Sometimes plans need to be adjusted when reality happens. I wanted to write something else today, at the request of a regular reader, but today turned out to be a very busy day for me on Hive (already).
It was the end-of-season at Splinterlands. But before I go into that topic, I want to speak about PeakMonsters, which just had a major update. They didn't even announce it yet, except on discord.
PeakMonsters Updates
So, as 
Now, most of my cards that are rented out are already placed on my rental accounts where they benefit from the services of rental bots, but I still have cards that I manually manage using PeakMonsters. I've gotten lazier though since managing rentals is taken care for me automatically.
But who wants to manage their own collection on the rental market, now has multiple options to do so, besides setting the lowest price on the market (which is still an option).
One interesting new option is that the price of cards that are rented out can be modified without manually terminating contracts and re-renting the cards. That can be good or bad. It offers the convenience of not having to relist the cards after the rental contract expired or was terminated, but the 2-day period before the card can be re-rented still exists, and if the price is set compared to the market when the order to change the price was given, the market situation can be different when the card is put on the rental market again. There's a 2-day delay. But maybe the price taken into consideration is the one when the card is placed back on the rental market.
I like the additional compare options and I've seen a series of new filters added, but I didn't have time to play with them yet. But generally, I love more filters.
I've read a post presenting the new features will be published soon, so keep an eye for that on the 
End-of-Season at Splinterlands
I've read recently a bunch of posts from people saying this last season was... terrible (as in very hard).
I have to say... before they said it, I didn't notice it, lol.
Compared to previous seasons, I played generally more relaxed, and usually less time.
Now, in hindsight, was this season harder than before? Probably.
I only reached CL3 yesterday, and I was very close to CL2 today, but nope. Today was frustrating, indeed, compared to the other days of the season for me, because I wanted to reach CL2, so I played longer than usually.
But let's look at some reasons why I believe this season was harder than before.
For once, if one compares results from the previous season to the ones from this season, I believe that's a mistake.
Last season was one of the longest (18 days) and allowed more people to rank up to higher leagues than their "normal" ones, so their reset leagues for this season were higher too. Competition at the beginning of the season was... different than they are used to.
Then, this season was one of the shortest ones (12 days). Reaching the same level of rewards as in an 18-day season, putting the same daily effort, would be close to a miracle.
The second reason why this season was harder is that players adapted to the new changes to the ranked battles rewards system.
Now it makes much more sense to play to win - even by discarding the bonus from the daily focus -, rather than focusing on the daily mission and as a result having your win-rate drop.
What I can agree with from my own experience too is that the rewards seem to have lowered in dollar value. Other than the market dynamics, to some degree, I believe that's by design: adding merits to loot chests, has that effect on daily rewards, but helps slow down the distribution of the reward cards.