With the football leagues which are on a 3-week break and crypto getting more interesting again, I had some spare time and opted to give Survival Mode in Splinterlands another chance...
Where I'm at on Splinterlands?
So I've been here in Splinternads since 2018, going from loving the game, playing it manually daily, to getting burned out and frustrated by the pattern of the constant need for the team to fix the economy while keeping the Dev paychecks coming which systematically came at the cost of fun and gameplay. With the introduction of Modern mode, I was pushed out as putting money in the game is pretty much a sure way to get crushed since cards are bound to lose all their value once they get pushed into Wild and I have no time or desire to manually grind the game daily. So I turned on a bot and have that play WILD with the card collection that I own. My main interaction with the game now is to stake the SPS that I earn and use the Glint that I earn to buy rewards chest selling everything that can be sold to cover the cost of the 2000 DEC Wild season tax. I also still participate in the Guild Brawl but it more feels like a task than actual fun.
This got my SPS Balance close to 400k and my card collection value at more or less ~2500$ (realitsically). I did manage to get 2 'jackpot rewards' in the form of one of the Black foil cards from the Fortune Draw & a Legendary Unbound card which I both managed to sell on the market and I cashed out the DEC swapping if for HIVE as I'm building toward 100k HP.
So basically, I'm at this point kind of hoping for some kind of asset price pump to further get out of Splinterlands as it got for beyond the point where I can ever enjoy it again fully as an actual game. I also stopped making content as I pretty much was repeating myself too much shouting off the rooftops that things like the crazy Time requirement, Crazy needed money investment, Crazy Pay2Win Mechenics, Crazy Complexity, Crazy Asset devaluations, ... all need a fix (See How This Could Fix Everything.)
Splinterlands Potential!
At the same time, I don't want to be so negative and see plenty of things where Splinterlands still is very impressive. The community remains great, the tech simply works and the fact that the game is still going and making profit is a massive achievement on it's own. Still though purely as a gamer, it is not the game that I really want to play or would get addicted on, while as an investor it's not the investment where I have the belief that it makes sense.
Getting Back in Survival Mode
When survival mode just launched, I played it manually. I quickly moved to just tunring on my bot and when the brackets were introduced I tried the ones with the manual play which just felt impossible as often the bots you perfectly countered my lineups and hours of grinding was not enough to get into higher ranks with each new season there was a reset so I pretty much had to start over. At that point I just quit Survival and didn't even bother to turn my bot on. I also haven't been keeping up with the news so I had no clue on any changes that were made.
Choosing a bracket was the first thing I needed to do to get back into it. I noticed that the SPS rewards were gone but instead it was Glints that only can be earned in Survival (which is not a bad thing as it cuts down the SPS inflation). It's also crazy to see how few players are actually doing Wild which kind of says it all. Since I'm not going to pay to have it automated, I just choose the only Manual Play mode that was available to me. I also was kind of confused by the cooldown reduction as from how I understand it, it kind of beats the point of the original idea behind survival mode.
I pretty much played for 1 hour starting from the bottom of the ranking only playing against bots who had weak decks and which each time take over 1 minute of waiting to get matched with.
I only used 1 deck over an over again to blast trough and move my way up to bronze earning some reward points.
After 90 minutes of this mindless grinding, I kind of gave up and I didn't really see the point of it also because the rewards were not instant or clear what I was actually earning in terms of Glint. However, the day after, I discovered this post Link) which dates back from march and created some clarity on the Survival Mode rework. It turns out that you need 100 Played battles to be ranked and (surprise surprise) they created and are priniting another Reward card for the format which you get at least 1 from if you play 100 battles and have a 50%+ win-rate.
This kind of motivated me to keep going and reach at least 100 battles in the hope they actually would become a more challenging and fun.
At the moment, I'm in Silver 3 and have 43 battles played somehow managing to lose one of them despite the really low opposition. I will see where it all takes me in the coming day but most likely, the participation in Survival Mode will be a 1-time-thing as there are just way more fun or profitable things to spend my time on.
Conclusion
As both a player and an investor, I continue to be quite cold about Splinterlands as so many key obvious flaws in the ecosystem need to be fixed before it can get some actual adoption. The most frustrating part of it all is that 95%+ of the work has been done and the tech works great with so much potential to actually have a game that people easily could come into and have a ton of fun with. Unfortunately, it's hard to see anything else than the next set to be released introducing more assets and more and more stuff in the game that keeps increasing the complexity instead of creating a game mode that fully cuts down do this focusing on pure fun.