I guess pretty much everything revolving around Splinterlands and Hive is predicated upon a very long term commitment so what you're saying it's not surprising. I hope you'll get something back eventually because you definetely deserve it.

And yes, that's definetely what the experience of low level players would be like. If you have a strong and enough well-rounded deck for a certain tier you should definetely be able to fight comfortably in the first few tiers of the next league.

So for instance with a strong Silver deck you should end up somewhere in Gold, with a strong Bronze deck you'll hit Silver and so on..

But that's really my problem with the current state of the game. I've talked about it a bit in my Splinterlands related posts and no one really intervened in the discussion but I'd really love to get some meaningful replies around this topic.

As low level players we're essentially forced to have fun for a few days in the season and then inevitably fall into the next bracket where eventually you'll hit a wall and then from there it's always going to be a 50/50 on wether or not your limited cards against higher level cards and it's just unfair and it's going to be like that for the rest of the season.

If I have Bronze cards I shouldn't face Silver cards. That's how it used to be.

You can definetely still have some profits and same progress but it's just not fun. That's the bottom line.

I understand it was changed, all this, because of the leaderboards.

I understand Splinterlands is both a game and an investment platform and there's ultimately a balance to keep between the two but what was chosen to tackle this issue of the leaderboards was extremely unelegant and I don't really see much discussion around it.

It's a pity because I like Splinterlands but honestly in this current form, as a game, I wouldn't reccomend it to anyone. It's a pity because there's clearly thought and passion put in the project and it has an high potential.

It's particularly sad because this is a bottom heavy problem and the people that can afford to put thousands and thousands of dollars into the game each year are not really incentivized to tackle this issue because it doesn't really affect them or rather it benefits them.

I've heard the arguments in favor of this. Personally, they don't really satisfy me. I understand that the "whales" essentially keep the game alive and if that's the bottom line then I'll have to make my peace with all these things but there used to be a balance before that kept the game fair and exciting for everyone.
They've done a good job of eliminating a lot of the extractive and exploitative behaviours. The game's otherwise in a good state, there's always exciting things to look forward to.. but why can't they find a better compromise than this for ranked? Why can't we go back to having leagues and proper division of players?

I'm sorry to have rambled a bit and forced this discussion on you but it's something I wanted to go over for a while now and you seem to be a reasonable person that wants the best for Splinterlands so I hope to get something meaningful from you. I've tried other way to start a discussion about this topic but never got much out of it.