Summary
This proposal seeks to improve Survival Mode in Splinterlands by introducing a three-month bracket-based Beta Test with percentage-based rewards. The goal is to create fair and engaging competition for players at all levels, increase match liquidity, and collect actionable data before deciding on permanent parameters.
Background
While Survival Mode is one of the most exciting additions to the game in recent memory, its current structure is not working for the majority of players. Issues such as low engagement, uneven competition, and unclear reward distribution have limited its potential.
The DAO now has an opportunity to test a bold bracket system that:
Aligns rewards with actual participation
Creates competitive and meaningful matches across all player levels
Creates a self-adjusting rewards formula that adapts automatically to player participation
Proposed Changes: Survival Mode Beta Test Brackets
Test Duration & Reward Pool
Run for 3 months (~6 seasons) as a Beta Test
850,000 SPS per season for testing
Bracket Structure
11 brackets ranging from Novice to Unlimited
Summoner caps, card level floors, and unique mechanics per bracket
Bot restrictions vary by bracket (E = Easy; A = Average; H = Hard)
Players must remain in the same bracket for the entire season
Cooldown Adjustments by Bracket Cap
Novice: 10% of max cooldowns
Silver: 25% of max cooldowns
Gold: 50% of max cooldowns
Percentage-Based Rewards Model
Instead of assigning fixed SPS amounts to each bracket, the entire reward pool is shared proportionally based on participation:
At season end, calculate Total Survival Mode CP across all brackets
Determine each bracket’s share:
Bracket Share = (Bracket CP ÷ Total Survival CP) × Total SPS PoolDistribute bracket rewards retroactively within each bracket based on tracked rshares (or equivalent metric) from matches
Example:
Total Survival CP = 500M CP
Bracket 8 CP = 100M CP (20% of total)
Bracket 8 receives 200K SPS from a 1M SPS pool
Advantages
- Eliminates arbitrary payouts – rewards scale with participation
- Encourages healthy competition – more active brackets earn more rewards
- Self-adjusting system – requires no ongoing micromanagement from the DAO
Clearer player incentives – rewards are tied directly to bracket activity
Test-driven inclusivity – given this is a test run, casting a wider net in the name of exploration is the name of the game
I'll support this proposal to give runway to Survival and because it can be a good testbed for some form of reintroduction of leagues.
While I do think matchmaking and better reward distributions can theoretically work without leagues, it would likely require a lot more participating players than we currently have. I also think that in survival we need league-based cooldowns for the mode to be playable (i.e. so low-league players don't lose their cards for an entire season), as suggested by this proposal.
Couple of additional thoughts:
(1) I think there are too many brackets and would give flexibility to the team to review whether this is the best distribution of brackets.
(2) Given that bracket shares will be based on participating CP, I think lower brackets will have very little SPS shares, potentially making them uninteresting for players to participate. I'd like the team to run some analyses to make sure this is the right reward calculation.
(3) Besides SPS, I think we need to implement additional rewards or "chase" opportunities in Survival in order for it to be interesting and get lots of engagement. Similar to Frontier mode, there could be the introduction of raffle tickets (per bracket) that give people some rewards that are unique to Survival (e.g. CC for a card that has Survival-specific value and perhaps limited value in other modes). A mechanic like this would absolutely drive interest in the mode, and the emissions can be controlled easily if it's based on a raffle system like what's in place for Frontier.
@davemccoy tagging you here, particularly on item #3 (bolded) above which, as we just discussed separately, I feel could be a a huge win for the mode (and could be applied to other modes as well) if done correctly.
love this idea as discussed on @thepeoplesguild If it doesn't work well it can easily be scrapped or tweaked
I’m against this proposal because the problem isn’t brackets or rewards .. it’s the format itself.
Survival Mode isn’t innovative enough to justify its existence. It’s just another variation of the same battle system we already have in Modern, Brawls and Tournaments, and it suffers from the same burnout effect: most players won’t manually play more than 10–15 minutes a day. That’s why Survival participation is so low.
Chainging rewards and brackets would only create artificial growth, attracting value extractors rather than genuine players. If we want a new format, it needs new mechanics .. not just reshuffled rules. For example, a dungeon roguelite structure (like Slay the Spire) could offer real variety and attract a different audience.
