Introduction
Hello hiveans, it's your fellow Splinterlands player, and extraordinaire reporting today to explain how @aggroed and @yabapmatt have updated Splinterlands counter to their goals of improving the game for the community at large against exploiters. I know there's a divide about this topic. Some of you think these updates, such as the more recent one about highest league season rewards ending in favor of current league season rewards are helping improve the overall balance.
The problem with the ranked battle updates
I had been away from Splinterlands for a while last year, but when I came back the Collection Power update had been released, I was a bit perturbed by it, but let it slip since would stop those with specialized decks from spamming towards Diamond and Champion. However it along with the update today have basically ensured that players will be fleeced by exploiters.
As someone who rents out cards, I could easily rent my cards out for 13 days out of the season, ends my rentals on the 13th day, and use them on the last day to maximize my profits, hurt other players, and abuse the systems put in place to help them, all because of an oversight.
24h cooldowns on undelegated cards sounds fun, til you realize that permits other players to use you for more money, all because you can't afford to buy cards, only rent them, but soon you won't even be able to rent the cards you need, because your season rewards and being slammed back to Bronze 3-2 the last 2 days of the season. And that's no Bueno for me, either have CP based leagues, or have season rewards based on current league, but not both together.
And honestly, the whole ranked system needs an overhaul. The more focus on trying to avoid exploitation, the more exploitation you end up with. You cannot avoid exploitation, or bug abuse, you can only try to balance high end versus low end.
Businesses are about providing a working product to customers, not about avoiding the small group who might exploit the promo systems in place to reward loyal customers, or even new customers. Imagine if all of the reward programs floating around required your drivers license number before you could use the service to avoid multiple accounts, most of you would avoid them like the plague. Or required you to jump through hoops before you could redeem, you'd stop using the service, and quite possibly stop patronizing the business.
So far all I've seen has been updates that are counter intuitive to their intended objective, on Splinterlands.
I'm not wanting to see this game start losing players, but it's eventually going to happen, if today hasn't already caused players to start selling what cards they have, to avoid further losses from rentals that were pulled today.
Champion league players don't need to reach champion on multiple accounts, they just need to manage multiple lower league alts to exploit the current systems, while renting out cards that they could pull on the 13th day, to use for raising an alts league, while screwing over the players that were renting the cards.
Trust busting caused Rockefeller to become richer by having smaller businesses instead of the one larger company. How will these updates stop the exploiters from doing the same? Rockefeller ended up becoming his own competition. In this case, exploiters will just worm around the CP, and season rewards change, while smaller players will struggle more.
Any input, counter arguments, etc, please don't hesitate to bring them up in the comments below. I just feel disgruntled at seeing how low the ranked system has come from trying to avoid exploitation of it.