Are you a Survivor?
Well if you are tryhard65 and dratek, the first one related to moneymaker8425 on discord and @annunaky at hive and discord, certainly thinks so. However how long, time will tell until we plug this leak. Sorry for being direct, but beating around the bush is not my strong suit. Its been ages that @vugtis been telling me that he is not the highest earner in the survival mode in Splinterlands, where bots are allowed and there is no ECR. However, you have the depth in your card deck that you use to that play as long as you can. The depth of your deck is the ECR. Clearly, Vugtis, jeffopenscards, and neal has the deepest depth in their card holdings.
But, they are not the winner! Thanks to @beaker007 and blockchain technology, every data is public, we just have to fetch it the right away. So we fetched the SPS earning data from season 157 for all accounts that played the survival mode. Here is that data.
Well once you get me any data in a table. I can do magic with it! I think I have proven this over and over again :)
How Much did they earn again?
Well in season 157 alone, in 15 days time these two account earned 165,695 SPS! Well without any context that is hard to know if that is more or less. So let us compare how much did the others earned during the same 15 days.
284 total accounts played survival mode last season
That alone is not very good news. I don't have the Modern and Wild data for the season 157 yet, because that is a lot of accounts, but we can get an idea from the daily battles listed in Peakmonsters dashboard:
On a typical day, Modern and Wild typically gets about 25K battles each, so 50K battles total between the two. Survival gets 2K to 4K. So you get the idea, it is about 1/10 the size of the players if we take battle numbers as a guide. So let us see the rewards for survival.
These are rewards in SPS for the whole season 157, 15 days.
There are 284 players only in survival mode, sharing 1.2M SPS. The median player gets 1104 SPS, and tryhard65 tries very hard, so he doesn't get 65 times the median, he (sorry his bot) gets 75 times the median! There is a 10 bonus you dummy, just because he tries hard! Get it?
But how much better is he from Vugtis?
Well I got you covered! You want to see a magic plot. I got it!!
People who are with the game for a while knows that some of the 'deepest card decks' are owned by some of these names:
The plot above us a cross plot between total SPS earned vs SPS earned in the survival mode only. The X=Y line means that the accounts which falls on that line plays only survival. Those below the line earns from survival, wild and modern. Notice, how much of an outlier the top two accounts are compared to the reputed players with large decks.
Here is the histogram of all players with variable bins and a x-axis that is logarithmic. This allows me to plot the entire distribution in a relatively tiny space. Again P50 or median earners earn about 1100 SPS. The x-axis covers 5 orders of magnitude!
How do we fix it?
Clearly the largest deck holder who gets to number #1 spot in survival leaderboard can't possibly earn number 25th! That clearly means the leaderboard system in this game mode is broken. What happens is as vugtis starts playing people usually gives up games against him, because now they can see the opponent. So vugtis wins and climbs up the ladder very fast. However, once he get very high, there is no match up for him, so he just sits there without any games. While the other dudes tries really hard and drops down, plays game after game and drops. They win in shear number. Not to mention they rent cards for cheap and sells the SPS.
So here are the potential fixes
- Stop revealing account names, we had it hidden before, why did we change it? This change was STUPID
- Stop allowing of renting in survival mode, this is supposed to be about depth in the deck
- Make reward pool smaller or make a max reward threshold, say 40 SPS, can't earn more than that per win
Suggest some other changes if you want in the comments. Here is my take, when this proposal comes to the DAO for the reward pool, it is NOT passing unless these or some other changes are implemented. Also I strongly suggest to @davemccoy is to consult with the player and seek a solution ASAP. This exploit must stop.
How much did they spend to earn those SPS rewards?
About $35
Per day right? Tryhard65 rents 36k DEC/Day
So that is $525 Spent ($35 * 15) to earn $850 in SPS from that Season
Still = $325 Profit!
You got it!
Thank you for the information AZ. I am glad you have data to make the points you are making, and I'm also thrilled you are offering solutions too. This is a good start.
I will follow up as well with not only you, but with as many people that will talk to me about it. Including all the people involved that you mentioned in particular.
Thank you Dave. I think Vugtis will appreciate a solution, he is certainly the most impacted. From my point to view not revealing the name is an easy solution because we had it for ages. I have no idea why we changed it.
