I've Finally Decided To Play My Account Myself Again!

Back when the old league system in Splinterlands was abolished and the new ranked system was introduced, I got burned out pretty quickly. This certainly is only partly due to the actual changes, as I had been battling non stop ever since February 2020, but they did play a huge part in it. With the new rating system and especially with the removal of winning streaks in Champion League, I simply couldn't progress at all. I had started the season in Champion III and I finished the season in Champion III, basically at the rating that I also had started the season at.

As a result, I decided to take a break from playing the game. I didn't want my account to sit idle, though, so I looked around to decide what to do. I never really liked botting and after talking to some people, I decided to try and go the scholar route. Luckily enough, one of the best players in the game, @altumns, agreed to pilot my deck while I took a break. What was meant to only take a couple of seasons turned into a solid 6 months break from the game. While I was still active in Discord, taking care of my land, claiming my staking rewards, and everything, I completely stopped actually playing the game.

To tell the truth, this felt pretty damn good. Don't get me wrong, I still love Splinterlands and I still think that it's an awesome game, but after years of playing it every single day, it really felt refreshing to just step away for a while and simply take a break from everything. @altumns did an awesome job running my account and most achievements now logged in the Modern tab are his achievement:

I could never even hope to get remotely close to a rating of 7,600, let alone finish the season at first place. Nevertheless, all good things have to come to an end eventually. It started a few weeks ago during a vacation with the family. I'm usually getting up between 5 and 6 am in the morning and since my family wouldn't get out of bed for at least another 2 hours, I had some time to kill every day. So I started to play some tournaments again and boy, those have been fun. Ever since, I joined every single tournament I could and played all of them, mostly doing better than what I had expected. In the end, this motivated me to call the shot and start playing fully again for myself as of today.

I have no expectations of doing anywhere nearly as good as @altumns did and I will probably earn less because of it, but it is what it is, and in the end, Splinterlands is a game first and the entertainment I can get out of it is more important to me than the additional value I can earn by having my account played by somebody that's clearly better than me.

So looking at my options, I decided to at first start playing in Wild again. I'm pretty much out of the loop in terms of the modern meta, especially at the Champion level, and after the season reset, all the top dogs will be sitting at the same rating that I do, so competing there really didn't seem all that appealing. So I bought my Wild pass today and went off to the races. I started in Diamond 2 at 3,200 rating.

Luckily, I've gotten quite some Glint from the season end loot, so I shouldn't have to worry about my energy for the days to come:

To be frank, I expected to mostly play against bots in Wild but as it turns out, that wasn't the case at all. Going by how long people took to enter their teams, I'd assume that at least half of my opponents were playing manually. So it looks like Wild isn't that bot ridden after all. Or maybe it's just because it's the beginning of the season and I'm playing in mid Diamond. Either way, I had a lot of fun playing these matches but I also had to adjust a lot of my strategies. It's been ages since I've played in Wild and as it turns out, you can't just spam Yodin Zaku any longer and just steamroll everything your opponent puts up. At the same time, Tofu braved to be just as dominant in Wild than it is in Modern.

It took my 13 battles out of which I've won 10 before I was able to advance to Diamond 1:

There I was greeted by the new league advancement chests.

Really nothing to get excited about, but I still think these are a great addition to the game as they make advancing in leagues feel so much more meaningful again. Also, since they are separate for Modern and Wild, I think I'll at least try to double dip by playing some Modern later in the season. I'm really not sure if I will do better than I used to do before I stopped playing, but I'm at least going to give it a shot.

Anyway, I pushed on and after quickly climbing another 100 rating, competition become noticeably tougher rather quick. The number of viable decks in Wild is pretty crazy and while I couldn't climb as high as I had hoped today, I still had a lot of fun. It feels pretty good to be back to playing. In the end, I've won 29 of my 49 battles today, guess that's solid!

Let's see how long this new found euphoria is going to last, but for now I'm really looking forward to entering my battles myself every day once again!