Hello there.
My second season of playing in Splinterlands' Survival format is over. I have to say that this season was harder than the last. I think I won less battles, and lost my core teams early. Going back to my previous post about my early season mishap, where I faced max or high level teams in my first 10 battles and lost my teams. My monsters were able to revive in time for a late season push and battles.
I queued up on the second to the last day of the season, thinking that I will be facing players with incomplete teams or those just trying to squeeze out some rewards with their remaining collection. But I soon found out how wrong I was. My first battle was against a max level Lobb Lowland. The one after that was against a max level Kitty. I was starting to think that waiting to play near the end of the season was a mistake.
Even if this is the case, I had no choice but to continue playing because of the upcoming end of season; where monsters will be revived anyways. I got lucky with a surrender from the opponent, but faced another high level team afterwards. After this happened in 3/4 games, I pretty much knew I was in for a bad time. In all my games after these I only faced a level 1 team in 1/19 battles, and 8/19 battles were against max level teams.
I was hoping to get out of Bronze, or maybe even just Bronze 2, but what eventually ended up happening was me stopping prematurely at 400 rating. One reason of stopping was to not risk going below Bronze 2, and the other was because I ran out of Archons that quickly. Some of my battles at the end were probably winnable, but I was pretty much playing on tilt.
My second Splinterlands Survival run started with a beatdown, and ended with a whimper. I am at a loss on how a lot of these strong accounts are still this low in Survival. In one of my battles, I noted that in their last 5 battles they were using low level teams, but in my battle they whipped out a max level team. When I checked their history, they just started playing again at that moment. They must be like me and started playing for the EOS as well. It was against merlinsmatrix.
When I checked their match history after EOS though, I was surprised at their battles. In their last 25 viewable battles, they won 1 out of the 25, and was back down to 260 rating. So I guess for accounts like these that have max level cards and a large card pool, and I'm just assuming here, they use a bot to play their survival battles, and play until all their cards are dead.
I guess that explains how all these powerful accounts are still down in Bronze in Survival. Maybe my mistake was playing on the second to the last day instead of playing on the final day. If a lot of accounts do this, I can have a field day facing these level 1 teams. I guess I'll try that out this season.
I'm not calling anyone out or faulting those that do this. I understand that it is another form of min maxing, and a way to earn more rewards. I do wonder if wouldn't it be better to combine a few of them and try winning more, compared to going 1/25. I guess that is for them to find out. To make myself feel a little better, here are some of the battles that I did win.
To document some things that I need to remember or test in the future, here are some of my learnings during my second run of the Survival format. The second season has been a lot of painful lessons though, so hopefully things are better this season.
Play at the last day of the season, never at the second to the last day.
It is possible that a lot of the strong players do the strategy of starting their bot 2 days before EOS, and play until their entire collection dies out. This can be well into the last few hours of the season. I can try and take advantage of that by playing against them while they're doing that.
Another thing I need to find out is if they do this at the first half of the season as well. I'll probably check on merlinsmatrix's battle history throughout the season to check on this. They might play on day 1-5 of the season, wait for their low level monsters to revive, and play on the last 2 days of the season again. If I can time these correctly, that might help me win more games.
The liquidity bots have a timer.
In my runs throughout the season, I got faced with the liquidity bots a good amount of times. While I usually win against them, they were no pushover and usually took a few units down with them. I'd rather play against those level 1 teams instead and come out unscathed. What I noticed is that I am almost always sure to face a strong liquidity bot when the finding match timer reaches 2 minutes without me getting matched with an actual player.
So if I want to avoid those strong liquidity bots, I will just cancel my matchmaking, and just look for a battle again. This resets the timer and I can increase my chances of matching up against an actual player. This can be tedious though, so I will probably only play when I am not busy.
That is it for my learnings in the second half and second run of Survival. Don't hesitate to let me know what you think, and if you have suggestions for improvement. And as always, these are Not Financial Advice, and Do Your Own Research.
If you want to start playing Splinterlands, you can use my link:
Splinterlands Referral Link