This weeks post is exploring Splinterlands Wild Format. If you are not familiar with Splinterlands ranked play formats there are basically two ranked formats at this time: Wild and Modern. There was a Survival format, but it is briefly paused for the team to make adjustments to it before resuming it.
Normally you have to pay 2,000 DEC to participate in Wild Format per season, however this season Splinterlands team is waiving the cost of Wild Pass so that all players can experience the fun and thrill of doing battles with their older cards too.
And just a note, if you have SPS staked you are receiving Voucher tokens, these tokens can be swapped in game for DEC in order to pay for the Wild Pass. Here is my voucher balance:
In order to swap Vouchers into DEC you can go to: https://splinterlands.com/voucher-hub
Please note that by default you are using DEC to swap into Vouchers, in order to swap Vouchers for DEC you click on the following button:
Then you enter the amount of vouchers you want to swap for DEC and click the Swap button. As you can see at the time of me writing this blog it takes 126 vouchers to get 2,010 DEC that is required for the Wild Pass:
You might wonder why am I giving these detailed instructions on swapping vouchers for DEC in the game? Well if you have been around the Splinterlands / Hive ecosystem you might recall that you could buy the Wild Pass for vouchers directly, that is no longer possible. Also, as an experienced Hiver you might say just transfer vouchers from the game into Hive Engine on Tribaldex and swap them for DEC over there. Well that is no longer an option either as transfer of Voucher tokens out of the game has been disabled.
Additionally Voucher Hub is located under Pools, which is not the most intuitive place to look for a Trade Hub, so I have provided a direct link to the Voucher Hub above. Of course there is another use case for Splinterlands vouchers, you can go to the Voucher Shop and buy Exclusive promo cards. But those are quite expensive. The current promo card is Kelan Gaines and this Rare Death and Dragon promo card is actually quite good, but to buy it at a maximum level it would take 11,500 vouchers and even with almost 500K SPS staked I have only accumulated 3,634 vouchers...
So for me swapping vouchers for Wild Pass is a valid voucher use case in order to play in Wild League for free.
Wild League is often associated with playing against bots and while that may be true, it is not necessarily a bad thing. It allows you to determine how much you can play per day by utilizing XBot or Archmage botting services. If you don't have time to play 25 games per day you can set your bot to play 15 games daily and play the remaining 10 daily games yourself.
Also, if you are playing all of your games manually you can take a look a the teams bot has generated in the past and predict what the bot will play. The bot on the other hand is not analyzing your previous games so here we as humans have an advantage. However make no mistake, the botting services are quite good and even with this advantage they can be quite difficult to defeat as they play highly optimized teams for the ruleset.
So how are the earnings in the Wild mode compared to the Modern play mode? Here is an example of my recent win in the Wild League:
Here you can see that I am playing at a Champion 3 level and I got only 4 SPS for my win? This is significantly lower then the current SPS earnings in the Modern format!
Let's see how this compares to my second account recent win in Modern:
The difference is roughly three times! And that is despite my Wild rating being 360 points higher! Higher rating usually means higher SPS rewards.
One reason for the difference is that SPS staking requirements in Wild are roughly a double compared to Modern staking requirements:
My second account has approximately 251 thousand SPS staked which gives it 10.8 multiplier and my first account has 341 thousand effective SPS staked which gives it a 8.93 multiplier in Wild. So the differences in multipliers definitely do not explain the difference in SPS earnings between Wild and Modern leagues at this time. So it must be that Wild SPS reward pool is shared among a lot more players who are playing more battles.
Let's take a look at the available data from Peak Monsters:
Here we see that after a long period of relatively stable amount of battles in Modern and Wild we see a drop in Modern battles and a big increase in Wild battles! Wild battles prior to the new season were around 21.5 thousand per day and increase to 65,300 battles the first day of this season. That is almost a three fold increase in Wild battles. Modern battles are around 13,500 battles down from around 19,000 battles last season. Which is means we have almost five times more battles in Wild compared to Modern.
Also in the chart we see drop off in wild league battles in the first three days of the season. Here are the numbers for the first three days of Wild league battles:
Day 1: 65,300
Day 2: 55,379
Day 3: 49,394
That is a decent drop and I would expect it to continue, but at a lower drop-off rate as the season goes on. Additionally next season I would expect that with re-introduction of the 2,000 DEC fee the number of accounts playing in Wild will drop again and that will lead to increased SPS earnings for those who are participating in Wild format.
So what was average SPS per win in Wild format in the last season? Here are my results for the last season:
We can see that I had 158 wins in Wild last season and my SPS earnings from the Wild format looked were 946 SPS. So 946/158 = 6 SPS per win in wild. So last season in Wild we were earning almost 50% more SPS than now.
Obviously with Chaos Legion set going into Wild League and rental costs and card costs for the modern format being much higher than Chaos Legion set it means that there will be a lot more high level players in Wild and we cannot expect the same SPS earnings as last season where those maxed out Chaos Legion players were in Modern.
But I will not be surprised if SPS earnings in Wild will go back up to 5 SPS per battle or about 25% higher than they are now.
If you have some staked SPS please vote for my SPS Validator Node HERE
I have recently became a Hive Witness and would really appreciate your vote for me as a witness: https://vote.hive.uno/@seattlea
If you wonder what is the best way to get involved you can use my link to begin your Splinterlands and HIVE journey.