Hi everyone! Splinterlands has rolled out a new update which changed the rewards for ranked battles, in particularly, those for Novice and Bronze 3. I'll be giving a summary but if you want to read it yourself, here's the link to the official update.
Reward Changes
To put it simply: Players in Bronze III and Novice league will no longer earn DEC rewards from ranked battles. Once they have the rating and power for Bronze 2 and up, they will start earning rewards again. They will still get rewards for daily quest.
The official reason was that there were people creating a massive number of new bronze accounts to farm rewards, and situations where people are incentivised to create many new accounts rather than increase their league, rating, and assets in a single account is detrimental to the long-term health of the game.
Meanwhile, for all other ranks, their allocation for the reward pool has increased, so everyone in Bronze 2 and up should be seeing an increase in earnings.
WTF So What Do I Do Now?!
For players still in Bronze 3 with some DEC in their accounts, rent up to 1k power, grind to 400 rating, and continue on your way. Matchmaking is rating dependent, so you don't have to worry about a sudden difficulty spike as you'll just continue to be matched against similar opponents. At the moment, 2 gold foil commons worth 1k power is about 8 DEC, which can definitely be earned back in Bronze 2 with abit of grinding.
Alternatively, you can check Peakmonsters For rental deals, which can potentially be cheaper.
What About New Players?
This is abit harder to answer, as you've definitely drawn the short end of the stick here. If you don't intend on spending some money for rentals, you'll need to grind out the daily chests until you get a reward card which you can sell for rental money, at which point you should be able to carry on as per normal as long as you've already met the rating requirements.
One reward card is enough, as even the cheapest card, venari heatsmith, is worth 17 DEC, which can cover the cost of rentals for power.
Well, if that's not your taste, you can always go to the Splinterlands Discord and see if any kind soul is willing to lend you 1k power for a day or two, but don't expect results if you choose to go down this route.
Personal Thoughts
Honestly, I do wonder how efficient this update will be in stopping people from mass making accounts. Its definitely still possible to just delegate power to alts in order to meet the requirements and continue farming rewards, but we shall see.
I'm planning to make a new account to see the new system for myself and will do a follow up post on this in the future. I'll probably end up streaming my climb (and suffering) on Twitch if you wanna see how far I can go with just the starter deck!
Otherwise, if you like the post, do leave an upvote and let me know your thoughts!