I Gave Up Playing Survival

About two seasons ago, we got the Survival Mode resumed after it was paused to work on some major changes, such as the introduction of the Bracket System, which is like the return of league caps, and a new system of distributing rewards, which takes the players' collection, win rate, and overall participation. They also adjusted the cooldown of the defeated cards to make it more in line with the Bracket that the player has chosen to improve the availability of cards and improve the match flow.

I see all of this as a positive change to the mode, and has encouraged me to try Survival Mode even though I do not have a big enough card collection to reach far in Survival. I just thought it would be nice if I could play a few more battles after I finished playing in Modern. But after playing a season and a half, I decided to stop playing Survival for good.

Same as the previous season, I chose to play at Bracket V of the Survival Mode. 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. This is also one of those under the Active Brackets, so players cannot use any automated tools to help them play the game. There are some liquidity bots around, but they are only there to provide matches.

I thought this would be good since even though other players are not around, you can still play your battles and have some fun, and I did have some fun last season. Even though it took me a whole season, I was able to make it to Silver II rating, as I had to wait for my cards to be in cool-down multiple times before I could play again.

I only had a few matches with other players, and I say that is the most fun I had, since not only did I beat my opponent, but I was also able to reduce the number of cards that they could use, which I think was the very essence of having Survival Mode.

But oftentimes, the battles I had were mostly against liquidity bots, which was given due to the low number of players. But unlike the previous season, where the liquidity bots were set at the minimum Archon level for the Bracket, they were reverted back again to playing only max level cards with all the cards, including the reward cards, which I'm not even halfway to maxing yet, so immediately, I get to be at a disadvantage. Not to mention that the liquidity bots played with ghost cards, so they will never run out of cards, no matter how many battles they have.

With the previous season, the bot feels to be not made to win a match in general but to slowly deplete you of your card collection, but with this new season, it feels that they were made to completely crush the player as soon as they start playing the mode. May not have that much of an impact for those with big collections, but it will definitely affect players with small collections like mine.

I may be able to solve this by adding more cards to my collection through either buying or renting cards, which will also improve my Rshares, thus increasing the rewards that I will get, but here's another problem,

Matchmaking is Egregious!

Despite having liquidity bots providing liquidity, it still takes a very long time to find a match. Even when I was the only player that was currently playing in the Bracket, it still took a long time before I got matched with a liquidity bot; if not, I would fail to get a suitable match. Unlike bots or Scholars, I had a life, and I could spend that time more productively in other things than playing Survival as it is. The reason people play a game is to entertain themselves during their free time, and waiting in front of the screen to find a match is the very opposite of that. So now, not only will you have to wait a very long time to find a match, but you will also be likely to get crushed by max-level bots. If that's the case, it would be better to just play on an Automated bracket where I could use automated tools to play for me. But since I also don't use or own automated tools, my only option now is to completely stop playing Survival Mode.

With the current state of how Survival is run right now, I do not think that any casual player with a small collection will find it fun or rewarding to play the mode. First, they really need to improve the matchmaking time so as not to make it a staring contest, and for the liquidity bots, at least mix them with different card levels and different card collections, even if that's only the lower ratings, to at least make it fun, and maybe players will try to have a bigger collection to further advance in the mode.

Thank you, and see you on the next post!

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.