The current state of survival "competition"

[skrts]

Les be real,
survival may have an active player base, but the competition is the deadest its ever been.

The conclusion ive arrived to is a sad one, well, at least if you play like me

Survival is no longer competitive

Its just not, lets look at the facts here,

- last seasons stars have yet to arrive
- every season or 2 they change what leaderboards you can get a star in
- the spawners have a hard cap, which in theory shouldve worked in balancing, but rly just forces everyone to buy cubits or sell ssvs for cubits to directly convert into money
- party merging is dead (tbf this is not the best solution, but one of the only ways to counteract direct cubit or ssv injection into money)
- and lets be honest, competition is literally just IRL trading now (usd > cubits > money) (usd > keys > ssvs > money)

Um I will say tho, honestly its pretty chill for people who dont gaf about competition, the collections is pretty fun to grind theoretically if people grinded those, uhhhh, warp home is pretty nice.

Focusing on the positives, survival is a nice server to just chill on, but any type of serious competition is dead in the water imo, its just too boring or expensive, but at the end of the day, if theres a problem there needs to be a solution right?

YEAH LOL NO THERE IS NO REAL SOLUTION

"Solutions" (these are not good solutions, or even valid ones infact, im just tryna illustrate how beyond help this server is)

increase spawner cap - does nothing, may increase earnings overall, but then money is worth LESS than before, and parties with more access to alts wins

remove spawner cap - economy becomes like season 4, multitrillionaires, infinity arms race of alts and farms, will require people to buy alts and have party members with access to more alts to win (aka, small parties are ggd, since theres an alt limit, and obviously there will be a lot of bypassing with vpns and that)

allow merging - this seems to be the most realistic solution, but just creates a new problem in its place, you never know when some party can just band together with a couple power solo or small parties to easily win at any point, causes too much drama and chat cancer, boosting allegations, etc

remove cubits from webstore - this wouldve worked if it was done as soon as cubits in the webstore was implemented, which was actually a suggestion by one of our patrons in the patrons chat in the discord, cause even the rich lads feared the implementation of an influx of cubits in the system. Alas now, we cant do this as theres already too many cubits running around, and as well lmao lets be honest manacubes not gonna remove it, it generates them too much income.

REMOVE COMPETITION ALLTOGETHER - this would actually be a decent idea for a server with competition for the sake of competition, remove all incentive for season rewards, stars, all that, begone. however this is very unrealistic, cause then the server will probs die, and be more boring

NOTE: if u dont play competitively, please refrain from saying "just dont play competitively and have fun", this is a post for the competitive side of survival, we understand ur pov, but please, shh.

P.S. if you have any real suggestions, put them down, id like to see how this cubit farming subserver can be fixed

 

[Tytler]

I agree with a lot of this to be honest, like last season yes it was less pay to win and more who can afk the most alts and inf chests and farms, but you don't need to buy 300 cubits or buy 100+ crates and sell them to win. I'm not really sure what would solve the problem, I will say the spawner cap brings pros and cons, it brings a balance to the afkers, but it also promotes p2w and ruins the priv grinders for those who want maximum profit but also mobs to grind for mob kills. Removing cubits from webstore would bring a lot of benefit to p2w strats, but they won't get rid of it cuz of profits. I think no matter what they do pay to win in some form will usually rain on top. If it would be alts, buying cubits/crates, buying inf chests, or anything.

 

[Sonic_Raptor]

Increased or no spawner cap would be nice. Probably more realistic is a continued nerf to afk2win in favour of more active grinding. Another possibility is more core progression and making it harder to reach max cap if spawner caps are to remain. The spawner crafting for the new Olympus reset looks extremely promising for this but we will have to see how it works as a mechanic.

Another factor we've got remember about the caps is the lag prevention. No one who has only played this season really knows about lag or lag intensive farms. Most farms from this season or the season before would probably be classified as a lag machine or a crash chunk because thats literally what they could do to some players. Whether this was fps or tps depends though but the point remains, this seasons lag has been amazing compared to previously.