As it stands, Survival Mode feels like an over-engineered staking system with low manual engagement. Without radical innovation, tweaking rewards is just rearranging deck chairs.
@clayboyn & @bjangles,
Nice work on putting this together. I think the top priority is finding ways to keep survival mode alive. I think the potential is great and a good portion of the work has already been done.
A few thoughts:
Should we change 3 months (~6 seasons) to 6 seasons (~ 3 months)? We don’t want to end in the middle of a season.
Have we considered creating Wild Survival and Modern Survival (no bots)? Then we just have leagues within those (similar to your bracket idea). We already have the code for leagues so maybe the dev lift would be lighter than implementing brackets? And since this is a trial it might allow us to hone in on potential changes to leagues for the other modes.
I would like to see more in terms of rewards for survival (not SPS). I don’t know if the right answer is glint (maybe if the glint store had more frequent updates), survival mode reward cards, survival mode titles, daily chests, etc… things to make the mode more fun and engaging.
This is a proposal that came from the community after much discussion about how to fix survival mode. I've been quite busy working on other projects, so I'm not fully up to speed on this one, but for full disclosure if this proposal doesn't pass and no one puts up anything that does, I will be drafting a proposal for survival mode.
The proposal that I draft will be quite simple: Does the SPS DAO want to fund rewards for Survival Mode? I'll work out the numbers to keep things in line with what the team was doing for a specific amount of my time, likely a year. If that proposal fails as well the team will likely just sunset survival mode.
Just to clarify, the 850,000 SPS pool per season will be coming from the DAO I assume. And, it was mentioned at some point to have a mix of Glints and SPS as rewards to minimize the impact on the DAO, but I don't see it in this proposal. Could we reconsider for this test run of 6 seasons?
Odd. I thought cards couldn't be used in other leagues after losing.
it did used to be like that. It's been changed recently so they are only disabled from survival
Oh I must have missed that info. I've been away for about 2 weeks so must have missed the DAO proposal for that.
I personally didn't play because of the card cooldown period. Maybe it just needs to be made aware to everyone.
I've been more active in discord. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't have known. I don't know why the team don't announce positive changes to everyone. So many people don't use discord at all
Testing is good, data collection is good.
Designing based on testing is far better than an arbitrary decision on what "we think" will work
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7 out of 11 brackets for underleveled cards seems excessive, especially since a lot of us can manage a maxed CL deck. It would make more sense to give modern ranked leagues before you do it in survival mode. The noobs and casual players have Frontier mode. Survival is supposed to be for the hardcore and the best of the best.
Has the amount of dev work been discussed with the team? Changing the structure of rewards, cooldowns dependent on levels, floor levels for cards, storing CP for season etc, none of this has been done before has it? A question for the town hall I suppose.
I do want to see survival mode succeed but if the amount of dev time would be better used elsewhere in the game then perhaps it should not survive. I don’t want to be short sighted though and as a mode to give value to older cards perhaps it just something we revisit when dev time on adding things to attract new players is not as important.
Will there still be survival rewards to collect per win?
Will all my total win rewards only be accessible at end of 3 month season?
Good
Not a fan of survival mode in general, and these league brackets just make things more confusing to me.
Also, @clayboyn you use the term summoner instead of archon. I understand change takes time...
I have personally been making a concerted effort to use the term archon... just like I did with battle mage... just like I did with summoner... just like I'll do with whatever it's going to be called in 6 months...
That said I didn't write this proposal, I'm just running it for the community. I actually haven't even voted on this one. Not sure where I land on it, but it definitely needs work. The current version ain't working at all. If the DAO wants to try something different, cool... otherwise it's just going to get scrapped imo.
I don't mind scrapped. Right now I'm just battling vs. bots. 5 straight battles against bots. Survival off means renewed focus to put extra cards on lands (not for me) or more renting for new players. I'm only bothering with Survival Mode because if I didn't I would fall further behind all the accounts taking advantage.
I'm about to look at my season performance from last season to see how the new changes affected Survival payouts and performance with the more challenging champion bots.
We should give an extra % of rewards to the tiers that are manual play only. Not only do I believe manual play should be encouraged just in general, but it reduces the amount of SPS that is siphoned off by bot services.