RE: Splinterlands Town Hall Summary - May 16th, 2022 - 1PM Eastern!

I've never run a bot before but this has me thinking about it. Let's do some math and see if it makes sense for me since I have a fair amount of cards. Nothing like some of the whales around here who could open thousands of bronze account but I could open 100 accounts with what I have pretty easily and there's probably a few thousand other accounts like mine who could do the same.

I would have to give up about $15 per day ($225 per season) to take them off the rental market. Let's say I spend $1000 on spell books to make 100 bot accounts. Is it worth it?

Let's say my win rate isn't the best so I don't get max chests. Let's say instead of 30 chests daily and 150 end of season, we cut that by 2/3rds even though my bot would fair pretty well since I have a lot of legendary and epics other bots don't have. But let's say my bot sucks so I lose a lot and only get 1/3 of the chests a good player would get.

Now each of my 100 bot accounts gets 1/3 of that max possible chests which is 10 daily chests and 50 EOS chests. Plus whatever the per win DEC comes out to. Let's ignore the DEC per win and just look at chests.

OK so with 100 accounts thats 100 * 10 = 1000 daily chests. And 100 * 50 = 5000 EOS chests.

Seasons are 15 days so that (15*1000)+5000=20,000 chests per 15 days running 100 kind of shitty bots in bronze plus whatever DEC I get in the chests and ignoring the dec per win.

Monsters in bronze print at 33.33% if I remember right from the other post so 20k * 33.33% is 6666 monsters in my chests. That's 6666 monsters to add to that already incredible supply in this game :)

Quick break in my plan to discuss two things the devs said in this AMA:

BTW since the devs said in this AMA they didn't know if this would increase of decrease rewards card printing, I'll answer that. A current bronze bot gets 1 chest per day with a 10% chance of a monster and I think 9 chests at the end of the season if they get to bronze 1 so 100 bots there would get 2400 chests and 240 monsters vs my 20k chests and 6666 monsters with the new system lol. But oh the mystery. What ever is going to happen to the print rate and all the bot accounts?

Oh, one more thing. THey correctly answered that rental prices on these common and rare CL and untamed cards would go up because they would be in demand so they wouldn't be .1 dec or $0.0001 each anymore. So let's say a bot has to rent 30 of these cards to run the account each day and let's say these cards go up x20 in price to 2 dec each. That means each account would need to put in 60 dec of $0.06 per day in rentals to run a bot. remember this figure. Its now going to cost .06 per day to run a bot account.

COntinuing my plan story now:

OK so 6666 monsters fro my chests and some dec and card packs every 15 days from running 100 bots. Now those aren't all the best monsters but I'll get a few good ones which will increase the average value per monster. Let's say I get .10 cents per monster. That's $660 per season and that doesn't include the DEC and packs in the chests. That could be another few hundred dollars so I cover my spellbooks in 1-2 seasons max. Then its all just gravy.

Quick per bot daily math on just the monsters coming out of my chest?
$660/100 bots is $6.60 per bot per season divided by 15 days is .44 cents per bot per day in just monsters which cost me .06 in rentals means .38 cents per day I can send straight to market and extract from the economy per bot. But hey, I added .06 so you, player guy holding cards really did win when it comes down to it wink wink.

Now I do already have the cards so the math is a little different for me. But the bot accounts already have the spellbooks plus they already have tons of cards from old rewards chests. They could simply swap some of those out for some CL cards and start operations up again without adding anything new to the economy just like I can. Just a quick rebalance and good to go.

Now I did ignore something vital. If I can rent cards for .06 to make .44. It stands to reason that there will be arbitrage right? In fact, there should eb arbitrage until its renting cards for .19 cents to make .20. As long as I still feel like I can make enough money to cover the spell book before the arbitrage runs out, I will keep buying more and so will other people. And because that will keep creating demand for more cars to run these bots it might hold prices up for a little while. But lets be honest. There are so many millions of cards in this game that aren't in use and every single season the print rate on rewards cards will get faster and faster as more bots play and that will kill CP value because it will become so abundant. And I don't really have to get out of bronze to make bank so there's really no need to push higher although I'm sure those silver and gold bots are going to clean up. But at some point, arbitrage will run lower. That's te nature of arbitrage. Its margins and bots can survive on lower margins than players can because they can duplicate their efforts and put in minimal resources. So let's get the devs all excited and talk about that further investment I'd be making on creating more bot accounts.

