Some thoughts on Steemmonsters

The Steemmonsters battle had begun since a week ago and more than a thousand players had participated. There were many complaints over the week mostly on the ELO points system and unfair game matching. Steemmonsters is not perfect and we can be sure to see the developers making significant change to the current mechanism to accomodate players at different levels.

Here are some of the potential problems that I am seeing in Steemmonsters. What do you think?

Card balancing

There are some monster cards that are unusable regardless of the mana cap. Example, Giant Roc, Rexxie, Silvershield Warrior, Animated Corpse, and Angel Of Light. These cards are under powered and doesn't fit into any team. There is urgent need to relook at them and make them usable again.

Matchmaking at Leaderboard

Many lower level players are complaining about matching up with high level or max level cards that they had simply no chance of beating. This is happening because there is currently only one leaderboard. The SM team had promised that the upcoming tournaments will be level capped to ensure a fair play for players with different level of cards

Leveling of XP

Another major concern from players is the need to keep buying cards from the market to level up their cards. In future, we will be seeing leveling of XP for your monster cards by battling in tournaments. However, this needs to be implemented with care to prevent abuse and bot farming. Gaining XP through battles should also not be excessive such that it devalues existing cards.

Botting

The first script for automated battles had already been created by holger80. I had tried it out and it works pretty well. Now, we can start to see people creating new accounts and transferring their max leveled cards and bot the way up the Leaderboard. A preventive measure was pushed out by the SM team requiring all accounts to have a Starter pack before being allowed to battle. Hopefully more could be done to prevent botting.

Tournaments

According to SM roadmap, we should be seeing tournaments starting next month. This could just be a trial version before the prized tournaments are released. During testing at the testnet, we notice that the closing hours of a tournament is the most important period. This is the time when all players will battle to clinch that top few spots. Therefore, I hope future tournaments can consider the different timezone of SM players all over the world. It will be unfair for us Asian players if tournaments always conclude at our sleeping hours. I