Taking On The Survival Challenge Again

Once again, I take on the Survival challenge by playing Survival Mode this season to help provide battle data to improve the liquidity bots' competitiveness for the future implementation of Brackets into Modern Format. Quite ironic how Modern was supposed to be a "Human-only Mode", but we lose so many players that we needed to rely on bots so that we can play the game. Hopefully, when Brackets were introduced in Modern, we can start to see some players return to the game as they can now play in the leagues that they are comfortable with.

Unfortunately though, I will not be able to required 250 battles to be eligible for the additional Glint Reward for participating in the test. As of the moment, I have only fought in 130 battles, and there's only like a day left before the season ends. That said, there are some things that I have noticed while playing against the liquidity bots that I would like to share in this post.

Similar to the previous season, I decided to play at Bracket IV of the Survival Mode. Even though players can now choose between Brackets I-V so that they can play using the max potential of the deck that they're using. Another thing that the team changed this season is that they made Brackets I-V to have only access on Modern Cards, meaning that aside from certain rulesets, both the players and the liquidity bots can only use modern cards in battle, which is one of the things that I pointed out during the test last season. It just doesn't make sense that wild cards are being used on a test that was supposed to be implemented in Modern Format, where Wild cards cannot be used.

Anyway, the reason that I decided to enter Bracket IV instead of Bracket V, which uses max-level cards, even though I play at the Champion League at Moder Format, is that my soulbound rewards collection was still at Gold League level at most and that I don't play an entirely max-level deck to begin with. Aside from that, I also want to test my theory that the results of the previous seasons' stress testing are compromised because of the use of Wild cards, and once the liquidity bots lose access to them, they will give a far inferior performance compared to last season. So the way that I could prove this theory is by playing the same bracket and comparing my performance from the previous season and this current season.

This is how I performed last season.

This is where I currently am this season.

As you can see, I have only played half of the battles that are required to be eligible for the Glint rewards incentive, and I have only achieved half of the reward points that I had the previous season. But if you look at the leaderboard standings, I have risen from rank 21 to rank 15, and there was a chance that I could still push for a higher rating with the remaining time till the end of the season. Regardless, being on the leaderboard will give me some copies of Darkguard Hellion, Leaderboard Glint Reward, and an Ascension Token that will allow me to compete for the next Ascension Tournament to potentially win more Glint. So it's not that I completely wasted my time playing the Bracket.

But what I wanted you to really look at was my win rate as well as my max win streak from the previous season and the current one. Can you see the difference? From 71.2% last season, my win rate has now been boosted to 85.61%, and from the max streak of 13, I suddenly got a max streak of 54.

If that doesn't tell how much weaker the liquidity bots were this time, then I don't know what will be. And my deck is basically the same as the one I used last season.

So why did I fail to reach the minimum amount of battles? It's because I started to play Survival halfway through the season, so that only gives me a week to play all 250 battles, which can still be possible if the team has kept the same reduced matchmaking time as last season. But unfortunately, it seems that we are back to the long matchmaking time period prior to the bracket testing. My guess is that because the team has opened other brackets for testing, the liquidity bots have also been spread out more to provide liquidity to other brackets, unlike the previous season where liquidity bots were concentrated in just a single Bracket. Aside from that, when I battle against some bots, it takes them quite a while to submit their team, which makes the battle take longer.

So yeah, the liquidity bot has been dumber now that they lose access to wild cards. Maybe they will be better next season, but that long matchmaking time might prove to be a hurdle that results in me losing interest in playing enough survival battles. Hope they can do something to make that more consistent so as not to eat players' time.

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.