As my followers know I am always bleating on about the football (soccer to the Americans in here) so I was excited to learn around Splinterlands bringing out a football card trading game in conjunction with the MLS so from the offset I kept tabs on it and over the past year there has been ups and downs and moaning and whinging but finally the time has come for ranked play to be released. Now during the beta stage many people were going mad the way the game played as you have 1 goalkeeper , 2 defenders , 2 midfielders and 2 attackers which was not really that similar to a football match where you have 1 x goalkeeper, 4 defenders , 4 midfielders and 2 attackers (traditionally). So there was this element where people kicked up about it. I kept testing and playing anyway. The beta stage was quite boring as you did not win anything for winning.. This all changed last week when ranked play was introduced and then all of a sudden things got interesting. I played a couple of games and I won but then I lost 17 in a row which was strange. They I figured out that after a certain number of games the players get injured. You can play around 4 or 5 with the team you have but they go to 0% fitness after a few games. Then because I was losing all the time my moral went through the floor which made me even more shit (for want of a better word). Now I more than likely have the worst record in the game so far but on the plus side I am learning and the thing I thought about most during gameplay is that we may be onto something here. There is so many ways to go here to make this game a success. For a start if down the road there were 11 players introduced then all of a sudden we have a serious game on our hands. Imagine passing it around the back and threading balls into your midfield. This could get huge, kind of like a Subutio on steroids.
Skills and leveling up players cards still isn't there yet. I still have to learn what exactly team morale does to a player and I am learning fast that you need to have good passers at the back to get it up to your midfielders. I also learned that in order to have a team full of superstars , you need a bench full of terrible players that have bad stats as there is a limit in the number top players you can have on your team with the roster points rule. At the moment you get 360 roster points. There are 6 attributes for every player that are all out of ten. So say the best player ever , maybe Messi, has 10s on all attributes well then that is 60 points. You have 300 points left for your entire team and bench. I think this is a great idea and a little strategy I am implying at the moment is to buy up the terrible players so I can fill my bench with them. In the end the terrible players may be in more of a demand than the best players because in order to have a dream team you need to have a disaster bench which makes pack openings all the more interesting. And this is just the start of it. I am using the strategy of putting my keepers on the bench as they have the least amount of stats.
I find myself being drawn back into the game every night but I have to say that the negative bits to it is that it takes so long to change your team around when the players get injured. There are change NFT buttons and Change Player buttons and this is confusing to the player. If you could drag an ddrop players into your team like in Splinterlands where you double tab then it would make for better mechanics. It took ne 15 minutes to change my team last night as I was going in and out and hitting the wrong things. You have to click on the player detail and then look for subs. It's all a bit of a mess at the moment but I am confident that the developers will fix this so it makes selections easier. Injuries are huge in the game but I like them but maybe as we level up we will have less chance of a player getting injured and they can last for say twice the number of games than a level 1. Again all places of opportunity. What I thought was a disaster of a game is now becoming alot more reason for hope when no featuures are added and the UI is cleaned up. I am now quietly confident around the game and it has time until the MLS starts again next March to get things nailed down and marketed. One point to note is that Genesis League Sports does not even have a community yet so this would be an easy fix to get one going.
But for now I will play ranked and work out tactics and ways to not lose I reckon. So I will be stronger when the game does get larger. As I said earlier if this became an 11 man team then we are laughing and I do not think it would take much to upgrade to this. The upside to the user is that it would be more similar to the actual game of football. The other upside is that more packs would have to be purchased. Look at the Premiership teams all need a squad of 25 to compete at the top level, The same could be said about the game. But the Premiership (unless your Tottenham ) does not ahve all your players injured after 5 games which means you will have to buy at least 200 players to play regularly. Bit of a cash cow here if it took aff. It all makes sense and us football fans are not afraid to part with some cash to get this done. The future is looking brighter all of a sudden and we are not even 2 days into ranked play.