Let's say I take half the loot I get bring it straight to market so I'm getting a profit I can take from the economy and leave with. Didn't cost me anything to make it once my costs are covered so I'll sell at any price like the bot owners do now. It'll push prices down further and hurt everyone but I'll make a few bucks with no effort and hopefully you guys will keep working to create more value so I won't have to disconnect my parasitic syphon hose for a while. It'll work until the margins on rewards values are so small that humans can't afford to play anymore anyway so you guys better be working hard to bring that value so I can go for a while. As long as I keep cashing out my profit is gauranteed even if this whole thing goes under because of me and my bot owner bretheren.

With the other half of my profit I can make the devs all tingly by putting it back into the economy to create and buy cards for 12 more bot accounts. That means I'll need to buy $120 more in spellbooks (doesn't go into the economy) and spend $240 on new cards but thats ok because (devs, please close your ears so you don't lose that tingly happy feeling) it's not new money I'm putting in.

In fact, I bought that with the value the community put in. SO I syphon out $350 worth of value from the economy and simply recycle the other $350 in value I took from all of you to increase the size of my parasitic machine. For some reason the devs think this is a gain of $350 but as long as they think that, I can keep doing it. And since I increased my accounts by 12%, next season I'll take out 12% (I mean add) 12% more and I can compound this indefinitely. Except I can't can I? Because that would be exponential losses (I mean gainz devs! Actually devs, if you could just stop reading now because the rest gets pretty ugly) to the Splinterlands economy.

Really if enough people did this (which they will) the loss to the economy will outstrip the gainz fast enough that even my 12% more I'm pulling will probably push the value of assets down faster than I can pull more of them out. I need to add 12% more bots just to keep the same profit. And guess what that means for you hodlers? It means you lose value on the assets you've held at a faster rate than you can win more assets.

I wonder what would happen if this were going on? Well first, Splinterlands would need to significantly larger reward cards runs to keep up with the bot mint rate. Second as more cards printed the prices on all cards would go lower due to their CP value dropping since theres so much more of it now. THis would happen at such a fast rate that the total market cap of cards would drop even as the total quantity of cards included in the market cap equation went up by 10's of thousands of cards per day. Currencies in the game would also keep falling as asset values dropped. New human player growth would head lower daily and the daily active accounts would be stagnant as bots who can maintain on lower margins replace players who can't.

Sound like a game you know? Now imaging that game when the print rate fro 100 bronze bots goes from 2400 cards per season to 6666 and they get dec.

Oh, you know when I'll shut down my bot farm? Well first I anticipate the increasing size of my and other bot farms to end up creating a print rate on rewards cards that floods the game with so much CP that the CP aspect of cards is worthless. THis is already largely happening as common reward cards are going for .01 and CP heavy gold cards are dropping like rocks. Rewards cards will all be so cheap the chests won't be worth much anymore so playing won't be worth much just like its not before the revamp of the system anymore because you play for rewards after all.

So at some point it won't make sense to keep growing my bot farm. Instead I'll just be selling and taking whatever profit I can get on slimmer margins. As margins get slimmer more players will stop playing since people can't compete on such low margins. At that point I expect a pretty steep drop off because suddenly no one will be byuing cards. I expect the game will lose a lot of developers by that point because who wants to develop for a game that has no players. So there will just be a bunch of bots farming the last of the rewards cards before the prints run out and hoping to sell something to some straggling players hanging out for nostalgia or because they like the game enough to play for free. That's about the time I'll shut down the bot farm and maybe tool it for a different game that still has value to leach off of.

So that's my plan. I really hope land extends those plans but arbitrage has to close at some point so one way or the other, my bot dreams and your dreams of playing profitably have to end. Yours sooner than mine I guess.

:Edit: Someone will bring up that I'm screwing myself. I after all have $50k in cards that would go to zero. Here's the real kicker in all this. In the beginning of this, there's a great chance as rental prices head higher, card sale prices will follow. This is the best time for me to unload one bot worth of cards a a time at higher prices and start spending on renting instead. That way when the arbitrage windows close (arbitrage opportunities always close)which in this case arbitrage is the representation of value in playing the game, I won't be sitting on declining assets. Just like now, it makes no sense for a bot farm to own cards because all bots do is close arbitrage holes and remove value from the economy. The faster the community can add value, the faster bots will show up. THat's what the whole ramp was in July and August. It was bots coming in to syphon value as fast as investors could add to it and what we've seen since is asset holder losing as the value gets sucked out of the system by both the devs introducing more assets to compete with the old assets and the bots hooking up that hose. That's why bots rent. So they aren't syphoning from themselves.

Posted using Splintertalk