Survival mode has finally returned two seasons ago, and it has come with many changes to make the mode fairer such as the introduction of a new Bracket system and realigning the distribution of rewards based on the player's win rate and overall participation. They also adjusted the cooldown of the defeated cards to make it more in line with the Bracket that it is played to improve the availability of the cards for a better match flow. In paper, I find all this changes to greatly improve Survival Mode, and can potentially attract players from other modes to play in it, specially since even if the cards were defeated in Survival, they can still be used in the other modes, including brawls and tournaments.
And because of that I decided to try playing Survival for a season to see whether it was a mode that I can participate despite my current card collection, and to know if it's a mode that can be fun to play or worth playing.
Survival Mode Experience
Last season, I selected Bracket V to be the bracket where I will play. It has the Archon level between Max gold league to Max level cards, and since I play with max level Archons, I see this bracket as the appropriate one to participate in. Also this is an active Bracket, which means that aside from the liquidity bots, all the other players in this bracket were playing manually.
Since I do not properly played Survival the season that it was started, I do not know that once the new season starts, I will go back to the initial rating of 260. At first I though I will de-rank just the same as with other leagues, unless a player switches to a different Bracket. Does not matter that much during that time, since I still need to grind my way up in rating, but now that I fell back all the way from where I stated, I got the same feeling when I play a game and lose the saved game data.
In terms of card collection, I had very few cards to use in Survival. Could have more, but I have burned most of my spare Chaos Legion and Rebellion Soulbound rewards for Glint for better or for worst, so you can see that I do not have a very competitive deck. Still, I was able to compete in the mode with a pretty decent win rate, even when fighting against other manual players.
As for the liquidity bots, since it was still in the lower league, the liquidity bots that you will encounter were at the minimum Archon level for the Bracket, and most of the time, they will play a very inefficient team, which is not really made to win a match, but rather to slowly deplete the collection of the player. After all, the liquidity bots play with Ghost cards so they can play unlimited battle.
But on certain occasions, the liquidity bot will throw at you a very efficient team, that could knock out your entire team by surprise. And I had fell for it many times.
At the end of season, I ended up playing a total of 87 battles with 70 wins, giving me a 80.46% win rate and a rating of 1,400, which is within Silver II rating. I'd say that my rating was pretty much what I expected, considering my card collection. But after getting my rewards, I told to myself "What a let down."
With the new rewards system for Survival Mode, a player will only received his SPS rewards at the end of the season, and what I get for wining those 70 battles were only 164.458 SPS.
Looking at the top battles in Silver, one could easily earn twice of that SPS earnings, playing the same number of battles. Some might say that it's fine since Survival is like a bonus mode to get more SPS without consuming Energy. But here's the problem with that,
MATCHMAKING TAKES TOO LONG.
Unlike before, battles already took too long to finish due to the addition of tactics in the game and that does not really bother me because it makes the game more interesting, but to find a suitable match every five minutes if not more does. Unless, you have some kind of staring fetish, I don't think that anyone will find it fun to wait five minutes to find a battle. Unlike bots or Scholars, I had a life and I could spend that time more productively in other things than with playing Survival as it is.
The weird thing is that there are liquidity bots, but even when you were the only one playing in the bracket, matching with them was still difficult and I always often ended up not finding a suitable match. And if players continue to have difficulty finding matches, then they will eventually stop playing in the mode or rather switch to the automated mode, where they could use automated tools.
Closing
And that was my Survival mode experience so far. In terms of making it worth playing the mode, I do not think that the team can do much of it, since it will heavily rely on the player's collection, but in terms of encouraging players to play the game, I think that the first step is reducing the matchmaking time, so that manual players can find a match every minute. After all, the game is supposed to be fun and not tedious.
Thank you, and see you on the next post!
Splinterlands Free Assets
This were assets that I edited using Adobe Photoshop and more of this assets were available in this post for anyone who likes to use them.
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