New league format proposal for Splinterlands battles

The current format of the de-facto one league is casing several problems, like allowing bots with low-level cards to harvest large chunk of rewards and forces well playing gamers to face opponents with much higher leveled cards further in the season.

Several concerns and solutions expressed @j6969 in his post The Incoherent Ravings of a Mad Man. He also proposes a league format change based on the DEC value of the cards, which is interested and worth further investigation.

Over a year ago I have proposed a League Format Improvement modeled on European football leagues.

In a nutshell, the differences to current rules would be:

• a number of team in each league is fixed
• a player cannot move between leagues during the season
• at the end of the season, a number of top players in each league are promoted to a higher league
• at the end of the season, a number of bottom players in each league are relegated to a lower league

Based on the current number of active players (accounts) I think the following could be introduced:

Champions League

• 200 players
• bottom 20 are relegated

Diamond League

• 400 players
• top 20 are promoted to Champions League
• bottom 40 are relegated

Gold League

• 600 players
• top 40 are promoted to Diamond League
• bottom 80 are relegated to Silver

Silver League

• 800 players
• top 80 are promoted
• bottom 80 are relegated

Bronze League

• 1000 players
• top 80 are promoted
• bottom 160 are relegated

Novice League

• all the rest of the players
• top 160 are promoted

The above numbers would require further investigation and fine-tuning.

Benefits:

• With the above changes, I expect any starter pack only (spellbook) accounts would have a tough time to go over the Bonze league, and with a larger player base would be stuck in Novice, thus they would not be able to farm rewards in-proportionate to deck strength and value.

• Players would be able to compete for Silver League Champion title etc, making the game more entertaining.

• Developers would have more control over the number of rewards distributed each season

When the player base will get larger, each league can be divided to three sub-leagues, i.e Gold League to Gold I, Gold II, Gold III and the number of players (teams), promotions and relegations in each league adjusted.