The issue is really that we've been totally swamped with the CA release and the new player experience stuff we want to have ready for our marketing efforts that we haven't yet had much time to work on Survival mode. I think we all agree it needs some work and we never expected it would be perfect right out of the gate.
I suggested hiding the opponent names initially when some of these issues first surfaced and I got pushback from some players and people internally who thought that was all part of the strategy, so we didn't make any changes until we had more time to really gauge community sentiment on that one.
As for the rentals, I guess I don't understand why more people aren't doing that if it's so profitable. Ideally we would see a lot of bots start renting large amounts of cards and competing until the average earnings dropped and/or rental prices increased. That was kind of the idea of survival mode - to add more value to the cards so that rental and purchase volume would increase.
I'm hoping the revival potions will help add more battle liquidity and we're going to try to get those out asap after CA.
Ultimately, though, it will be up to the token holders to decide if they want to provide SPS rewards for the mode going forward and what changes they want to see for that to happen. We hope to be able to start working with the community on that very soon.
RE: Surviving the Survival Mode?