As an opposing point of view for why spawner caps is good and what can be done to improve them is that they have created the need for ingenuity but still not to the degree that Nasa, Hyrule and Grounded went to last season. The restrictions have led to players developing and pushing other forms to make money such as the emergence of the SSV trading which is apart of what really controls the economy right now. I think something more important then spawner caps themselves are hopper restrictions as they restrict Chest farms which are the antip2w as they allow players without inf chests or autocraft to compete to a similar degree as those who do have access to those materials. In regards to some of the "creativity" that has been displayed for farms this season we can look at Superfly's post here. What needs to be done is to make Redstone or the pay splits for different types of farms such as squid more prevalent so differing tactics are more viable.

Another good point for not raising the spawner cap is that currently on both Skyblock and Islands there are both spawner and hopper limits like survival, however there is 0 restrictions currently on how many islands you can own so with a hosting service you can easily run 60 farms. This has resulted in a blown out economy and Skyblock once again not having a season with staying power.

Finally the accessibility of being able to make money with farms being so simple this season is extremely important and its been both frustrating and great to see more players having access to a lot of money. Its resulted in a lot more inflation then previously but has probably been a benefit to people outside of the top 2 pages of ballot last season who actually controlled every aspect of the economy to their pleasure. As seen by JDU and the Hoe's raising cubit price purely to beat the other for petty reasons.

I'm not sure which is best and I think the fact competition has died is perhaps more a reflection on mid to late game progression and something we as a community should be figuring out viable suggestions for to make it more interesting/fun/grindy. I built over 20 farms last season 12 of which were the standard 12 or 4 chunk designs and whilst it was a heap of fun optimising them and building them and designing them I have always said that AFK2win and p2w are the things I dislike most about our economy.

Sorry if this is kind of a random splurge of things but I liked your post Skrts I don't think most of your suggestions are very viable. Merging is shit for a bunch of reasons but I won't go into too much more detail about it.

 

[Sonic_Raptor]

- last seasons stars have yet to arrive

Currently crying.

 

[skrts]

Increased or no spawner cap would be nice. Probably more realistic is a continued nerf to afk2win in favour of more active grinding. Another possibility is more core progression and making it harder to reach max cap if spawner caps are to remain. The spawner crafting for the new Olympus reset looks extremely promising for this but we will have to see how it works as a mechanic.

Another factor we've got remember about the caps is the lag prevention. No one who has only played this season really knows about lag or lag intensive farms. Most farms from this season or the season before would probably be classified as a lag machine or a crash chunk because thats literally what they could do to some players. Whether this was fps or tps depends though but the point remains, this seasons lag has been amazing compared to previously.

As an opposing point of view for why spawner caps is good and what can be done to improve them is that they have created the need for ingenuity but still not to the degree that Nasa, Hyrule and Grounded went to last season. The restrictions have led to players developing and pushing other forms to make money such as the emergence of the SSV trading which is apart of what really controls the economy right now. I think something more important then spawner caps themselves are hopper restrictions as they restrict Chest farms which are the antip2w as they allow players without inf chests or autocraft to compete to a similar degree as those who do have access to those materials. In regards to some of the "creativity" that has been displayed for farms this season we can look at Superfly's post here. What needs to be done is to make Redstone or the pay splits for different types of farms such as squid more prevalent so differing tactics are more viable.

Another good point for not raising the spawner cap is that currently on both Skyblock and Islands there are both spawner and hopper limits like survival, however there is 0 restrictions currently on how many islands you can own so with a hosting service you can easily run 60 farms. This has resulted in a blown out economy and Skyblock once again not having a season with staying power.

Finally the accessibility of being able to make money with farms being so simple this season is extremely important and its been both frustrating and great to see more players having access to a lot of money. Its resulted in a lot more inflation then previously but has probably been a benefit to people outside of the top 2 pages of ballot last season who actually controlled every aspect of the economy to their pleasure. As seen by JDU and the Hoe's raising cubit price purely to beat the other for petty reasons.

