The Splinterlands team is excited to announce an upcoming new gameplay format known as "Survival Mode" which will be a new ranked play format in addition to the current Modern and Wild formats. We believe this new format will have a major impact on the overall product and game economy and we are hoping to release the initial version within the next couple of months.
Similar to Wild format, any card in the game may be used (except for Gladiator cards without a Conscript Summoner or Ruleset), and the use of battle helpers and automation tools will be allowed as well. There is not currently planned to be any pass or payment required to participate. Survival mode will, however, include two significant changes that we expect will create a very interesting and unique gameplay experience:
In Survival mode, the cards themselves act as the "energy" that determine how many battles a player can play. Survival mode is less about choosing individual teams for each battle and more about overall collection management. It changes the collection strategy from "do I have one copy of each card I need at a high enough level?" to "how many copies of each different card do I need and at what levels?".
With only these two relatively small changes, Survival mode creates a completely different type of game that can appeal to a different type of player, and for the first time incentivizes players to get more than one copy of cards they need to win battles.
Nearly all other aspects of ranked battles will remain the same in Survival mode, including seasons, end of season resets, the rating system (except that there will be no win streak rating bonuses), matchmaking etc.
Survival mode will have an SPS reward pool of the same size and that works in exactly the same way as the reward pools for Modern and Wild formats. That means that players will win SPS from the reward pool for each win in Survival mode based on the reward shares they earned in that battle as compared to the total number of reward shares earned from all Survival mode battles over the past 15 days. The same calculations and modifiers/bonuses will apply to reward shares for Survival mode battles as for Modern and Wild battles.
There will also be leaderboard rewards for the players who have the highest ratings in Survival mode at the end of each ranked play season.
Initially, both the SPS rewards and the leaderboard rewards will be supplied by the Splinterlands company. After some time, assuming that the Survival mode format is well received and is adding value to the ecosystem, we hope that the SPS stakeholders will approve the rewards to be paid from the DAO or from the available remaining SPS inflation via a governance proposal vote.
Glint rewards are also planned to be added for Survival mode battle wins after a few seasons have passed. This will allow the team to review a couple seasons of real data and design the payouts to ensure that reasonable amounts of Glint are awarded in a fair manner.
The primary difference between Survival mode and the other ranked play formats is that when a card dies in a Survival mode battle, it goes on cooldown for a period of time, meaning that it cannot be used in ANY other battles (including Survival, Modern, Wild, Tournaments, and Guild Brawls) until the cooldown period is over.
Please note that cards on cooldown from a Survival mode battle death will still be able to be transferred, delegated, listed for sale or rent, and put to work on land. The existing cooldown indicator will be used to indicate if a card is on cooldown and for how long in the collection and market detail screens.
Summoner cards will be considered to have died in a Survival mode battle if their team loses the battle. In the case of a draw, neither Summoner will be considered to have died.
The cooldown time for a specific card will be based on the card's rarity, level, and foil, and will be calculated based on the following formula:
base_cd - (base_cd - max_cd) * bcx / max_bcx
Where base_cd is the base cooldown time for a 1 BCX card of that rarity and max_cd is the cooldown time for a max level card of that rarity, both of which can be found in the following table:
Please note that a 1 BCX card will use the Base cooldown from the table above and will not use the formula. Additionally, Gold Foil cards will have half the cooldown time of the equivalent regular foil card.
For example, a 300 BCX regular foil Common card would have a cooldown of 180 hours or 7.5 days:
360 - (360 - 120) * 300 / 400 = 180
A 5 BCX Gold Foil Epic card would have a cooldown of 78 hours or 3.25 days:
(240 - (240 - 72) * 5 / 10) / 2 = 78
A new type of potion will also be added to the Splinterlands shop with the release of Survival mode that will revive a card that has died in a Survival mode battle, removing its cooldown so that it can immediately be used again in battles.
Each Revival potion charge can be used on a single card and will remove its entire cooldown, no matter how long that cooldown is. The Revivial potions will be purchasable with DEC, Credits, or Glint like the other potions, and their cost is still TBD.
Players will be able to apply Revival potions manually through the card details screen by selecting the card or cards on cooldown they want to revive and clicking a button to use the required number of Revival potion charges. There is also planned to be an option to use Revival potions automatically, in which case the system will use available Revival potion charges to remove the cooldown on cards that die in Survival mode battles automatically, requiring no action from the player.
We fully expect that, after reading this, the player community will have tons of ideas and suggestions on how this new type of battle format can be expanded, changed, and made better. Indeed, the Splinterlands team has had many such ideas during the design process as well. While we have listened to and noted all of the ideas that have been presented so far, we have purposely kept the initial version of the new format as simple as possible in order to be able to get it out for players to try as quickly as possible.
We can discuss and debate indefinitely about how it will go and what will work and what won't (and there were many such internal discussions), but ultimately there's no better way to find out for sure than putting it out for our players to try in a live environment. Assuming the new format is well received, we fully intended to iterate on it and incorporate player feedback to continue to improve and expand on it over time.
Some ideas that have been discussed internally that we may look to add in the future are:
Additionally, things like card cooldown times on death, reward amounts and structure, revival potion mechanics, etc., are all subject to change both before and after the initial release as we evaluate the new format and work to incorporate community feedback and improve upon it.
Survival mode will be all about collection management. The best player with only one copy of each card may get easily passed in rating and rewards by a player with hundreds of copies of cheaper cards who can play many more battles while the first player is waiting for their cards to come off cooldown.
We are extemely excited to see what interesting and unexpected strategies come out of this new format and we expect that it could spark a significant increase in market sales and rental volumes, especially for some of the cheaper but powerful cards, of which players may now want to acquire multiple copies.
Finally, we want to remind everyone that we will be holding our monthly live Town Hall event later today - Thursday, November 21st, 2024 - at 7:00 PM ET / 00:00 UTC in the Splinterlands Discord server, as well as on our YouTube and Twitch channels, where we will be discussing the new Survival mode format and taking questions from the community.
For those of you who are not able to make the live event, please feel free to post your questions or comments about Survival mode or anything else in the #town-hall channel in the Splinterlands Discord server and a team member will do our best to respond as quickly as possible!
