Bracket IV: After Fighting A Hundred Battles

Aside from providing plenty of battle data, playing a hundred battles was also the minimum requirement to be qualified for the Survival leaderboard, and so far, I am currently at rank 40 of the leaderboard with a total of 104 battles at 1300 rating, or the minimum rating for Silver II league. There's still about a week before the season ends, so my rating can still either go up or down, same with my leaderboard ranking, but at this point, I will likely be able to do 250 battles without much of an issue. And that was also thanks to the waiting time before a bot opponent has been significantly reduced.

When it comes to the liquidity bots, I think that there are at least two different types of bots that were running in the bracket. We have the usual bots with random names and no guild affiliation, which I believe was run by Archmage, and there were bots with 'SLBB' names before them, which I think may be run by the team.

When I first started my battles in Bracket IV until I got out of the Wood league, I only encountered the 'SLBB' bots, and they often used Foundation Archons and units, so it was pretty easy to win against them. Just a good enough warm-up to pass Wood League.

However, as soon as I got out of Wood League, I was immediately faced off against an Archmage bot, which completely threw me off because not only did I face a max-level team for the Bracket, they also played a lineup that was completely consist of Wild Cards. And the bot has completely crushed my throwaway lineup. But rather than get disappointed by my loss, I got questions about why bots play Wild lineups cause I do not think that it will provide good data for Modern Bracket. After all, they won't be able to play those cards in modern. The same thing goes for us players, who can also play with wild cards, and can create synergies that would not be possible in modern.

In my opinion, having both the liquidity bots and players be able to play wild cards has skewed the results of this testing, since they are not using the right cards. Like, the Archmage bots may perform very strongly during this test, but they ended up playing incredibly dumb once they lost their access to Llama Kron and Byzantine Kitty.

So, I was of the opinion that the team should tweak the mode for the Bracket to only allow modern cards for use, and it seems to be the plan for next season, based on the things I read on Discord.

As I continue increasing my rating, I noticed that the 'SLBB' bots have started to play with Non- Foundation Modern teams, and also at max-level for the Bracket, but still not optimized enough to provide a decent opponent, and they are still throwing those Foundation lineups from time to time. I also noticed that none of the 'SLBB' bots that I encountered have a rating below 1k, while the Archmage bots have a 1k+ rating.

Between the two bots, the 'SLBB' bot's difficulty is almost non-existent, to the point that it's giving me free wins, while the Archmage bot's difficulty goes from "They're okay" to "Too hard to beat", but that is because they can play a lot of wild cards, most of which I do not have, but their actual difficulty can also be much lower once they lose their access on those Wild cards.