I'm not sure which is best and I think the fact competition has died is perhaps more a reflection on mid to late game progression and something we as a community should be figuring out viable suggestions for to make it more interesting/fun/grindy. I built over 20 farms last season 12 of which were the standard 12 or 4 chunk designs and whilst it was a heap of fun optimising them and building them and designing them I have always said that AFK2win and p2w are the things I dislike most about our economy.

Sorry if this is kind of a random splurge of things but I liked your post Skrts I don't think most of your suggestions are very viable. Merging is shit for a bunch of reasons but I won't go into too much more detail about it.

oh i know they arent viable dw lmaooo, the point of those suggestions is to demonstrate how nonviable everything is
except maybe the spawner cap thing, but if you remove taht, you need to remove alt limits, cause then again, BIG PARTIES GO OOGA BOOGA

 

[MomGetTheLantern]

- last seasons stars have yet to arrive

 

[Sonic_Raptor]

oh i know they arent viable dw lmaooo, the point of those suggestions is to demonstrate how nonviable everything is
except maybe the spawner cap thing, but if you remove taht, you need to remove alt limits, cause then again, BIG PARTIES GO OOGA BOOGA

Part of the issue I guess is hopper restrictions limit farms more then spawner limits. Spawner limits are frustrating for QOL and economy control but creativity with farms is blocked by hoppers. What we have to remember is we had like 5-6 hopper optimisations last season and I'm pretty sure Survival's large farms are the reason you can only place one spawner per chunk now. Also with no limits big party go ooga booga cos claims.

 

[-Peter-]

Les be real,
survival may have an active player base, but the competition is the deadest its ever been.

The conclusion ive arrived to is a sad one, well, at least if you play like me

Survival is no longer competitive

Its just not, lets look at the facts here,

- last seasons stars have yet to arrive
- every season or 2 they change what leaderboards you can get a star in
- the spawners have a hard cap, which in theory shouldve worked in balancing, but rly just forces everyone to buy cubits or sell ssvs for cubits to directly convert into money
- party merging is dead (tbf this is not the best solution, but one of the only ways to counteract direct cubit or ssv injection into money)
- and lets be honest, competition is literally just IRL trading now (usd > cubits > money) (usd > keys > ssvs > money)

Um I will say tho, honestly its pretty chill for people who dont gaf about competition, the collections is pretty fun to grind theoretically if people grinded those, uhhhh, warp home is pretty nice.

Focusing on the positives, survival is a nice server to just chill on, but any type of serious competition is dead in the water imo, its just too boring or expensive, but at the end of the day, if theres a problem there needs to be a solution right?

YEAH LOL NO THERE IS NO REAL SOLUTION

"Solutions"

increase spawner cap - does nothing, may increase earnings overall, but then money is worth LESS than before, and parties with more access to alts wins

remove spawner cap - economy becomes like season 4, multitrillionaires, infinity arms race of alts and farms, will require people to buy alts and have party members with access to more alts to win (aka, small parties are ggd, since theres an alt limit, and obviously there will be a lot of bypassing with vpns and that)

allow merging - this seems to be the most realistic solution, but just creates a new problem in its place, you never know when some party can just band together with a couple power solo or small parties to easily win at any point, causes too much drama and chat cancer, boosting allegations, etc

remove cubits from webstore - this wouldve worked if it was done as soon as cubits in the webstore was implemented, which was actually a suggestion by one of our patrons in the patrons chat in the discord, cause even the rich lads feared the implementation of an influx of cubits in the system. Alas now, we cant do this as theres already too many cubits running around, and as well lmao lets be honest manacubes not gonna remove it, it generates them too much income.

