In recent months, there has been a lot of discontent about how Brawling works in Splinterlands. While there's a lot of discussion happening, nothing has been changed thus far and as several members of the team made it clear repeatedly, there are no major changes coming unless a DAO vote happens:
So with this post, I want to get into a discussion about what's working and what's not working in Brawls currently. This is not an official proposal, as I think it's important to first find some consensus and discuss different options available to us. That said, if we do come to a consensus, I'm more than happy to put up a formal proposals to get things changed.
Also, while I think that Brawls do need an overhaul, I don't want to waste too much of the teams time on this. So while I personally would love to see bigger changes, like changing the tier system to an actual league system with relegation in place instead of guilds choosing their own tier, I don't think that it's feasible to invest the effort to set this up. So instead, I'll try to provide ideas for (hopefully) small changes that should help address the major issues.
Lastly, at least to my understanding, the DAO has no say over how Brawls are designed, so any change proposed will still have to be accepted by the team which again makes it very important to find solutions that have a broad consensus behind them.
With these points out of the way, let's get into the actual details. I want to go over the issues I see with the way Brawls are set up right now, describe where I see problems and then provide possible solutions. Those won't be fully fleshed out, often missing exact numbers, but they could possibly serve as a basis for future discussion.
The main issues I see with Brawls is that there are not enough incentives for guilds to play in the highest tier possible to them. We've seen this every time the first guilds managed to upgrade their arena to a new level and we are seeing it very much now with tier 5. A lot of the top guilds had a level 9 arena for months now, but there's still no tier 5 Brawl happening at a regular basis. This issue is actually made up of two problems that both contribute to the overall effect:
- If there are less than 10 Guilds in your Brawl, you will receive fewer Crowns and Merits
- It's way more profitable to go second or third in tier 4 than it is to go 6th or 7th in tier 5
Let's take a look at the former problem first. Brawl rewards consist of 3 pieces: Staked SPS, Merits to buy Gladius packs, and Crowns to upgrade your guilds buildings. While SPS is taken from a fixed pool and distributed among all players in a given tier, the amount of Crowns and Merits is dependent on how many matches are played in the Brawl and thus on how many guilds are competing in your Brawl.
Because of that, in terms of Merits and Crowns, it is not worth it for the top guilds to move to tier 5 if nobody joins them there. Less guilds in the Brawl means less battles fought means less Merits and Crowns earned. So in effect, instead of having a somewhat fair Brawl between the few top guilds, it's more rewarding for them to stay in tier 4 and ideally dodge each other, providing each with a comfortable first place finish and thus a higher reward than they would have gotten in tier 5.
The other issue that comes with this is that the number of guilds in any tier directly effects the amount of Crowns and Merits everybody can earn. In the current cycle, there are 43 guilds in tier 4:
Because of that, there's a total of 5 brackets, made up of 7 or 8 guilds each. If there were only 40 or a total of 50 guilds, each guild would play in a bracket with 10 guilds, thus increasing the amount of Crowns and Merits earned quite dramatically. To me, this doesn't make sense.
So how would we fix this? I propose to change the Crown and Merits rewards to a fixed amount only depending on the tier you play in and not taking into account how many (or few) matches are actually played during the Brawl. The deciding factor thus wouldn't be how many matches you have won but what percentage of matches your guild has won. Let's provide a very simple example that I'm going to iterate on later:
Let's say the Crown rewards are set to 1000 Crowns in tier 5.
If you won all your matches, you'd receive 1000 Crowns as a reward.
If you only won 50% of your matches, you'd receive 500 Crowns.
If you didn't win a single match, you'd earn 0 Crowns.
So the highest amount available would always be fixed per tier and it wouldn't matter any longer if you only faced one guild or nine other guilds.
For this to work, we'd also have to change how frays that are not filled would be treated. Right now, they are simply ignored and not counted for the Brawl. Moving forward, they would have to be counted as a loss if your guild didn't fill that fray. I know that there are a lot of guilds struggling to fill all frays. This is mostly because there are a lot of gold foil frays, frays that only allow Alpha cards, and so on. I feel like this absolutely needs changing and is another major issue. The team already told us that they'll be looking at fray composition, though, so I don't want to touch on that part for now but am hopeful that this will be corrected anyway.
Then there's the issue of higher tier Brawls not being worth it for guilds that will go last in the higher tier but would fight for the top spots in the lower tier. As you can see in the reward page I've shown above, there's a dramatic difference in rewards between the top finishers and "the defeated". This issue wouldn't be addressed by the changes proposed above and indeed, that's why I would prefer to change Brawls to a relegation system where playing in a higher tier would always be better but you'd have to earn the right to move the next tier and had to fight to defend that right. As that's not going to happen, we will need to come up with a solution that still provides incentives to move up in tier, even if the guild is probably not going to compete for the top spots.
One way to make that happen would be to make the possible Crown and Merits rewards considerably higher for the higher tiers. Here's an example with totally made up numbers:
Tier 1 - 100 Crowns
Tier 2 - 300 Crowns
Tier 3 - 600 Crowns
Tier 4 - 1000 Crowns
Tier 5 - 1500 Crowns
These numbers would have to be tweaked obviously and there are people way better at this than me, but ultimately the idea would be to provide enough incentives to compete at the highest tier possible to you instead of staying lower just to have higher rewards. On top of that, we could provide a flat bonus for guilds that choose to compete in higher tiers. We could give 100 Crowns as a flat bonus to every guild that won at least 20% of their matches in tier 5 and maybe 50 Crowns in tier 4. This should be achievable for all guilds and would (hopefully) prevent any abuse of the bonus.
It would also address another issue that I'm seeing more and more - namely that the top guilds are growing stronger way faster than the rest of the pack can keep up. In parts, this is to be expected of course, but right now, it feels like the differences are too extreme. So by having that flat bonus for competing in higher tiers, we could reduce the difference between the top spots and the rest a bit.
Another option would be to change the Crown and merits rewards to logarithmic growth:
What that means is that the Crown reward would at first grow (almost) linear with an increasing win rate but it would flatten out the higher the win rate gets. Every additional win would still provide a bigger return, but it would stop guilds from getting ahead too quickly. Taking the example from above, again using made up numbers, things could look like that:
Let's say the Crown rewards are set to 1000 Crowns in tier 5.
If you won all your matches, you'd receive 1000 Crowns as a reward.
If you only won 50% of your matches, you'd receive 750 Crowns.
If you only won 25% of your matches, you'd receive 500 Crowns.
If you didn't win a single match, you'd still earn 0 Crowns.
Personally I feel like this would be the best solution to address all of the above issues and should really help to make playing in a higher tier more rewarding for all participants.
So, these are my ideas and some possible solutions we could try to implement. Personally, I feel like having a fixed amount of Crowns per tier, given out at a logarithmic scale, and maybe adding a (small!) flat bonus for competing at higher levels could really improve the experience for all participants, no matter which tier a guild is playing in right now. But as I said, these are just ideas and possible solutions I came up with. I'm sure there are more and possibly better ideas out there, so I just hope we can really start a discussion on the topic and come up with a solution that the majority of the stakeholders feels confident with. Feel free to leave comments with suggestions here or just message me in Discord. Ideally, though, we could get the discussion going in the Brawls channel itself so as many people as possible can take part in it.
Thanks to everybody who made it through this wall of text and thanks for any feedback, it would be much appreciated!