Hi everyone! I am back, at least for now. Haven’t played Splinterlands since Chaos Legion dropped, so that’s been around six months off the game. I am still actively reading all the SPL news on Hive and was initially skeptical of how the revamped rewards system will affect players.
Initial Thoughts
When reading the changes last month and reading the commentaries around it, I was quite worried that the revamped rewards system would turn the game into a grind and that we would see a surge in bots as more chests are available at the lower leagues.
First Focus Daily
With the revamped reward system, using starter cards were going to come with a massive penalty to your rewards (I believe I saw just have one starter cards was -14%), I had decided that I was going to rent cards that aligned to my daily focus so that I could earn focus points. As I haven’t played in so long, I start back at zero rating in Novice. This meant you get nothing for winning, only rating points, so I decided not to rent anything while I grinded my way slowly into Bronze League whereby you gain FP, RP and DEC for winning. Playing in Novice was no fun as I was just using starter cards (you can’t penalize zero rewards) and it was two steps forward, one step back. Super demoralizing!
Took a day of casual playing to just make it into Bronze league and I got the Fire Focus… did someone say Yodin?? Popped straightway into Peakmonsters and started to look at rentals for the Fire splinter. Also decided that if I was going to do this, I ended quite a few of my rentals for Collection Power and more cards to play with. My rentals weren’t taking in much anyways, less than 50 DEC a day at the moment, so I figured I would put them to better use by playing.
I was surprised how cheap rentals have gotten since the new rental system by Peakmonsters was introduced a year ago. I used to rent heaps to play in Diamond, but had to stop as rentals got too expensive, especially at EOS. Managed to pick up a Lvl 1 Yodin at 50 DEC, freaking steal!! Was thinking of renting normal cards, but I noticed GFs rentals were so affordable, I just got the GF versions. I only rented six Fire splinter cards for 57.7 DEC/day as I had my own set of cards to use too. They were mainly reward cards, but they did the trick.
The first reward chest required 300 FP and took a while as I was only getting around 80 FP per win, but as I advanced to the higher leagues, I was getting more FP & SP per win! Of course, the more reward chests you get, the higher the FP & SP required. By the end of the daily, I ended up with 15 daily reward chests, which was decent considering the max was 30 per day. What was surprisingly was how many season reward chests I had. As I started battling in Silver 3, I was getting 1k+ SP per win which was like getting one season reward chest every time I won!!
Low expectations here for the daily chests and I was very surprised. I got a chest with 494 DEC and 5 cards! Cards were worth around $0.20, so first-time round is already a profit! Makes me want to play again for sure.
Conclusion
My prediction that the game will be a bit of a grind was fairly accurate as I did battle a lot more then usual. This will definitely put off the people who want to play it casually as the rewards will not stack up. But the SPL is smart to tap into the psyche of mini rewards. I was fairly happy to stop at 12 reward chests but knowing that winning one more battle was going to get me one more chest made to keep playing, then knowing that winning 2/3 more times after will get me another chest. In the end, I must have play ten more battles, definitely no good for someone with no self-control :D