Diving Into Survival Bracket Once Again

The stress test for the liquidity bot was still on going and as I believed this coming season will mark its seventh season. Still, it seems that the test will still continue for quite a while. The purpose of this test is to prepare the bots for the changes to come once Brackets was implemented in the Modern ranked because the Brackets will result for the human players to be separated into leagues, which will certainly result human player liquidity to decline, and bot will provide liquidity to fill those needs. But they can't just be there to provide liquidity, but also to provide decent gaming experience to players, meaning they are not just giving free wins, but were still manageable to defeat.

I was not able to play Survival for an entire month, so halfway last season, I tried to play Survival again although I do not manage to reached the minimum battles required to be eligible for the Glint incentive. Still, I was able to climb really far from where my account's rating used to be.

Similar to my previous plays, I once again chooses Survival Bracket IV, where players can choose up to gold level cards. To my surprise, not playing for two seasons has resulted in my rating being reset, so I am back to the Wood League. One of the reasons that I keep playing Bracket IV is to keep my rating, and now that's down the books, but still, I find it more important to play in this Bracket because the majority of the players will most likely play in the lower leagues, and for them to stay, it is essential that the game provide a good gaming experience to them.

Anyway, I started playing survival about halfway through the season, while also playing Modern Champion League, so I do not think that I will be able to complete the 250 battles required for the Glint incentive, but I can still play a hundred battles; that is the minimum required to be in the leaderboard, and if I manage to be in the top 25, I would be eligible to participate in the Ascension Tournament. I placed 14th, so the goal was reached, and the additional rewards were just a bonus.

At the same time, my alt also managed to place 86th on the Modern Champion leaderboard for an additional 50k Glint, so that was already 90k Glint in leaderboard rewards alone.

Now, when it comes to the bots I encountered, I started in the Wood League with the SLBB Bots that were using only foundation cards. I don't find any issues with that cause that could serve as a little tutorial or warm-up in case it is the first time that a player steps into Gold League.

However, the bot keeps using Foundation Archons even after I reached Silver rating, as if it will take that many battles for players to get used to the game, like a teenager still using a bike with training wheels.

As I play more battles, I eventually get matched with Archmage Bot and Komcbot, who mainly use common and rare modern Archons at gold level, but sometimes it will also mix in Foundation units. That is fine, I guess.

But there are times when they will use Foundation Archons, and because Foundation Archons are only capped at Silver level, the units that it uses will also be capped at Silver level even when it was using modern cards.

I have said it multiple times, and even in my feedback, that the bots at this level can still use Foundation cards, but should at least increase their level and even some of their stats to make them more competitive and not just become some throwaway teams.

And that was my last season's Survival mode experience. By the looks of it, there was really no noticeable change in the bot's behavior in my early grind in Bracket IV. I do not know if that was intentional or if there were just not enough players who stay within those ratings to provide enough battle data to improve the bots. But for me, if you make battles that easy, there will be ways that people use to exploit it.

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.