The Price to a Play to Earn Game Killing Off Bots?
Bots are a big topic on people's minds in splinterlands and every play to earn game will face them.
Let's first look at things in the beginning of Splinterlands as a case study. It's important to consider perspective before you jump to one side of the fence.
What good were bots?
Bots allowed for players to find a match more quickly
Running bots required accounts to have cards (Proof of Stake)
Selling cards, or proof of stake, fuels the development of a game
Are bots bad?
Many will say yes because they deplete the rewards pool. But, even if you had a nonintrusive way to eliminate bots and your rewards are high enough, then humans will simply replace bots.
If play is more profitable than renting, then people have incentive to automate their play.
In the days of old, a game's success was built off selling a copy of it or an upgrade. But, ownership of digital assets and their interaction has become easier and more accepted. Thus, we are arriving at more play to earn games.
Some gamers of old feel that this ownership is just a way for game makers to be greedy. On the contrary, there is a demand for immersion into the virtual and there is a new demand to be met. To ignore this is, well, bad business on the game makers side.
When you consider a game's success it satisfies these conditions
Does it fill it's most base purpose, is it pleasurable or fun?
If it supports ownership:
Did the game allow you to spend very little for the entertainment you got, pay for itself, or actually make you money?
Side Note: If you approach a play to earn game with the intent on making money with a substantial amount, you're really not just playing around. To me that sounds more like business.
Well if you're gonna play splinterlands to it's full potential you'll need to buy cards. However you see the game, why don't you save the most on splinterlands card purchases in the industry by using cardauctionz
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P.S. One day it may be impossible to tell if you're playing a human or a robot in a live game of chess. Then what are we gonna do?
As always, I will never give financial advice, I will only be expressing my opinion. Thanks for reading!
Well let me preface this statement with the disclaimer: the following message is a reflection of my person experience and observations of some random gamer.
I have played video games as early as I was allowed to, I had my big conquest convincing the family to get a desktop comp so I could play my first video game ever, Warcraft I, or as it was known in the day, Warcraft.... ;)
My first experience with botting was in the game Runescape, which I still play 20 years after first trying that very interesting new type of game, coded in javascript, as it once stood. No disk space downloads, meaning I could play at school, not like I ever did, but I could....The first bot I ran into playing Runescape were PK bots(Player Killing), they would do skill combinations and swapping of spells and prayers at speeds that were just unable to match. These annoyed me, I didnt like PVP anyway so I just stuck to the bank, standing, as it was known as..... My hoarding skills and saving skills lead me to fill a key niche in the game, the person who buys all the stuff you collected for a low price but reliable valuation, you can do better if you goto world 2 or what not, so most people just sold me their random items. Then people would come into the bank needing a particular item to do a quest, or skill a particular skill. There was no grand exchange and no accurate item drop information, it was usually easier to just buy it on the spot for a little more.
So that was my arbitrage, and the perennial law rune for 1000 gold, even tho I never fail to find someone to sell me law runes in bulk at 300 ea. But the buyer only ever wants 1 law rune at that price, for just that teleport. Interesting market standards that developed looking back at them.
In one of my common bank spots, Seers Village Bank, We began to be visited by many of these non-armor wearing female lvl 3 (minimum combat level at the time) with 0 skills on account, going to the field to the south collecting flax from the floor, which required no skill built up, and running the full sacks of items to the bank, back and forth, like a relentless army of white walkers.
I caught one of these botters at the keyboard one day and asked what they were doing. Up until then I never even saw anyone pick up that flax, for any reason and it was like 100 to 200 gold each. This was the entry level botter spot, low risk, you could bring a fresh account here and if u got banned, u didnt lose any build up skills. So from a stable price of 100-200 gold each, prices gradually dropped to a low of around 10 gp. I acquired massive quantities of this item, because although a slow process, I could always afk spin the flax into bowstring, worth 200 gp each. from a 10 gp item. This profit was protected by the fact that a decently high level of crafting skill was required to do it and it was a very hard and expensive skill to increase, and botters would not risk getting banned after sinking so much gold and time into the account skills. Then the great Bot nuke of 2011
Runescape great botnuke 2011
and you can see a month later the forums thread discussing the economic impact, how raw materials were no longer being produced and prices were spiking randomly as the economy went through price shocks and rebalanced one item and activity at a time. These price spikes were saviors to players, finally they could earn gold while playing.....