Rental is another issue, especially very cheap rental.
I am sure others can come up with many better solutions. I just put together whatever came to my mind.
And we thought season rentals would reduced the exploit on 2 day rentals with renters min-maxing the use of energy but now we had survival with accounts that not only can play infinitely but also snipe- renting the cheapest cards in the market to get far more SPS n just one season than what a casual renter gets in playing for a year. I'm all in to survival being for players who owned cards.
Yes, more and more that is becoming the consensus. No rental in survival.
Great way how you presented the data, its important to have it fair and fun. The dao needs to take over rewards eventually.
One addition there are more then 284 players in survival mode.. this data set i based on the persons that are on the leaderboards (Bronze/Silver/Gold/Diamond and Champion) of season 157.
Yes. Good point. At the same time if they are not on the leaderboard they are not earning. So for this discussion it's okay.
Vugtis was asking for an API endpoint that you used to collect this data. Can you provide a link an a short description under this comment so that we keep a record please?
No problem... There is not one simple api but here is the process i followed:
start = https://api2.splinterlands.com/season?id=156
end = https://api2.splinterlands.com/season?id=157
https://api2.splinterlands.com/players/leaderboard?season=157&format=survival&leaderboard=0
Put all balances in a dataframe (table)
There you have it, for ~290 accounts it took about 1,5 hours to complete (there is backoff strategy from splinterlands to not overflood it with request)
@vugtis or others.. If you would like the python scripts i can setup a repository to download it...
Thank you. This post is good enough for now. I just wanted to know if there is a simple endpoint to get this data. The answer is NO. xD
We will continue to investigate next season as well
Thanks for bringing it up. I hate when that name shows up in battles :)
At a first glance, no rentals in survival looks like a good solution. Also not showing opponent names prior to battle is good.
I didn't like the change in the beginning, but got used to it really fast. Let's bring it back.
Throttling (?) rewards feels counterintuitive for a mode that should reward deck depth and ownership.
I think if we do the first two, containing rewards may not be necessary. Then it will be about balancing the reward pool relative to other modes
Thank you for your witness vote!
Have a !BEER on me!
To Opt-Out of my witness beer program just comment STOP below
View or trade
BEER.Hey @sc000, here is a little bit of
BEERfrom @isnochys for you. Enjoy it!Did you know that <a href='https://dcity.io/cityyou can use BEER at dCity game to buy cards to rule the world.
View or trade
BEER.Hey @sc000, here is a little bit of
BEERfrom @isnochys for you. Enjoy it!We love your support by voting @detlev.witness on HIVE .
Thank you for your witness vote!
Have a !BEER on me!
To Opt-Out of my witness beer program just comment STOP below
View or trade
BEER.Hey @sc000, here is a little bit of
BEERfrom @isnochys for you. Enjoy it!Learn how to earn FREE BEER each day by staking your
BEER.View or trade
BEER.Hey @sc000, here is a little bit of
BEERfrom @isnochys for you. Enjoy it!Learn how to earn FREE BEER each day by staking your
BEER.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.
I think hiding the names just like we had before, solves a lot of the problems.
Rentals are a different beast. Damn if you block them, damn if you don’t. Vugtis understands this market well and he is against it in survival for sure.
I personally find rentals to be cumbersome. However I have plenty of cards.
I still don't understand why more people aren't doing what tryhard and dratek are doing. I don't know how much they are spending on the rentals, but they must be pulling in a good amount of profit per season if the numbers you're showing are correct. Seems like a big arbitrage opportunity no one is taking advantage of so I must be missing something.
Because normal player can't!! get to this cheap rentals. I spent hours trying to find keyla under 30 DEC, mission impossible. While some have 30 copies of it for 5 DEC. So either there is a rent sniper in play or they hang on rentals 24/7.
This is really affecting the ranked mode's as well.
In addition, once one aquires a cheap rental he can renew for as long as he wants. Until removed from owner. And as Azi sayd, alot of lazy renters.
I checked.
They are renting about 35K DEC worth of cards.
Trouble is they can do this because there are still lot of "lazy renters". Aggy is one. He hasn't changed his prices in ages until last week. He was giving away CL max summoners for 10DEC :)
There are more like that. Cheap rental are not universal. They also require automation. Publicly available rent bots disappeared. So many common people can't use them to snipe cheap rentals.
