers than what the tooltip is telling us.
Every match you play, your ECR is reduced by 1% of what it currently is:
So at 100%, the ECR is reduced by 1% and you end up at 99%.
At 50%, your ECR is only reduced by 0.5% so you'd end up at 49.5%.
At the same time, your ECR is constantly recharging at a rate of 25% per day. Since it's impossible to get your ECR to 0%, it would take a maximum of less than 4 days to fully recharge it again. Now that you know all the numbers, let's talk about how to best deal with it.
If you want to maximize your gains, there's one simple rule that you'd always want to follow no matter your strategy: Don't let your ECR ever hit 100%. Obviously, whenever it is at 100%, you are missing out on the maximum DEC reward for a win and your ECR can't recover any longer so you are missing out potential earnings as long as you let it sit at maximum.
Since you don't want to let your ECR ever go to 100%, you want to at least play enough games to keep it just below that value at all times. Since it's recovering at a rate of 25% each day, you should at least play enough matches to use up these 25%. To do so, you want to play at least 29 matches each day (1*0.99^29 = 0.747).
If you keep it at exactly that number, you'll get the highest DEC return per match and you'll always start close to 100% ECR the next day again. Please note that this only works if you play your games at roughly the same time every day so if you want to allow for some error margin, it's probably best to play 30 or 31 games.
So now that we know how to achieve the highest DEC per game ratio, we all should stop playing after ~30 games, right? Well, it really depends what matters most to you. If you want to earn the most amount of DEC with the least amount of games then go for it and stop after 30 games. But me personally? I enjoy the game way too much to stop there. That's what my ECR is looking right now:
As you can see, I'm way below 75% and I'll probably drop even lower today. Getting back to 100% would take me more than 2 days at that point. So am I not missing out on potential gains because of that? Well, not really. I am gaining less DEC per win, that is correct, but I can also play more games to make up for it. Let's say my ECR is 50% when I start playing. If I play the same 29 games I'd play if I was starting at 100%, I would end up with a ECR of roughly 37.5%, so while I'd only earn half the DEC I'd also only loose half as much ECR in the process.
In other words - I could potentially play twice the games before my ECR dropped by the 25% it recharges every day. So in effect, I'm not missing out on any gains here, it just takes me twice as many games to achieve them.
So... how many games should you play each day and what ECR should you aim for? Because of all I've written before my answer is quite simple:
Play as much as you want to and just don't ever mind the ECR!
As long as you are staying below 100% ECR, you are really not missing out on anything. When I started, I really was stressed out by the ECR sometimes, especially when I already dropped below 75% and had not finished my daily quest.
So really, instead of trying to keep the ECR above a certain threshold, you should just make sure to keep it below its maximum. Just remember that Splinterlands is a game and it's meant to be entertaining in the first place. So if you enjoy yourself, go ahead and play 100 matches a day, you won't miss out on anything. But at the same time, if you feel like you need a break, don't force yourself to grind down below 75%. Just let it rest and come back when you feel like playing again.
And that's all from me today, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Game Theory Saturday. Thank you all for reading and see you all next time!