Runescape botnuke economy forums post
Today the price of flax is 102 gold down from a high of 182 gold in november 2021, 15+ years later, settling in the same price range as when I started playing.
The relative utility of flax is unchanged, it can be spun into bowstring, a necessary ingredient for making any bow with the fletching skill. This item is always needed in the economy in the long run, it derives its value from the output items value, bowstring. On average flax yields a 2x return when spun to bowstring, but the bots killed the raw material price by producing so much. Even though players could skill one of the most expensive skills in this way, and every 1 gold the price of flax went down, it increased the percentage return on spinning it, demand for bowstring never changed, and in fact real demand for flax by players to spin it skyrocketed. But every time the flax price rallied, more bots came on to exploit the easy profit. The bots continued to farm the game progressively one skill and item at a time, until it wasnt worth the time of the farmer, but they always made money selling gold for real dollars so they would farm anything no matter how little the profit.
Does this sound familiar @splinterlands ?
The reality is, as long as there is positive financial returns for botting in Splinterlands, you should expect to see an increase of botting over time, as others seek to cash in on this easy profit. This goes for any game where botting can be used to earn an economic return. We see this happening in all the play2earn games, like a plauge. The decentralization our founder and ceo @aggroed and @yabapmatt talk about(which in my opinion is a noble ideal to aspire to), are guaranteed to lead to an economy that has been sucked dry of all rewards, who will step in to buy these over supplied cards in the face of unrelenting endless and likely to increase supply of cards. Honestly you guys really created a situation where you built the rental system mostly reliant on bots or new players being the consumers. Players usually buy their decks if they stick around, I personally have not rented 1 card myself in the past 6 months from someone else. We will get rid of the bots and the next day, see player base collapse, and the passive income pillar of splinterlands, the rental market, will be shattered. With the raw amount of cards the team printed, real player demand cannot even in your wild dreams sustain 50% of current rental demand.
So we need to keep decentralization and honor the spirit of the project and our founders, while limiting but not eliminating the incentive of bots, while increasing the incentive or reward for actual humans playing.
One idea I came up with as a quick fix with minor coding required was a new potion since they had the quest potion coded into game they just have to change the potions features, the code is there, bought with Dec, SPS, or Vouchers, Giving 100% bonus dec income from battles for example, but this exp bonus, would require some form of activity check periodically. You can incorporate your planned minigames here. Let people do this activity when they want to, and pick which, whether they complete a captcha, complete a bank pin entry of their security pin that shifts locations like runescape, a minigame like pinball or slots people play for a period and interact with an ad, and earn something then go back to game no time lost. If they dont activate the activity check in a certain period, or fail it, they will lose the BONUS portion of dec. This allows humans and bots to play with the same rules, but have different likely outcomes.
This is the model you need to aim for in all your economic plans, dont aim to crush the bots, aim to make then bottom feeders who can only reach the scraps of the human players feet.
Heres a simple one, the new reward cards you are giving out, only drop in Gold/Diamond/League chests, at 10%/50%/100% of card drops for example. And lower leagues can earn the previous set of rewards, and keep 2 sets active always. There are so many options!!!
This boils down the supply and demand at the end of the day. Even though the profitability of spinning flax to bowstring only increased over the cited period, also while being able to make gold while skilling one of the most expensive skills at the time. This shouldn't have occurred in my opinion, but this what happens when supply and demand are not balanced, and you combine the words markets and momentum.
Ok thanks for giving us such a detailed response. I paid particular attention to "but they always made money selling gold for real dollars so they would farm anything no matter how little the profit." because I wasn't totally sure the gold was being sold for dollars until then.
I'm glad we are interacting on this because it makes me state this, human players are more valuable than bots. Easy example, community doesn't exist without humans. Also, if a game needs to raise money it can't ask robots to do anything.
Brilliant. You really should make this its own post. I've never played runescape but I got the general idea and it is the exact same thing that's happening inn Splinterlands as you say.
I think it's a misconception that humans would farm games like this in the same way as a bot owner with 10k bots who will grind for the smallest profit margins and systematically send it all straight to the market.
