Will Try To Play Survival Again

It's been 3 months since I stopped playing Survival Mode. Even though I see it as a good alternative to playing Modern Format, like when I use up all my energy or have played enough battles to claim all my daily rewards, and I am still itching to play some battles, as well as when I want to play with my Wild cards again without the need to pay for a Wild Pass. The problem is, finding a match takes too long, which, for a manual player like me, is a huge hurdle, especially when the cards that I lose in the battle take a long cooldown before I can play them again.

But with this season, I will once again try to play Survival mode, and this is to answer the call for players to test the bots in preparation to bring Brackets into the Modern Format.

Next season, which is about one hour and thirty minutes from now, there will be a stress test on the liquidity bots in Survival Mode Bracket 4. It is one of the "Human Only" brackets, so the use of bots, battle helpers, or other assisted play tools is not allowed. As for why this Bracket was the one they chose, I think it is to allow more player participation, while also playing at an advanced level with cards at high enough levels, where they can access most of their abilities, that being the maximum Archon levels are in the Gold league. At the same time, it is still forgiving to players since they can still use level 1 Archons, so if they know that they would not be able to win the battle, they can at least minimize the cards that will be for cooldown. Unlike brackets 5 and 6, the card cooldown in bracket 4 is also much shorter.

So, from playing Bracket 5, I will have to downgrade to Bracket 4 if I want to participate in the stress testing. That will likely reduce the Glint that I earned compared to Bracket 5, but the amount of Glint I earned by playing Survival is mainly just a bonus from having the opportunity to play some extra battles. That said, the requirement to play at least 250 battles within the season seems to be too much for me. Playing 100 battles alone is difficult, given the long matchmaking time. Yeah, they might increase the number of bots, and with more players participating in the stress test, the matchmaking time might become more tolerable, but that still won't cover the cooldown of cards. And there are not that many players with tons of card collections, particularly the Archons, and casual players like me will be less likely to participate in the testing, not to mention, only the players who play 250 battles can receive the 100-250k Glint incentive, so that already leaves out casual players. Does their help not matter? I think it will be better if they could give Glint a bounty for every 50 battles instead.

At the same time, I'm still not sold on liquidity bots as a way to compensate for the lack of matchmaking battles after we had Brackets on Modern. For many seasons now, there have been instances where the liquidity bots have been turned off. It usually took place at the beginning of the season, which may not be that noticeable since there are more players playing at the start of the season and likely have tons of Glint to spend on chests that will give them more energy. But sometimes, the liquidity bots also get broken when a new ruleset is introduced. When Brackets comes back into modern that is heavily reliant on liquidity bots, what will happen to the matchmaking when they suddenly get turned off?