Brawling and Battle Assistants - A Quick Look
Brawls. We all love 'em! If you are already in a guild, you know how great brawling is!
And if you aren't in a guild... Why not? Go on, find one and join - I'll wait for you right here...
Ok we ready?
In Splinterlands, Brawls are the closest thing we get to a team event. There's no ECR. No ladder climbing. No seasonal resets. Just pure competition - Guild vs Guild vs Guild vs Guild....
There is a lot at stake in brawls. Bragging rights, crowns, merits, SPS. We jockey for position every 5-6 days.
So... What about Brawling Bots?
We all know that ranked play has a lot of automated gameplay. But to my knowledge, no publicly available battle automation service currently offers fully automated brawling. However, we know there are some tools out there to help with lineup selection. I don't know how to track all these tools. However, one of the most recent entrants to the arena of Splinterlands Automation Services is XBOT. They've gotten a lot of buzz and a lot of success.
XBOT has recently opened up their "Battle Helper" service to allow users the ability to recommend lineups for any match - including tournaments and brawls. So I started to wonder - how reliant are the top guilds on battle assistance tools?
Next: Follow the DEC
In order to use XBOT's Battle Helper feature, players need to transfer DEC to a dedicated XBot account for credits. So it was a fairly straightforward process to track which players, and in which guilds, have sent their hard earned DEC to XBOT since the launch of the new paid service. I queried the Splinterlands API on March 11.
Battle Helper Usage across Tiers
| Tier | Guilds Using BH | Total Guilds in Tier | BH Users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 4 | 20 | 33 | 53 |
| Tier 3 | 32 | 121 | 59 |
| Tier 2 | 24 | 257 | 40 |
| Tier 1 | 18 | 388 | 28 |
| Other | n/a | n/a | 32 |
| TOTAL | 18 | 388 | 212 |
NOTE: I didn't track movements of players between Guilds, so there there may be minor inconsistencies in the data. Out of the 212 users, I found that 32 users had inconsistencies in the data, mostly due to no brawl matches with their current guild. It seems plausible these may have been due to ranked play or tournament matches. Or they may be users that moved to a new guild. For my purposes I am comfortable to ignore, because I wanted to look at the top tier.
Tier 4 Guilds
There are currently 33 guilds in Tier 4. It's the most prestigious and competitive Tier in the game at the moment. These Guilds are meant to represent the best players in the game. Over half of the Guilds in Tier 4 have at least one player using XBot's assistant. And they seem to plan to use it more. Collectively, these players have loaded nearly 60,000 DEC's worth of credits.
For context, Tier 4 brawls have 21 frays, and most guilds in this tier generally have around 25-30 members.
| Guild - Tier 4 | BH Users | DEC to XBot |
|---|---|---|
| ✨[RKO] Outta Nowhere ⚡ 🧨 | 12 | 5,550 |
| Team Possible Hackers | 5 | 605 |
| Legendary Raptors | 4 | 6,000 |
| YGG Brawlers (Ásgard) | 4 | 11,000 |
| Legendary Wizards | 3 | 1,375 |
| PeakMonsters Pirates | 3 | 554 |
| [KoG] Guardians of Glory | 2 | 601 |
| [KoG] No Guts No Glory | 2 | 2,700 |
| Knights United | 2 | 10,500 |
| Legendary Lunatics | 2 | 920 |
| PeakMonsters [Archon] | 2 | 1,010 |
| Phoenix IVY | 2 | 1,100 |
| T&A Legion I | 2 | 300 |
| The Guild of Neoxian | 2 | 10,885 |
| Legendary Dragons | 1 | 1,000 |
| PeakMonsters [Legion] | 1 | 321 |
| PeakMonsters [PREMIERE] | 1 | 2,000 |
| PeakMonsters [Vikings] | 1 | 247 |
| Roaring Twenties | 1 | 1,010 |
| TOTAL | 59 | 57,778 |
What are we supposed to do with this?
I don't have an answer. I wanted to take a look at how prevalent the practice of battle helpers was. Clearly, there is a significant presence in Tier 4 especially, where the stakes are highest.
I have no data on other battle assistance tools or private automation solutions and can't really speculate further.
What do you think? Does this surprise you? Let me know.
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love your brain so much and your relationship to data, transparency and clear ideas and what founds them is important to me big time, so weather we know what to do with this layer or not, its clear that peoples really want these tools and that there is a very clear future for these tools in the hearts and dreams of the people. As we work together to create a clear understanding of how we can integrate them, we may be able to dissolve most if not all the conflict surrounding growth in these areas.
Good job team
What I see is that the minority of players is using these tools. At least from the data slice presented here.