Something I think a lot about now is how there are more bots than humans on the internet already. Right now only the most technically savvy (or at least ambitious) are using them but in the not too distant future I think we all end up owning and programing bots just to keep up with each other as more and more of our lives and the economy go online.
I think it will be too big of an economic disadvantage to not have many bots running to do all the things. I've been trying to figure out what everything ends up looking like once that happens? Is that when we just get rid of all the grinding all together?
One more note. I've realized that many of the bigger bot accounts aren't even taking advantage of the rental market for income. They are sitting on thousands of copies of "rare" cards sometimes that just sit in their account until they go to the sales market. If they ever decided to rent those out, Splinterlands economy would crumble overnight. I wonder if the devs have thought of that?
Thanks for contributing my friend. Your statement reminded me of these virtual support people they put out there(a crude robot). I don't like them personally but it's better than no support if you follow me on that.
"Brilliant. You really should make this its own post. I've never played runescape but I got the general idea and it is the exact same thing that's happening inn Splinterlands as you say."
Thanks I appreciate the kind words. It took me some time to come up with this solution because when I heard aggroed talk about decentralization and not having a gatekeeper who decides who can play or not, I thought to myself, this entire genre is dead, if they cant figure this out. Every game will be botted, of course because there is a financial incentive. We see that happening in every crypto nft game that experiences an increase in their farmable tokens or nfts. Then as profitability declines and the value has been extracted from the ecosystem, they move onto the next.
Runescape instituted things to ferret out the bots exactly like I suggested, but they forced you into annoying options, I think Splinterlands can make it fun especially considering all these mini games they want to add. Here take a 5 minute mini game break, based on how well you do you will receive some bonus, or if you fail, no negative effect just a lack of positive. So you do not actually discourage botting, you make the game and activities so that human interaction, thought, creativity add a competitive advantage for humans, let the player pick from a choice of options, or they can just bypass it with 1 click, and go about their normal activities botting. Their rewards can be farmed, let them crash their own reward sets to the ground, while players aim for top league reward cards. I fear Splinterlands has already developed an unsustainable ecosystem in regards to lending markets, there can never be enough players to create realistic demand for using 1.1 million pelacor conjurers, the most useful common in the current reward set. and its 40% printed, so we will see maybe 2.5 million pelacor conjurer, If we had 10 million people playing, you would need 1 out of every 4 players renting one card every day to have a sustainable rental market. The numbers wont work, rental market and passive income does wit bots, let the bots stay, segregate the rewards, ramp up rewards for interaction from players is my suggestion. I will try to put this all into a post at some point, I will wait and reserve judgement to see the new reward changes that are upcoming next month!
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I remember when they released these rewards cards and they tried to make them seem scarce by saying you could only ever have 18k fully maxed out cards. And people bought it. Really the only reason they needed that many cards was because they were being farmed by 300k bots.
There is so much I find wrong with the Devs ideas of a successful economy. The biggest thing is that they don't seem to understand supply and demand. They've seen that when they create something new it adds demand or when rewards go up it adds demand but they don't seem to understand that they can't just add endless supply or flood the maret with rewards that have no demand and just get that result. They need to create the demand or at least get out of the way and let it come back before they crush it again trying to bring in demand with more supply.
Listening to this last AMA was maddening. Yabapmatt actually said that if the bot owners are spending money in the economy then its great if someone decides to build a 10k strong bot army. He misses the point that bots aren't here for fun. They aren't here to experiment and be social or to build an impressive collection of cards they can show off. They are here to drain more out of the economy than they add.
Any amount they spend is only to pull even more out. The fact that the "genius who built this whole economy" as I've heard aggroed say many times, can't figure that out does not bode well for the economy and fate of Splinterlands.
And the coulter that is always well people are here to make more than they spend also. But that ignores the efficiency of the bot and the ability to duplicate their efforts so the margins on the game keep coming down until they aren't worth it for players but remain worth it for bots.
