Surviving the Survival Mode?

Are you a Survivor?

Well if you are tryhard65 and dratek, the first one related to moneymaker8425 on discord and Hive account@annunaky at hive and discord, certainly thinks so. However how long, time will tell until we plug this leak. Sorry for being direct, but beating around the bush is not my strong suit. Its been ages that Hive account@vugtis been telling me that he is not the highest earner in the survival mode in Splinterlands, where bots are allowed and there is no ECR. However, you have the depth in your card deck that you use to that play as long as you can. The depth of your deck is the ECR. Clearly, Vugtis, jeffopenscards, and neal has the deepest depth in their card holdings.

But, they are not the winner! Thanks to Hive account@beaker007 and blockchain technology, every data is public, we just have to fetch it the right away. So we fetched the SPS earning data from season 157 for all accounts that played the survival mode. Here is that data.

Well once you get me any data in a table. I can do magic with it! I think I have proven this over and over again :)

How Much did they earn again?

Well in season 157 alone, in 15 days time these two account earned 165,695 SPS! Well without any context that is hard to know if that is more or less. So let us compare how much did the others earned during the same 15 days.

284 total accounts played survival mode last season

That alone is not very good news. I don't have the Modern and Wild data for the season 157 yet, because that is a lot of accounts, but we can get an idea from the daily battles listed in Peakmonsters dashboard:

On a typical day, Modern and Wild typically gets about 25K battles each, so 50K battles total between the two. Survival gets 2K to 4K. So you get the idea, it is about 1/10 the size of the players if we take battle numbers as a guide. So let us see the rewards for survival.

These are rewards in SPS for the whole season 157, 15 days.

There are 284 players only in survival mode, sharing 1.2M SPS. The median player gets 1104 SPS, and tryhard65 tries very hard, so he doesn't get 65 times the median, he (sorry his bot) gets 75 times the median! There is a 10 bonus you dummy, just because he tries hard! Get it?

But how much better is he from Vugtis?

Well I got you covered! You want to see a magic plot. I got it!!

People who are with the game for a while knows that some of the 'deepest card decks' are owned by some of these names:

The plot above us a cross plot between total SPS earned vs SPS earned in the survival mode only. The X=Y line means that the accounts which falls on that line plays only survival. Those below the line earns from survival, wild and modern. Notice, how much of an outlier the top two accounts are compared to the reputed players with large decks.

Here is the histogram of all players with variable bins and a x-axis that is logarithmic. This allows me to plot the entire distribution in a relatively tiny space. Again P50 or median earners earn about 1100 SPS. The x-axis covers 5 orders of magnitude!

How do we fix it?

Clearly the largest deck holder who gets to number #1 spot in survival leaderboard can't possibly earn number 25th! That clearly means the leaderboard system in this game mode is broken. What happens is as vugtis starts playing people usually gives up games against him, because now they can see the opponent. So vugtis wins and climbs up the ladder very fast. However, once he get very high, there is no match up for him, so he just sits there without any games. While the other dudes tries really hard and drops down, plays game after game and drops. They win in shear number. Not to mention they rent cards for cheap and sells the SPS.

So here are the potential fixes

Stop revealing account names, we had it hidden before, why did we change it? This change was STUPID
Stop allowing of renting in survival mode, this is supposed to be about depth in the deck
Make reward pool smaller or make a max reward threshold, say 40 SPS, can't earn more than that per win

Suggest some other changes if you want in the comments. Here is my take, when this proposal comes to the DAO for the reward pool, it is NOT passing unless these or some other changes are implemented. Also I strongly suggest to Hive account@davemccoy is to consult with the player and seek a solution ASAP. This exploit must stop.