hmmm I think it still needs time. It's only been like one season or two since the change. People don't like change especially when it's negatively impacting them so I think the response was not that surprising. The change definitely did have more of an impact towards casual players but it's hard to say that they are dead. One of the issues is that there's more people with either owned maxed out cards or they are renting max out cards. We don't have enough new players or casual players to match with the casual players hence why they have a negative experience fighting all these maxed out decks. I think the system was designed so people would eventually just battle to where their deck would hit a 50% winrate and then they would have to upgrade to climb higher. I guess people are uncomfortable with that 50% winrate but I also think that would be good as it would help people push to upgrade their decks. Where they can truly shine should be the tournaments but problem with tournaments I feel is that their are people using battle helpers. I have no proof of this but it does seem sketch when seeing the lineups and winrates of certain players consistently performing.

What I think we can do in the future though is just to have each league have their own mode. Like max modern, gold modern, silver modern, bronze modern and of course the wild half as well. Then people can just choose where they want to play and of course the rewards from max modern will be more than bronze modern. It should scale based on the cost to own a deck for a certain league.

I feel this would help a lot but the only problem is we lack the playerbase to do this or I guess we could have Splinterlands nonspellbook bots to fill the match liquidity.

Let's give it a bit more time though. I still think it's a step towards the right direction just potentially needs some amendments from the team but they need more data. I don't think 1/2seasons is enough to go ahead and make another change but that's just my opinion.