I know you know this. I'm just venting. Ugh. !LOLZ
THIS. It boggles my mind why some people don't understand this.
well its the mob mentality, prices of cards/ rental income/ sps value/ land value all down across the board. People have pitchforks and want a witch to burn. I feel bad for the stupidity Ive seen thrown at the devs, then when I suggest things in legit hopes to improve the system, I see people get so defensive and assume im gonna complain about prices or roi. No I have a degree in economics, work in banking, a successful track record of outperforming the S&P. Life long video game addict who cracked every economy in every game I played.
I wanna make this work, but they need to also realize, be like mark zuckerberg, take my ideas, twist em, tweak em, im offering them up for free to help. Dont just take the position other people only want to earn more money. It will shut them down from seeing the sincere care that those of us have for the game.
Some probable effects of a bot ban would be:
#1 A crash in the card rental market followed by a crash on the prices of cards on the secondary market.
#2 A collapse in Splinterlands rankings in daily active user charts like Dappradar.
How big of a crash depends on how big the ratio of bots to players.
Agreed 100% and ironically they will either get banned, or run the rewards into nothing and move on, whichever comes first. The path of least resistance would be make new reward set only drop in wild league gold+ and modern diamond+ chests. Lower league chests would receive the botted set closer to end of print run, this adds value to ecosystem because new players rewards, while not worth a lot, can be acquired cheap by new players from the botted supply, allows new players to combine these cards for reduced prices as they cycle. Bots still can make their roi, new players come in understanding prices will be low till the set moves on, and have incentive to get to the next set drops in higher league. Honestly adding higher amounts of the same chest drops, is a joke, that does not force people to centralize their CP and stop multi accounting.
Honestly, one disconnect I have with the community and Splinterlands team is, Sept or Oct of 2021 they nerfed new player rewards in bronze and adjusted the dec earning formula to cube your CP instead of square scaling rewards up for the highest leagues. When they did this, they said "it was done because they want to incentivize and compensate those who buy cards and invest in the ecosystem for the long term." At the time many people didn't like this message, they heard, all we care about is whales. But the team presented the solution to botted rewards, as adjusting the incentives towards owning cards.
Today, tournaments, which I believe will be the most prestigious and highest paying events in Splinterlands, should in the future represent the finest in skill, wisdom, and experience among the splinterlands player base. Lets keep a logical train of thought here. Ranked battle rewards must be focused towards people who invest in the ecosystem, Forsakensushi agrees with @aggroed and @yabapmatt you are 100% on target with this goal. Dec rewards are worth less in the ecosystem in general utility than sps, allowing governance of the game, and in much less possible total supply so definitely more scarce. So the higher utility and value currency SPS, paid out in the most prestigious and competitive events in the Splinterlands Ecosystem(tournaments), has no bearing on if the player owns a single card. I can go rent a set of cards, invest nothing in Splinterlands, rent the CP, and obtain access to the most lucrative reward pools in same manner as those who have fully invested in the ecosystem. If either of you can explain how that makes sense, I would truly welcome an explanation. I seek understanding and mutual growth. I love Splinterlands!
I have been reading your comments and they are excellent responses. Most people complaining about bots are no different from various political activists asking for socialism, regulation and welfare. If they got what they ask for, we will end up at a worse place than we started and we might even have to give up on many fundamental values like decentralization to get to that place. I have been following @aggroed for a long time and I can say that his heart is at the right place when it comes to personal values. He had made many wonderful articles in the past.
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I have played many games, most of my life, and its a true passion of mine, as is investing. I came across Splinterlands by accident, and I truly love it, and want to share what Ive learned being a part of other game economies in the past, I have always participated in merching activity in games, I love to create a value system for a game, and methodically interact with the market based on that valuation, acting as a gatekeeper of intrinsic value, usually denominated in experience earned, or in game utility in my experience, or the dreaded eye candy lol, so fickle that eye candy valuation.
Thanks for the compliment!
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requiring owned cards to receive full rewards in tournaments. Otherwise nerf the rewards and split between other winning card owners as a bonus. Watch how fast that card market comes to life if you require owned cards and cp for tournaments, and you then reward players who invest in ecosystem more, as aggy and yabamatt have stated as their previous goal.
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Personally I wouldn't allow bots in any p2e game, period. (Yes, I know why they were allowed in the first place)
In hindsight last summer might have been the best time to ban them, instead of printing ridiculous amounts of assets, based on an inflated bot playerbase.