REMOVE COMPETITION ALLTOGETHER - this would actually be a decent idea for a server with competition for the sake of competition, remove all incentive for season rewards, stars, all that, begone. however this is very unrealistic, cause then the server will probs die, and be more boring

NOTE: if u dont play competitively, please refrain from saying "just dont play competitively and have fun", this is a post for the competitive side of survival, we understand ur pov, but please, shh.

P.S. if you have any real suggestions, put them down, id like to see how this cubit farming subserver can be fixed

I completely agree, im not a huge grinder on survival but even i feel like there is fuck all to do. The cubit economy is either you have stupid amounts (gate) or you have none theres no balance anymore.

 

[MomGetTheLantern]

What needs to be done is to make Redstone or the pay splits for different types of farms such as squid more prevalent so differing tactics are more viable.

I agree with the idea of creating more ways to reach Rome, but I don't feel like it should be done with pay 2 win spawners like squid spawners etc. In my honest opinion there need to be multiple "hustles". U could see an afk farm as a hustle and you could see grinding a job as a hustle. There can be many different hustles. This way there's never one hustle that's gonna make people get top on the leaderboards. I currently don't really have any solid ideas on additional hustles that could be implemented tho.

 

[Sonic_Raptor]

I completely agree, im not a huge grinder on survival but even i feel like there is fuck all to do. The cubit economy is either you have stupid amounts (gate) or you have none theres no balance anymore.

I feel like there is probably more to do individually than last season. Quest shop would be nice. It does all relate to grinding though. Once again big building parties have found themselves running out of claims / options other than merge or build elsewhere.

 

[awesomeboy__]

ayo 4 month non p2w maps, no cubits or ssvs sounds very nice. will never happen though but if it does it'll get a lot of players imo

#addnonp2wsurvival join the gang

 

[Katiekanji]

At this point, it feels like there is no reason to compete and even if you are competing and are on the p top, it’s not as big of a flex and people don’t really care. There are no payouts and the stars from last season still haven’t been given out, there’s no motivation to compete. I may not be qualified to say any of this as I joined this season, but from what I’ve seen with the changes from what others have said about previous seasons, it just feels “dead” and like the competition aspect has been forgotten about. I’m not sure about removing cubits altogether because I like the idea of people who may not be able to afford things like ranks or crates, being able to get a rank or crate through gameplay. Honestly, I don’t know the best solution, but something needs to change to hype everyone up. Personally, atm I only get on to talk in chat and interact with the community or if someone needs me on/opening gkits. It’s quite sad and not as fun to play anymore imo :/

 

[skrts]

Idk what's going on in this thread, but to those concerned about last seasons's legend stars:
View attachment 43150

TLDR: eco broken no one knows solution the end

 

[Fluffy-hime]

As one of the “big competitors” on survival, I felt it appropriate to give my 2 cents here as well.

At this point, survival’s competitive scene has stopped being a competition of who has the best skills for making money quickly, and has now become a competition of who is more willing to pump their irl money into this game. I’m not trying to say that’s a bad way of playing this server, because we all have our own ways to play that we find enjoyable, but it certainly allows for the competition to quickly get out of hand.

Some would say that the survival competitive scene is not just about the money, and I would totally agree. In the past, there have been leaderboards for best looking parties, which is something that cubits/cash can’t be used on to increase your position on that leaderboard. There have been /quests leaderboards, which involves actually doing activities in survival that don’t require money. There has also been a leaderboard for the most mob kills, which also doesn’t require cubits/cash. There are numerous other leaderboards, top souls and top /jobs level to name a few, that don’t require cubits/cash, but have not been awarded legends stars in the past.

So there is plenty of competition to be had and plenty of ways to get your own place with the big dogs, so to speak, but it could easily be argued that /p top is the biggest place of competition of them all. The party system is the core of survival, as it allows players to have protected land for whatever they wish to build/create. It’s what makes this server unique.

But the thing is, the main trait about survival is that there is no true end goal of the server, unlike skyblock and olympus, which have clear areas of focus to them. I’ve always believed that point of survival was to just explore, build, and most importantly, have fun. But as the op said, we’re not here to talk about that, we’re here to talk about the competitive scene.

