Speaking of return, Survival mode has been resumed starting this season after it was paused during the second half of September last year. This was made so that the team can implement various changes in the mode that they think are necessary, after looking at the participation data, and taking community feedback into consideration. In this post, I want to share my thoughts on the changes that have been made to Survival mode.
For those who may have been new to the game or have been on hiatus for the past year or so, Survival mode is a battle format that allows the use of all Splinterlands card sets, similar to the Wild format, but it does not require a season pass and does not have an energy cap. The caveat is that regardless of whether you win or lose, when a cards are defeated, it will go on a cooldown and cannot be used for a certain amount of time. This goes for both Card units and Archons. This means that to be able to compete in this mode, it is much preferable to have multiple sets of decks. While the previous version of the mode looks to be very competitive, there are various exploits in the mode that resulted in unclear incentives and low engagement in certain tiers, and to address those issues, various changes have been made to Survival mode. This changes were:
This change has already been implemented even before the last time that Survival was paused, but what this change do was to encourage more participation, since players do not need to worry that the cards they use in other modes to have cooldown. Like it could be a problem if someone entered a tournament and suddenly cannot use their card because it was defeated in survival.
It has been a long time since the league caps were removed in all ranked formats, but with the updated Survival mode, they introduce the mode bracket system which is similar to a league cap. Here there are 11 brackets from novice level to champion with their own Archon level cap and players can even select between Active brackets for manual players and Automated bracket that allows the use of automation tools, so long as it was an approved third-party automation service.
I tried to play at the bracket V of survival and I immediately lost, I did not expect that the bots will use max level cards right away when the minimum Archon level in bracket V was at gold level.
For each season, there will be 850,000 SPS that will be allocated for Survival mode, but this rewards are not fixed in each bracket, but rather in the player's win rate and overall participation to ensure that rewards will reflect where players are actually playing. Because of this rewards will only be paid at the end of the season, which I think is great so that players cannot liquidate their earnings right away.
With the brackets system now implemented, cooldowns are also now scaled by the brackets to improve the availability of the cards as well as the match flow. Originally, the cooldown of the cards were based on their rarity which goes like this:
Cooldown formula:
| Rarity | Base lvl Cooldown | Max lvl Cooldown |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 360 hrs (15d) | 120 hrs (5d) |
| Rare | 300 hrs (12.5d) | 96 hrs (4d) |
| Epic | 240 hrs (10d) | 72 hrs (3d) |
| Legendary | 120 hrs (5d) | 48 hrs (2d) |
Aside from that, what affects the cooldown of the card is their foil type, so a gold foil will have a shorter cooldown period than its regular foil counterpart, and so goes with black foils. And now, the cooldowns are also based to the brackets where they were played.
It was not implemented yet, but soon, the team will introduce Phoenix Ash Potion, which can be used to reduced the cooldown period of a defeated card in Survival mode. If I remember it correctly, the idea with this potions is that they can be crafted using land resources, and if that was the case, I think it will be great for adding more utility to land resources.
Since I do not have a huge card collection, my participation in Survival mode will be limited, but I am still quite excited from the changes that was made into the mode, particularly the Bracket System, since defending on how it plays, it is possible that it could also be implemented in both modern and Wild, and perhaps we can also see a non-botted wild mode through brackets.
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.
All the image that I edited here belongs to Splinterlands.
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