RE: Reintroduction of leagues to Splinterlands

this is a really good idea, so most likely it will not pass the voting.

you must remember that the people voting are in aggregate regressing towards an average, so any exceptional features that made the game so extremely successful to begin with are beyond the range of that regression. If any feature of the game is above and beyond, it will draw attention and 'change' until it is lame and boring and mediocre. That is how regression works and people unqualified to design something like splinterlands are the ones making that decision. People with the most weight are also most likely to have max level cards and view this as a non-issue, because they are blind to the larger picture

about leagues:
I built my entire collection horizontally to max gold league options based on the rules of the game. At one point my collection was valued at ~$400k, and I even paid $6k for a single promo card just to have maximum variety of options, which was needed while competing for gold league leaderboard spots alongside the likes of @byzantinist.

These days that extreme variety means very little, because there are infinite max level cheap cards. Always playing against the same few sets of max level chaos legion and reward cards even though I have a gold league collection. Want to know why the market perpetually crashes then just look at how the game has changed over time. Want to know why all the low level rentals stopped and in turn card values drop then look around at what has changed. Who can value a level 1 beta card when bronze league no longer even exists? It's better to get a few of the cheapest max level cards than to get an entire bronze playset, which is completely retarded and antithetical to the game's original design thesis that made it so successful in the first place. Even small cards used to have value because of bronze, but now low level and filler cards just become fodder for the max level gladiator summoners, and the leaderboards system has become a complete joke that encourages nonsensical sandbag behavior. The winstreak bonus of rating has become a penalty because it pushes you into champion league faster meaning you need more losses to drop back down, and getting to champion with a gold league collection is zero leaderboard placement because the entire thing has become some kind of spinoff parody of what it once was. Someone should burn for what has been done to this jewel of a game, and we don't even have lands unlocking the fkn powercreep soulbound cards - get it together guys.

people were buying insanely expensive cards, like $1000 for level1 llama, based on the rules of the game: collection power and leagues/leaderboards. Then over time everything gets altered to invalidate entire collections. This comes after every town hall having the founders saying that major rule changes will not happen, well guess what, we no longer even have leagues which entire collections were built around so any serious investment into this game has become completely untrustworthy.

If the goal of removing leagues was to inspire people to sell anything that's below max level and drag card prices into the dirt even more then perhaps it is working, because nobody cares about the low level card variety anymore and nobody is hoarding them for rentals either. The 'fair' playing field of skill-based league level caps has been relegated to a corner of brawls where a few people per guild can get their appropriate level cap and every once in a while join an appropriate tournament. The way ranked leaderboards work right now is a complete disgrace, a massive downgrade, and it infuriates me every single day that I'm forced into champion with a gold league collection. No wonder my $400k collection lost 95% of its value, if it's so infuriating to even use it. You're better to buy an account that farmed the soulbound rewards and add some max level chaos legion than to have a $400k gold league collection, that's where we are at without leagues.

Anyone that votes against the return of leagues belongs on some kind of list.
infinite max level copies of the same 20 cards is not as interesting as mass-variety bronze league decks no matter what economic incentive mental gymnastics you try to pull. If anything it only inspires less buying of cards, less rentals, less investment, and pushes away new players at record speed when they inevitably face against a sandbag with max level cards. Leagues existed for a reason.