My Stance on the Ongoing Battle against Bots in Splinterlands

_{Edited in Canva Pro.}

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It's been a while since I reacted to something and I think this is a good chance for me to state what I've been thinking about recently. I know that a lot of people and players would disagree on me on this but I categorize myself as a pretty realistic person rather than idealistic. I would prefer to comment on things that I see is happening and what I expect to happen rather than wish on what happens in the future.

Lastly, before I start, this is my thoughts on this matter for a while now and is not something I'm saying at the spur of the moment.

Also, if you only want to just hear my take on this matter, click below to get directed to the appropriate section:

Why Splinterlands should focus on helping players instead of going against bots

These are the things what I wish to happen in order to make Splinterlands better.

Bot Farms, Using bots and its Legalities

• What are bots and bot farms?<
  Botting is the process of automating an account by use of codes. Account owners do this so that they won't need to use their time to actually play the game.

Bot farming is simply abusing this method and having multiple accounts with the goal of getting multiple rewards to offset the capital you used on the account.

• Is botting legal?
  By TOS, botting is actually legal in Splinterlands and there's no repercussions to you and your account if you do actually use bots.

However, even though using bots is legal, bot farming, although is not illegal, is frowned upon. This is where, I think, Splinterlands draw the line... BUT, is also a mistake in my opinion, which I will tell my opinions later.

• Effects of bot farms in Splinterlands economy?
  Cards and other assets in Splinterlands are actually limited. Although it doesn't look like it, every card has a certain limit applied on it. This is made so that the value of cards will go up over time. If there's limit on the prints, then eventually, in the future, not everyone will be allowed to get a hold of the said card and the demand on it will increase.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Bots

While I won't list every single thing, I will state some of, what I think, the most important ones.

First, a big and clear advantage of using bots is Time. Since you don't manually play with your accounts, you don't can do other things that you think are more important and still get the rewards. You, using bots, and a player playing the game for 2 to 4 hours, at the end of the day, still get the same rewards. A Djinn Oshannus earned by a bot account and a Djinn Oshannus earned by a player grinding hours on their accounts has the same price on the market. The only difference on it is the effort made.

This is probably one of the reasons while a lot of players don't like the concept of botting. It feels unfair to others who are using their own time to grind.

Second, in relation to first, while botting is frowned upon, you can play with multiple accounts at the same time. If you have 10 accounts (which is legal according to TOS), you need to invest like 20 hours a day if you're going to manually play on each for 2 hours per day. But with bots, you need 0 hours of your time and just let the bot do the work for you. Since you have more accounts, you also can get more rewards.

For the disadvantage, first, bots are stupid. I mean that in every way. When I was in bronze, I've played against accounts who uses range monsters as their front tank. Range monsters cannot attack while in first position so using this is nonsense. Of course, I won that game without issues. Another example is the accounts using weird combinations. Fog of War which removes Sneak, Snipe and Opportunity, and then the account using a full melee Sneak build. It would end with the opponent attacking one at a time. While I can't prove that these two games are bots (I've actually done the second example because I was not paying attention), there's no proof between a bot account and a player account except for assumption. There's no definite "proof" that the account is using bot except for being stupid all of their games. However, it may also just be a very bad player.

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Why Focusing on Bots is Worse for Players as a Whole

Splinterlands has this weird ongoing battle against bot and bot farms. I already expressed this on one of their posts and like I said on that, Splinterlands doesn't seem to like bots and yet they are "legal" to use. I find this a weird contradiction.

With this contradiction, since they don't want to "illegalize" the bots in fear of whales leaving their platforms, their next course of action is to reduce the rewards and make lives harder to bot and bot farms.

Some examples of their "actions" are application of Capture Rate. If you play a lot, your rewards will be multiplied by capture rate and this capture rate recovers over time. This is so bots will not spam playing 24 hours a day and reduce it to probably a few hours per day.

Second, the implementation of Reward Penalties.
You need to rent or own cards of a certain level per league. On gold, you must play at least level 5 commons, level 4 rares, level 3 epics and level 2 legendaries. You can play lower than this but it will add some penalties on your rewards after the game.