Ahh ok, that makes sense. It's important to understand the underlying issues and address those rather than the symptoms of those issues. Perhaps we could put a time limit on rentals where they have to be re-listed or something like that. I'm open to ideas!
Here's another idea: punish losses.
I.e. consider if rewards were only given at the end of the season. Stack increases with each win, and decreases with each loss. The more wins >50%, the higher the rewards. So it rewards a combination of win rate, as well as quantity of wins. However a player who's <50% with a massive number of battles wouldn't necessarily reap the highest rewards.
It discourages fleeing and discourages de-ranking for liquidity and exploiting weaker opponents.
This idea has my stamp of approval.
I like this idea. @yabapmatt what do you think? Any idea how long it will take to code?
I tried the survival mode in every season, but I quickly loose my summoners so I don't show up on your charts...
Survival mode killed a bunch of modern players, our guild had at least 4 players stop playing once the survival mode started.
I am OK with getting rid of survival mode all together.
On the data of season 157 you earned very close to median earnings :)
I think that if they stopped renting in survival mode that could actually be a good thing for the rental market. I feel like it would increase the price of specific cards. To be fair, if people are botting, do they really care who their opponent is? Maybe I read it wrong though.
I am quite certain we will be able to implement this soon.
In fact a substantial number of players are playing manual at critical times. Also bot can read opponents names if they are revealed and can be programmed to throw the match if the opponent is Vugtis. Its easy to do that.
Oh really? I guess I didn't realize that. I mean it makes sense, but it seems like a lot of variables to keep track of.
The good part about this is, most SPS goes to the big accounts, and I don't think they will dump it on the market but yes this has to be fixed, your solutions are a good start for sure and I think a 40 SPS max is already high!
This is not true all the time. Some of the largest accounts do not sell, but others do. They sell a lot, and they do it constantly.
Rentals for survival is clearly not working as intended when someone can use it to outperform the big card holders this much. Ideally we would like to "let markets market", but the rental market clearly isn't factoring in survival correctly. And then even if it did, then rentals for normal players would rise dramatically, which has its own problems.
Thanks for presenting the data this clearly!
Let markets market NEVER worked for Splinterlands.
I tried Survival mode a few times. But I did not get far. It seems that either I was not good enough or did not have enough cards to be really competitive.
I agree this would be more fair to all users.
Survival mode is about depth in your card deck, if you don't then there is no point to play that mode
Thanks for putting me in there! My deck has no depth at all, so I only play at the last day of the season :-D But thanks for putting me in there! Feels kind of cool, even though I'm the bottom 😝
I've heard from many sides that Survival is a huge SPS leak, and hence not good for the overall economy. Similar to the former voucher system maybe? Just diluting without adding significant value?
Currently it is 1.2 M SPS pool for a season. Large or small you decide.
I am glad you like your name to be there. I am towards the bottom myself.
1,200,000 per season is 2,400,000 per month is 28,800,000 per year. Total supply of SPS is 3,000,000,000. So round about 1% of the total supply is distributed like that, per year. I think it was something similar with Vouchers, but I don't remember. The drain seemed low, but the damage was significant due to that.
I have the feeling that it is large. But at the same time, if a company is diluting their shares by 1% per year, that's not much. Undecided then.
Well there are numerous ways how this can be handled.
IMO, either kill the rents for survival or only one copy of rented cards per unique card name can be played in survival.
Great post Azi!
Thank you!
Fixing this is really easy, with no dev work.
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 44/64) Liquid rewards.
I'm all for disabling rentals in Survival mode.
I think that view is gaining consensus for survival mode
!PIZZA
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@sirsmokesalot96(9/15) tipped @azircon (x2)
Come get MOONed!
!PIZZA
Great post azircon.
Whilst disabling rentals for survival is one way to do it, what do you think of reducing SPS rewards for each rented card in deck (-10% per rented card). Similar to what it is for using starter cards in the other modes. That way it still makes rented cards have some additional use but for those using purely rented cards their rewards will be massively reduced to the point where it wouldn't be profitable to do so.
Thanks for sharing! - @azircon