My conclusion would be the majority of top tier players dislikes the usage (or has own tools ;) )
You can throw all your esports + growth ambitions away, because full automation of Guild2Guild Brawls and Tournaments will only be a matter of time if not forbidden and sanctioned.
We can then simply switch to distributing rewards based on cards staked and leave out the entire gameplay ;)
gameified investment can take on a number of faces and each one of us sees a number of those faces, relative to how we see things in general, unique perspectives for sure.
That for sure, I totally agree. However, if all of them have the best in mind for the success of the investment, some might turn out to be more accurate than others ;-)
agreed, in my eyes it's all a focal pressure towards a larger sustainability and sense of collective self, through the cultivation of shared values / value, without losing sense of individual self and worth.
Thanks for bringing a bit of clarity to this area. Appreciate the effort.
Hmmm I am not using the BH, still one question. You only see, that the DEC have been send to XBOT. Can you as well see for what they are spend?
I mean. It would be possible that these players are using them for ranked or tournaments, but not for brawls.
Do I miss something?
I understood this as crystal clear. However, no clue if true or not.
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I haven't split it, that wasn't what was critically important to me. I just looked at who was loading funds. Besides, there isn't a way for someone to split usage from publicly available info.
HOWEVER, the bot plays ranked automatically with NO FEE. So pre-loading DEC to buy BH Credits seems to represent a clear intention to use for either Brawls or Tournaments. If a person uses for one, it seems very unlikely they wouldn't use for the other if they have funds loaded anyways.
Thats what I mean. We cannot see. I hope sooner or later using battle helpers for Brawls and Tournaments will be banned. I hope I can keep up with my performance in brawls without it. We will see.
Thanks for investigating.
Sometimes XBot stops playing with 1 or 2 fights left for the next dayly chest. When that happens people manually play 1 or 2 matches to top it off. Using BH in that instance for ranked is very common.
Also, I dont play tournaments but I do play brawls and I use it in many brawl fights (not all), but most of the time I make little changes to the teams suggested. I know this might not be what everyone is doing or even the majority but I think its a nice example to give out diferent perspectives.
I'm not too familiar with how the battle helper works, but how can you distinguish between people using it in ranked, brawls and tournaments?
(You don't need an Xbot token anymore in order to use it, so it can be used in all parts of the game)
Hi, no I don't believe there is a way for someone to split usage from publicly available info.
You are right that it's now available to play without an XBot token.
So I went back to the data, and I just randomly looked up 10 of the 53 Tier 4 accounts in my dataset:
-7 have XBot tokens
-2 share XBot tokens across multiple accounts
-1 has an Archmage token
So 100% of the very small sample have access to a high quality service for free ranked battle assistance. I suppose they might want to pay occasionally but that doesn't seem likely to be the primary use case.
I was just wondering. I definitely think this is very interesting info.
I agree that ranked battles is probably not happening a lot, but still not sure if it's brawls or tournaments, though.
If you're paying the helper it's logical to assume that is for both formats, tournaments and brawls.
I am the Guild Leader of [RKO] Outta Nowhere .
We have been complaining about bots for decades, and the Splinterlands team does not value social, economic, or rule-based values as other projects do.
So we are botting the whole Project now like many have been doing since day one.
I suggest everyone take advantage of becoming a bot in Splinterlands it saves you time.
Thank you for your transparency and openness. Automating brawls is definitely easier and doesn't appear to be against any rules so I can't blame you. Although I do wonder where we will be if this becomes the default path forward for everyone. Hopefully we can get some clarity since it seems there are still a lot of mixed messages about whether bots in brawls are welcome. Best of luck in the current brawl too. :)
We don't have a Brawling Bot this is in regards for Ranked battles, for our Brawls we have Skilled players and Coaches
Thank you for this interesting insight, good to know that one of my mates is using this tool, we signed Dave's pledge against bots, although I don't consider the same as botting isn't something I like to see though.
As you saw in the brawls chat I'd be glad to reach to a consensus so we can stop botting in brawls and tourneys and using the helper too. The Xbot owner pointed out that if we as a community disagree with this he would be eager to disable that option, would be nice to obtain a consensus and push forward some clear rules at them.
Maybe we can also think about the possible penalties for the players breaking the rules.
Right. It's possible if they have signed a pledge, they might be using BH for tournaments but not brawls, if that matters to you. The publicly available data is limited to who is loading funds, but not where they are spending them.
I think as a community we need to decide if there really should be rules, and really outline that clearly, before we can even start to think about penalties or enforcement. There is a lot of division and a lack of clarity at this point.
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