Photo from my account in Splinterlands.

The penalties are increased if you are using a starter card or cards which Splinterlands allow you to use when you bought a Spellbook. These cards has a letter "S" on top right of the cards.

While these look good on paper, this is really bad for everyone.

I don't agree on applying penalties for something you're not proactive of doing. Rather than penalizing its players, I agree on rewarding the players for something they proactively doing.

For example, rather than penalizing players for not using higher leveled cards, they should instead reward players for using max leveled cards. This encourages players to rent max leveled cards for their league rather than applying fear to using low leveled and/or starter cards.

Not all low leveled accounts are bots. Most of them are, but not all. And I think sacrificing these few non-bot accounts isn't good image for a game where their motto and tag line is, "Free to play" and "Play to earn". Slowly, but surely, I am seeing what other players are saying, "Pay to play" as you MUST rent and/or buy cards in order to play on higher level. It's not a matter of if you're good at the game, you'll climb but rather, you also must have good enough of a pocket to play higher league for better rewards.

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Splinterlands should focus on helping players instead of going against bots

I don't think bots can be removed in the game. Without the removal of bots, you also cannot remove bot farms. That's a fact.

If you act on decreasing the rewards so it would affect the bots, you would also affect players who are not using bots. Both players and bots use the same exact type of accounts and therefore, any changes you do to affect bots will also affect real players. That's also a fact.

I do understand that the rewards are getting more on the hands of the bot farms but this is a consequence of allowing multiple accounts. You cannot do anything about this unless you implement a 1 Owner, 1 Account rule. Unless you ask for KYC and ID, recognition for logging in like facial recognition before you use the account and things that would remove the "anonymity" for playing, bot farms will exist.

What can Splinterlands do then?

That's where we go to say, "improve player experience." The good thing is that this opinion of mine will certainly happen in the future. The bad thing is we don't know when.

One plan of Splinterlands is the application of items and magic.

(You can read it here. It's on the bottom most part of the page on land.)

Eventually, players would be allowed to use items and magic that would turn the tides of battle. What I want to suggest though is that these items both have positive and negative effects. Items with effects like, "increase 1 health but opponent increase 1 damage." will allow decision making in the process. Bots follow codes and rules and not the situation. Items like this can be game changer depending on who you use it on and when but bots can't. Bots most likely use items at the start of the game but if you have things that affects the opponent, decision making, which is not part of bot code, is a big part for changing the tides of battle.

If you add things that require player interaction, it would give advantage to players and not to bots.

Another reason why I think we should not focus on bots is that they are weak and stupid. Honestly. I've played a lot of games where it's 40 mana and the bot will just play 1 card. At this point, it's like auto win for players.

Last, and even if I get heat on this, I will defend this until the end of my Splinterlands time:

If you cannot beat bots, you're not strong enough to play Silver League.

To me, bots are like the gatekeepers. While, yes, bots can do calculations and make the most efficient builds, they cannot adapt quick. If Splinterlands implement a new rule of combat, bots take like months in order to make that successful and if you can't beat that, I don't know what to say besides, "Get Gud."

I know I sound like rude but let's be real. Bots are easy enemies in Splinterlands and the only ones who gets owned by bots are other bots. Regardless if there are 1000 bots in Bronze, if you're good enough of a player, you will climb in Silver in less than a week (unless you intentionally don't want to climb).

These are my takes for now and those might change in the future except for the last one. Right now, even among the changes that I don't agree, Splinterlands is on the right path. The game is fun and it's fun to invent builds and see them work. I do wish there are more interactions like the items and spells that would be implemented in the future but until then, we'll just have to live with the bots.

• This post is an entry for Splinterland's Social Media Contest.
• Other sources that I do not own are cited under their respective photos. Photos and drawings without cited sources are mine and made for this post.
• Animated Banners and Dividers are edited in Canva Pro.
• Some of the fonts used are from instafonts.io

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