Greeting fellow Praetorians!
I wanted to post about a subject near and dear to my heart: The Splinterlands Leaderboards! Is there a way to revamp them to make the game more competitive, fun, and rewarding? Maybe it's worth making a proposal!
From my perspective, the Leaderboard was always the carrot that compelled me to play more, buy more cards, rent powerful cards I didn't own, and interact with the Splinterlands ecosystem. When the leagues were removed and all folded into a singular leaderboard, I haven't had the same motivation to play as a competitive player who would try and jockey for a LB position. Afterall, the same players have been on the Champ LB forever, and many of those positions are taken up by the same scholars playing multiple high powered accounts.
How can we "fix" this, and is it even a problem? I think it is, and brought it up in the town hall on multiple occasions with no real response. In my last town hall message, Matt replied that he was willing to make changes, but it need to come from a DAO vote. As such, I have made a video and this post to explore community sentiment about the Leaderboard and how people would respond to expanding the leaderboard. If the community is behind this idea, I would create a proposal (with funding assistance please!) to try and make some positive changes to the Leaderboard.
My idea right now would be to expand the Leaderboard to 100 positions, but I am not against making the LB bigger if we get more players, as I feel the LB should also scale to the user base. For now however, I would suggest expanding it as follows for both Modern & Wild Leaderboards:
Positions 51-75 = 10000 DEC
Positions 76-100 = 4000 DEC
This would result in 350000 additional DEC inflation for league per season, for a total of 700000 DEC per season between them. While DEC inflation is a "bad thing" overall, so is the constant removal of rewards from the player base, so I think this finds a nice balance of not over rewarding while still offering something. Positions 76-100 would be effectively earning "a pack" if prices stay at 4000 DEC with Conclave Arcana. I don't know if this would be printed DEC, or if it would come from the DAO since the DAO is in charge of rewards, but I feel it is a "necessary evil" to restore some of the competitive and rewarding elements to Splinterlands.
If you would like to hear my opinion in video form, I have a YouTube video created where I talk about this subject here:
If you prefer to read the relevant Discord Town Hall conversation, I will post that below as well as a transcript.
Overall, what do you think? Is it worth it to set up a proposal or are things fine the way they are? Let me know in the comments and thanks for reading!
See you around Praetoria,
The Psilence
Below is the original conversation from the Discord Town Hall forum that prompted me to write this Hive Post:
Psilence** — **12/29/24, 2:06 PM
QUESTION: Will you be rewarding more than the top 50 players in each mode (wild/modern) / changing the payout method (to packs I believe was the vote?) for leaderboards soon? Having only 50 rewarded positions per mode is FAR less than when there were multiple leagues, which results in less competition. We used to have rewards for every league bronze silver gold diamond champ and now there is only champ. What happened to the other league rewards? This has been brought up multiple times, everyone seems to agree, but there is never any action taken. I know for me personally I used to top 50 in diamond. Now I don't even bother to compete for the leaderboard which has sucked away a lot of the fun and competition to the point where I just bot wild because there is no point in competing for the LB. Will this ever be changing? There was already discussion of top 100 at least but it's never been actioned. I look forward to competing for LB again, but in it's current form of multiple scholars playing all the top accounts and so few actual LB positions that I don't see the point. Even worse would be if we DO get a thousand more players who never have the chance to experience the former joy of competing for LB prizes because now there are even more players fighting for even fewer prizes. LB is the carrot to further investment and competition. SPS alone is not enough of a draw imho.
Quasar** — **12/30/24, 2:55 AM
Lb rewards were just taken from us, very disrespectful and then level caps were removed on top of that, if you were a great bronze/silver/gold league player competing for your leaderboard, now you are a nobody in the new ranked mode, so disappointing. It's a psychological thing I think, players need a safe or fair environment where they can compete with each other based on their level of investment and get appropriate rewards for being the best in their league, competing for some extra SPS or Glint from battle rewards isn't gonna cut it, it's just a grind, leaderboards on the other hand motivated me to rent extra cards to reach that sweet spot and get a prize for my efforts, now I have no hope of ever competing for the top spots which decreases my fun dramatically, I'm sure other people who used to be on the leaderboards in b/s/g/d leagues feel similar.