I think people DO understand that getting rid of bots will cause hyperinflation, crash the ecosystem and will make splinterlands look disgusting from a marketing perspective. The bigger the bubble the louder the bang.
Luckily there is a mechanic to dispose of excess Pelacor Bandits...😅
Getting rid of bots will not be painless, but I guess it needs to be done in order to build a healthy game.
eye am in ful agreeance, in fact my concern is that bots will have devalued the Dao level of splinterlands by being able to have collected the most sps, over humans and tho collective votes of splinterlands playing humans will mean less to nothing and the bot player base aka botticis wrex a kind of dominant soulless entity will act as a centralizing force, that will allocate the entire voting power to the few people running the bot accounts and thus stripping away any sovreignty that humans could have on this platform and almost ensuring that the potential mainstream. player base that could potentially find splinterlands, either by chance or by an intentional media will be scared away from the game by an elite army of very unwelcoming pre programmed algorithms that have already fully exploited the game before they got there. This being said we don't wanto punish the humans for the presence of botticus wrex, aka making rewards like Dec no longer earn able in bronze by new player, eye loved that back when eye began to play, that eye had player command within the gaming environment, as my clicks had life, value and power, now humans clicks no longer have as much meaning or value in the lower tyrs and only can be daily quest rewards now, which are small. Eye recently invited on of my girlfriends to play splinterlands and she invested in card packs because it's just a smart thing to do as a long term investment, however, when she began to play shees kind of stuck in the lower ranks because she doesn't purchase any in game assets she is just a p2e player new at gaming and doesn't wish to put in the thousands that eye have. So in this light folks like her are being punished for the actions of bits and every new player here on in is pre punished for the actions of bits and it's devaluing the nature of our clicks and the relevence of humans at all. In my opinion crash the markets then, kill all bot accounts and then the economy will become closer to what it would realistically be, even though it may suck, the price range of some cards like golden frost giants at 600k is like bying a mansion in the form of nfts, these assets would be more accessable as a price range, if bots didn't exist, because there would simply be less overall generated rewards assets and less multi account grind while ur sleeping availability to the elite few who can run 10 to 100 accounts and rake it in. In the end my main concern is the complete devaluing of the voting process behind sps and currently it will look like bots will own the Dao unless a number of us humans can actually get our hands fairly on validator liscence or if the splinterlands creators actually FREELY HAND OUT validator liscence to verrified humans who deeply wish splinterlands success and support and will devote themselves to the game and ecosystem. This brings up my last 2 ideas and the first is a groaner for sure as the kyc tech in splinterlands is really not good, as it won't validate me or my ID, but every other exchange will, binance ect, eym Canadian maybe that's why, but every account needs to be kycd and everyone can only have a single account and u can o ly transfer assets from verrified account to verrified account and once its set in motion all accounts are locked and all assets within them are locked and can ever be accesses unless their verrified and u can only verify a single account, this would pretty much decimate the multiple account hidden asset class. of botter and would be a fair invitation for other crafty human players to have just a single account, we give 7 days for everyone to move assets to a si gle account efore the necessary kyc, just get a better kyc algorithm because most human in some areas of the world will be locked out { lot of holes in that idea}. The last idea is that every human player is given a bot at start of game and the bot is woven into the game and is gamifed and its functions can be unlocked in an rpg mechanics style, and splinterlands just embraces bots and all new players are supported by having access to this layer. those r my feels, however in the final of it all we need to find a way to save the Dao from bot level centralization through the exploitation and abuse of sps, sps is sacred and we NEED to stand behind this as a united team of humans that value our voice as vote above all else, if our voice isn't sacred then greedy self interested entities will steal and eat this dream of ours before we even have a chance to direct it.
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So I don't think they should get rid of bots but I do think they need to ban new ones going forward which would allow the game to balance itself out over time without punishing people who did a perfectly legal thing at the time they did it and without crashing the entire economy completely.
I have some ideas on how they can actually equalize out or at least lessen the drain on the economy that I'm going to write a post about soon.
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just wrote this post about this topic
https://www.splintertalk.io/@eterna/the-entity-known-as-botticus-wrex-transmissions-from-the-hunab-kru
gm and thanks for your opinion
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Great read!