As for “fixes” to these competition issues, i feel that it’s way too late in the season for there to be any viable solution.

It’s too late to remove cubits from the webstore, and it would be a bad business move for the server as well, since it does allow for the server to make more money. Completely disabling /cubit commands might be an idea to use on top of removing them from the webstore, as that stops them from being sold for in game cash, but that would mean having to disable those commands everywhere on ManaCube.

Removing any sort of rewards for leaderboard positions wouldn’t alleviate anything, because there are plenty of people who will still tryhard those boards anyways, because that’s just how people are and how they will always be. I don’t think the server would necessarily die from it, but it would definitely result it some people not caring about the server as much anymore.

Could there be other ways to fix that we just aren’t seeing? Probably. To me personally, the ultimate fix is to just not give a care about it all. Just don’t get caught up with the details, and just compete the way you want to, as long as you’re enjoying yourself and not purposely making others miserable. The beauty of a game like this is that you can make your own mark on the server in your own way. Buuuuut this is starting to get into that whole "just dont play competitively and have fun" idea, so I’ll just end my spiel there.

TLDR: Competition scene is brutal, don’t jump into it thinking that you’re gonna have an easy time getting to the top, unless you have endless money and/or free time. There is no “fix” for this that will make everyone happy. But what’s most important is to make your own fun; games are meant to be fun, having to compete with others can be fun too, but don’t get so caught up with the competition that it’s no longer fun for you.

 

[skrts]

but don’t get so caught up with the competition that it’s no longer fun for you.

yep, tis why im moving soon :)

 

[bca_]

So, I've never been competitive on the money scene, but I have been competitive on building for best looking party in the past two seasons. I think simply giving out stars for last season would do heaps for rejuvenating competition on this front. Whenever I talk to seasoned players about why they aren't trying as hard this season there's often quite a few reasons but every single one of them eventually says "well without season stars is there really a point?" And okay, season stars are dumb. They don't *do* anything, but they do provide a goal to work towards and something that lasts longer than other people's memory of you on the server.

Regarding problems with the economy, it's been broken since the day I joined back in ss4. I like the idea of merging parties and removing boosting penalties just to add some dynamism to the economy, and if there's no season stars for winning anyway why should there be punishments for things that don't break the game? As everyone else has said, the season has gone on to long for any changes to fix stuff this season, but I think I'll end by pointing out one really serious problem that hasn't been directly addressed by any of your ideas:

Why are parties penalized for running public grinders?
- In order to make a public grinder you have to eat into your party's spawner cap
- You can't accept donations for a public grinder without running into boosting violations *

Maybe I am just nostalgic for /warp dirtig in ss4, and /warp grounded in ss5, but if the economy wasn't as wildly inflated this season as it is it would be very difficult for newer players to gain a foothold.

also,

multitrillionaires,

It costs 1T to upgrade your party level to 14,142**. I would be surprised if no-one gets there by the end of the season.

* yes, I know this was at least partially because gallery was so disliked, but the rules shouldn't enable that to grow into as big of a problem as it did
**The cost to get a party to party level p is given by: 5000(p + p²)

 

[skrts]

So, I've never been competitive on the money scene, but I have been competitive on building for best looking party in the past two seasons. I think simply giving out stars for last season would do heaps for rejuvenating competition on this front. Whenever I talk to seasoned players about why they aren't trying as hard this season there's often quite a few reasons but every single one of them eventually says "well without season stars is there really a point?" And okay, season stars are dumb. They don't *do* anything, but they do provide a goal to work towards and something that lasts longer than other people's memory of you on the server.

