Bracket IV Day 1 Grind & Feedback
Hello, there! @saydie here, playing Splinterlands everyday!
Today, I officially start playing Survival Mode under the Bracket IV. This is in response to this Post, asking for players to participate in order to test the liquidity bots in preparation for the implementation of Brackets in modern. For the players who will participate, they will be rewarded with an additional 250k Glint if they manage to play 250 battles with 50%+ win rate, but if under 50%, they still receive 100k Glint. Yesterday, I said that I did not expect to reach 250 battles, but after playing today, I think that it can be doable.
In this post, I want to share my Day 1 Grind progress and some of my early feedback.
Survival Bracket IV
Just like the previous survival season, all players will start in Wood Tier at 0 rating once they enter a Bracket, the same goes with me. Since this is still Survival Mode, +20 rating regardless of your winning streak, so it will take a while to get to a substantially high rating. That said, the liquidity bots that you will encounter in the Wood Tier are quite easy to handle, as they mostly use Foundation Archons and units, meaning that their stats are capped at Silver.
However, as soon as you reach Bronze Tier, this is where it starts to get difficult, because you will start to encounter liquidity bots with max-level Archons and units, meaning that they are capped at Gold. Given how easy the liquidity bots you encounter in Wood Tier versus the liquidity bots that you encounter at Bronze Tier, the difficulty progression of the liquidity bots has increased from easy to difficult real quick, so it definitely caught me off guard, especially since I am still not that familiar with Gold level meta, as I always play at max level.
Another thing that makes fighting the liquidity bot harder is that they play using all card sets, not just Modern cards. I even faced against a liquidity bot that uses land crafted cards in its battle history. Although we can also use Wild cards, the bots being able to play all sets places us at a huge disadvantage, and I could not see how the bots being able to play wild cards will be able to provide good data for modern brackets. I would rather prefer it if the team had just tweaked Bracket IV so that only modern cards can be used in battle.
For my first day of grinding Bracket IV of Survival, I played a total of 26 battles, by which I won 20 of them. That currently gives me a 76.92% win rate, which is still above the 50% requirement to get 250k Glint, though it will likely fall lower as I continue to play the Bracket through the season. I could still play more since I still have lots of Archons and units that I can use despite the losses that I have, but I decided to call it a day, so that I can write my feedback.
Bracket IV Feedback
- Survival Cooldown reduction is a big thumbs up.
I did not notice it yesterday, but when making my last post, but the cooldown of the cards that were defeated in battle seems to be significantly reduced for the stress testing period, which is great for casual players like me that does not have a large card collection. That is the reason I could say that playing 250 battles, even for someone like me, can be doable.
- Liquidity Bot difficulty progression sucks.
From liquidity bots playing only max-level foundation cards at Wood Tier, it immediately goes to max-level cards for the bracket, which is a bad difficulty progression. It's like after completing the tutorial, you're immediately facing off with the final boss of the game. At least try to diversify the level and the type of cards that the bot can use to provide a better difficulty progression, then only include those super-strong bots in matchmaking once the player has reached more than 1k rating, not when they are still at only 300 rating.
- Matchmaking time on Wood Tier was quick, but after that, matchmaking can take up to 2 minutes.
When I was still at Wood Tier, the matchmaking against liquidity bots was almost instantaneous, but after reaching Bronze Tier, the matchmaking time became inconsistent. Sometimes, I get a match within 30 seconds, but there are times that 2 minutes have already passed, and I still cannot find an opponent, whether it was another player or a liquidity bot. And that was still just the beginning of my grind. I wonder how long the matchmaking will be once I reach a much higher rating.
Closing
And that was my first day of feedback playing the Bracket IV of Survival mode. Will probably give you another update after a week of grinding. Hopefully, by that time, they will make matchmaking time quicker, because they have shown that it can be done when I was playing at Wood Tier.
Thank you, and see you on the next post!
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