Psilence** — **12/30/24, 7:38 AM
While the removal of the league's experiment is still being "justified", I'm not willing to argue that point anymore. If you remember I made a pre proposal to "choose your league" and it was a nightmare for me so I won't touch that again. HOWEVER... What happened to the rewards from bronze silver gold diamond leaderboard? It would only seem fair that if bsgd were all folded into one league (champion) that at LEAST the leaderboard rewards from bsgd would be distributed to this now SINGULAR league. Instead, they were just removed and not replaced, which is not just a removal of the league, but a DELETION of the league's LB rewards without replacing them which results in even LESS overall rewards given out. Why weren't they immediately redistributed in the form of rewards for places 51-100 or even 150? Especially in light of the fact that it's known that scholars take up a large portion of LB right now, and can't even play vs the other accounts they pilot which gives them a huge advantage to take up these VERY LIMITED Leaderboard positions? I'll bet 25 of the top 50 positions are probably the same 5 people, which leaves almost no LB spots for non scholars right now. I'm not even saying give us more than we had, I'm just questioning how we still don't even at least have LB reward EQUITY of the former league LBs. Literally just removed league's and all the rewards that came from their LB without putting them back into the new singular league. And I don't believe we should need a DAO vote to put these rewards back into the game. There was no DAO vote to remove the leagues, so it shouldn't be required to keep the existing rewards within the ecosystem. We're not asking for MORE rewards just pre-EXISTING rewards redistributed to more positions. This was a company decision, they should be able to do this on their own imho.
Psilence** — **12/30/24, 7:25 PM
I probably have less issues than most with the direction things are going in SPL... I'm actually optimistic! BUT I was a competitive player for years, and there was never a time as fun as the last few days of a season used to be when you'd be fighting for the LB! I remember we'd all talk about our placings in tavern and compliment each other if we LBd, trash talk each other (in a friendly way) and lament falling just shy of a LB position after renting and grinding the last hour or two trying to earn a few points. All that is gone now because the same people at the top who've always been at the top, and now they're mostly scholars so very few individual / unique players. The scholar "issue" is a problem for another time but clearly having the same people take multiple LB positions while not ever needing to face "themselves" is... Questionable. That's all the more reason why we need more LB positions. I just want that feeling back that we used to have at the end of season and the competition there used to be amongst us. I'm sure some others remember those times as well.
Yabapmatt**— **1/2/25, 4:31 PM
I think there are two separate things here - 1. Increasing the size of the current leaderboard and changing the prizes to packs, and 2. Other leaderboard opportunities for lower level players. For 1, I have no problem with increasing the size of the existing leaderboard and changing the prizes to packs, however the details of that will need to come from the community in the form of a DAO proposal/vote because the DAO is the one that holds the packs that would be given out as rewards. I understand there was a proposal in the past, however that was quite a long time ago and many things have changed since then to the point where I feel we need a new proposal. In that case it was the team's fault for not being able to act on that quickly enough, and I am going to try to make sure that doesn't happen in the future. For 2, I don't see a good way to add lower level leaderboards that makes sense. Players at lower leagues still get Glint rewards and earn rewards when they hit a new league/tier so there are always goals for them to achieve with rewards. I think this is very similar to most other games that I am familiar with and I don't personally see any issue with it or reason to change it.
Psilence** — **1/2/25, 5:49 PM
For point 2 I meant that instead of top 50, it should be top 100 or even top 150. The rewards that came from the LB of the now eliminated BSGD should be added to the ONLY LB that now exists. That would give more players the opportunity to achieve LB positions, make it more competitive, and restore the rewards that USED to exist and were removed without being replaced from BSGD. As it is right now you just took away those LB rewards, created a singular league, then didn't "put them back" on tail end of the only LB you left. Those rewards from BSGD should have folded into further LB prizes. I hope this makes more sense?
Yabapmatt _— _1/2/25, 7:06 PM
Yes it makes sense. I am not comfortable doing anything with leaderboard rewards without approval from the SPS stakeholders via a DAO governance vote.