Regarding problems with the economy, it's been broken since the day I joined back in ss4. I like the idea of merging parties and removing boosting penalties just to add some dynamism to the economy, and if there's no season stars for winning anyway why should there be punishments for things that don't break the game? As everyone else has said, the season has gone on to long for any changes to fix stuff this season, but I think I'll end by pointing out one really serious problem that hasn't been directly addressed by any of your ideas:

Why are parties penalized for running public grinders?
- In order to make a public grinder you have to eat into your party's spawner cap
- You can't accept donations for a public grinder without running into boosting violations *

Maybe I am just nostalgic for /warp dirtig in ss4, and /warp grounded in ss5, but if the economy wasn't as wildly inflated this season as it is it would be very difficult for newer players to gain a foothold.

also,

It costs 1T to upgrade your party level to 14,142**. I would be surprised if no-one gets there by the end of the season.

* yes, I know this was at least partially because gallery was so disliked, but the rules shouldn't enable that to grow into as big of a problem as it did
**The cost to get a party to party level p is given by: 5000(p + p²)

i mean like, 100 trillion dollars, money becomes meaningless faster, and the season dies quicker, since anyone that joins to see that their measily 6 mil per 5 min is outpaced by giga farms, they usually quit. cause with mega rich mans, comes mega inflation, and cancer outbidding, what i currently kinda like about this season is at least the prices rise at a normal rate, and has a flattening area, if money kept ticking up, the community would also die quicker than the competition, which leaves no one to compete with.

 

[Mik]

Idk what's going on in this thread, but to those concerned about last seasons's legend stars:
View attachment 43150

Skyblock be like -_-

 

[Mik]

So ik im not at all involved in the survival community but I think that it is very similar to Skyblock in many ways. Currently we see the biggest problem as there is no "endgame" goal to reach towards or a strict path to follow to become better and get further in the game mode.

For Skyblock the season died after the 4th month. The only goal to work towards was payouts and that was it. The payouts are not skill related, it is who has the best pc to run the most alts. There is no catching up to these players and nothing you do will get you anywhere close to where they are at. The only enjoyable part of Skyblock was the first month where there was no spawner meta available. The richest players had the biggest farms and the most time played. This was the best economy we have seen in awhile. However this ended like I said after 3-4 months and now players completely skip this phase by selling cubits they get from voting when they first join the server.

Now for solutions..... I have probably spent the good part of the last 6 months just thinking about solutions to this. Of course there are the simple solutions such as lowering spawner drop prices and increasing active grinding prices but that will not solve the over issue of alts. The only to counter to alts is to make requirements that cannot be achieved through afking.

This is where I came up with an idea we called "dimensions" which would be a way to prestige your island (/party) through many requirements that would take grinding rather than straight money. Some of these requirements include island/party collections which I thought was a very unique addition to the season that has a lot of ways to change the way the game is played if the extra step was added to it actually effecting the game.

When you prestige you will basically reset your entire parties balances, upgrades, and island collections in return for small buffs to sell prices, farming growth rate spawner speed, etc. I feel this will help the ever growing economy that we see with both game modes. These dimensions will also have caps on island level to force parties that want to compete for payouts to be more active.

These are just my thoughts feel free to comment below but I definitely agree there needs to be change to the current economies on both games. Here is the link to my full dimensions idea thing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XD0HSOQZkVhcdulN0McqakpUIstG7rpJBjqHJcJOh6g/edit

 

[Gatehousekeeper]

I feel like the whole economy on all servers needs a complete redesign, I think making it more grind based or like business based would be more fun and fair. However, a big part of it is lack if diversity in terms if income, I believe that there should be multiple different ways to make an living ingame, an example of this would be making jobs an actually viable money making method or having an income through grinding quests for example. Potentially, new unorthodox features could be introduced to allow for additional money making methods. I also think that they should potentially consider making party top not based on cash, as its too easily won simply by buying and selling cubits. For a party to win they should have to earn it, whether its by grinding one of the various grinding options or something entirely different. I had an idea for party points a while ago where doing certain things would give party points like grinding or killing players or whatever and then the top party is whoever has the most, some sort of similar concept to that I think would be quite fun. :D