How to Optimize ECR in Splinterlands (As of August 2022)

Greetings Players of Splinterlands,

ECR (Earning Capture Rate) is a function that is often misunderstood in Splinterlands. Many people believe that it is the key to optimizing their earnings when in reality it plays only a small role as long as a few key criteria are met.

In this article, we'll explore how ECR works and how it impacts your earnings. We'll also provide some tips on how to optimize your ECR for maximum earnings.

How to think about ECR

Players care about ECR in order to try and maximize rewards. ECR Impacts both your Ranked Battle DEC Rewards as well as your Daily Focus RShares and Season RShares that earn you chests.

The natural assumption is that you want to keep your ECR rate high in order to maximize earnings. Counterintuitively, this assumption is essentially FALSE.

You should think of ECR more like a recharging pool of potential. If you use it, then you've captured the potential. If you let it sit, then you've wasted the potential. But if you use it TOO much, you may ALSO be wasting potential.

Because the pool recharges continually until full, letting the pool sit FULL is actually a waste. On the other end, since the pool starts to drain quicker once drained below 50%, letting the pool get too low is also a waste.

Ideally, you keep the ECR pool between 50% to 99% at all times to make sure it's full potential is leveraged while not letting any go to waste.

How ECR Works in Practice

Basic ECR Functions

• Every battle costs you 1% of your current ECR (So your ECR after a battle is Current ECR - (Current ECR * .01))
• You gain ECR at a constant rate of about 1.04%/hour (25% every 24 hours)
• Once you drop below 50% ECR at the start of a battle, you lose ECR at a rate of 5% of your current ECR (a massive earnings punishment).

Implications of ECR Functions

To fully use your ECR while keeping it as high as possible: You'd play 25 evenly spaced games across 24 hours, i.e. You'd play a game every ~58 minutes.

You could think of this as playing 25 100% ECR games/day. Expressed as an ECR Point system, you could spend 2500 ECR points a day this way.

But what happens if you play more often?

Say you play twice as many games, this would have you playing ~50 games a day. What happens to your ECR?

Because ECR regenerates quicker than it is spent, ultimately your ECR balances out based on how often you play.

Playing ~50 games a day would balance out to an ECR of about 50%. This means that every game, you're earning 50% of what you would if your ECR was 100%.

Does this mean you're earning less in total though? No. Because you're playing twice as many games.

So 50% ECR times 50 games/day means that you're still spending about 2500 ECR Points per day - exactly the same as if you played 25 games/day.

The only time this becomes a problem is if you play more than 50 games per day on average. At that point your ECR drops below 50% and you start buring 5% of your current ECR rather than 1% - tipping the scale toward burning faster than you can regenerate easily.

So the ideal rate of play in Splinterlands to fully leverage ECR is anywhere between ~25-50 games/day if done consistently. Any amount within that range is essentially equal in terms of ECR optimization on the whole.

Burning Down ECR

You may realize that it looks like you might be able to spend more ECR with a higher play rate... but this only works in the short term. Essentially, for the life of the account it only works once.

If you start with 100% ECR but play ~50 games/day, you will be able to spend more than 2500 ECR points per day to start.

For one season, you'd be able to spend and average of ~2835 ECR Points per day while you're burning down your ECR.

However, by the end of the season, you'll have reached the ECR balance point and the next season would go back to ~2500 ECR points per day.

If you tried to let it recharge back to 100% to start again... then you'd have days without Spending ECR and your average overall daily ECR Points would go down as well.

So ultimately, there's no long term way to be able to spend more than ~2500 ECR points per day.

Comparing ECR Utilization

This chart shows how different play frequencies impact the overall utilization of ECR by an account.

There are a few key takeaways that it shows:

1. Playing less than 25 games a day clearly leaves ECR under utilized.
2. When accounting for multiple seasons, anywhere from 25-50 games becomes equivalent aside from the first season if starting with 100% ECR.
3. Even slightly playing more than 50 games/day sees a DRASTIC reduction in ECR utilization. Both in the first season attempted (starting from 100% ECR) and even further seen in any subsequent seasons.

So What DO We Optimize to Maximize Our Earnings?

As long as you're playing between 25-50 games per day on average and not starting battles when your ECR is below 50%, any further attempts at optimizing ECR are a fools errand when it comes to earnings.

You can gain minor boosts in the short term, but over time, it all balances out to be equal.

If you want to optimize your earnings in Splinterlands you should instead focus on optimizing for the other variables in the Rewards Calculations.

1. Rating (which has the highest impact). This is most influenced by your overall win rate.
2. Card Ownership - Starter cards are a massive punishment on earnings when used. Work toward minimizing how often you need to use them by buying, renting, or being delegated cards to replace the starter cards.
3. Win Streaks - These grant up to a 50% bonus per battle max on earnings.
4. Cards with Bonuses - Gold Foil, Legacy, and Promo cards all grant a bonus to your earnings each time they're used in a winning battle. In total these can add up to a max 70% bonus per winning battle.
5. Guild Bonuses - Joining a guild can offer a nice consistent boost to earnings in every win depending on the guild lodge level.

Wrap-Up

There you go! Those are the basics of how ECR works in Splinterlands and how you can optimize it to maximize your earnings.

Remember, focus on playing between 25-50 games per day on average, and don't start battles when your ECR is below 50%. Other than that - Happy Battling!

Have questions? Still confused? Drop a comment or join the discussion in our Discord!

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