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.
