Splinterlands — I let XBOT take the wheel last season

over 1 year ago

Splinterlands — What happens if I let the Robot overloads take over for a season?

A First for Me

Before last season I had never used a Bot playing Splinterlands. So why flip the switch this season and hand control over? Outside of pure curiosity a couple of factors led me over to the "dark side". I had run across several posts of other players starting to use XBOT.

After reading several of these glowing reviews I hopped on over to the XBOT main page and started to dig into the how and whys. The primary reason I found now to be a great time to test it out was that the service was being offered for free through December 10th. After that an additional seven-day free trial was offered. This meant I could test the service for free though a whole season. I figured if I was going to give it a go it was only fair to see how it performed over a season.

The second reason I was looking to test out a bot now was that with the holidays approaching, I am not sure if I will have the time every day to get my battles in. I was hoping to get in a solid test in case I needed to hand the daily grind off to a bot for a few days, and not have to worry about it sinking my season while I was busy enjoying family time.

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How Did it Go?

I scratched my head for a bit on how best to compare the performance of my last season with the bot's season. I did run the first few days of the last season manually before switching to the bot, but it was mostly grinding to get back to gold so I'll count it as a wash. As luck would have it both seasons were 15 days, so I decided to base my comparison on the number of chests I took in. I'll add some nuance to this comparison for further study, but the big question I had was, how did the payout compare? It wasn't fair to go with what came out of the chests as that is up to the RNG gods, but I figured number of chests was the way to go.

Season 99 — Run without bot assistance I was awarded 128 chests between dailies and EOS
Season 100 — Run with bot assistance I was awarded 132 chests between dailies and EOS

Close enough for me to call this a wash, but I thought I would dig a bit deeper, if for nothing else I was hoping to prove the bot didn't outshine me 😂 One area I was able to say I beat the bot was overall win percentage. The bot had a win percentage of 51% fighting solely in the Gold tier. My typical win rate percentage is about 56%. Seems like the bot was doing a better job of taking advantage of the daily focus to maximize daily rewards, while my human brain tends to focus more on getting the win. Seems like they both led to roughly the same overall result, but it would be interesting to see a longer-term test.

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Thoughts

Well, the season and test are over, what do I think? I wouldn't hesitate to recommend using XBOT. It performed well over the course of the season and matched my previous season chest total. With that being said, I missed playing daily. If I was only in this for the rewards, I could see letting the bot do its thing, but I enjoy playing and learning from each battle. There was still Brawl and tournament battles for me to manually fight last season, but I found myself wanting to play more. I will likely take the plunge and purchase an XBOT token for the days I cannot play, but I'm still looking to play most days and get my SPL fix.

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Last Season Rewards

11/30	12/1	12/2

12/3	12/4	12/6

12/8	12/9	12/10

12/11	12/12	12/13

12/14

👉The EOS chests gave me enough merits for a Gladius case as well

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Saving the Best for Last

This season saw our guild move into Tier 2 and with that greater rewards. THe first Brawl we fought brough me enough merits to purchase a Gladius pack and the best reward of the season.

The GF Trapp has a CP of 10,000!!!!! This puts me at 90K CP meaning I only had to rent 10K worth of CP to reach Gold 1 this season. I'm looking forward to adding another 10K CP quickly and being able to hit Gold 1 without renting!