I didn’t know this malpractice goes that deep and widely used. SPL needs to take action. I want bot farms to be licensed! I’m not against them but this is pure greed! A BOT SHOULD NOT PLAY AGAINST A BOT, period!

The more I think about it, the more SL team has to make a call on SL as an investment platform. You can't call it p2e if you don't even have to "play".. you just setup a bunch of bots... Bots totally devalue the play time of human player. Time is money. Bots have unlimited time. I have to put time to get my quest done. Did you check about CL packs bots are getting ? Could that explain why the pack price keep going down, bots just liquidating, or are they opening their packs?

A few questions/observations...

1. With the anonymous matchups, how do the bots know they are facing each other? Is there a pattern match based on the information presented and if some players outside of the bot farm are beneficiaries, it is a flaw that comes with the territory in developing these bot farms?

2. With as many bots as there are, you can check the Hiveblocks of each account and possibly get to the root of it all without scrolling through Peakmonsters. You can also query the blockchain through the Hive API.

3. The toothpaste is out of the proverbial tube and ranked rewards, daily quests, and end of season rewards have to be re-imagined. Bots are already active buyers and sellers. They are upgrading their decks to be competitive in higher leagues and possibly transferring SPS Airdrops to the farm owner.

4. The bot farms are invested in the game. It's just that their new money into the ecosystem is not being used to directly invest in the game assets. They create these accounts and some choose to engage in win trading with these bots to accrue game assets.

5. If the bots leave the game, the liquidity of the game goes off a cliff. We take it for granted that we can get a ranked match any time we want, but the bots go away and it becomes a bit of a wait.

6. The marketing effort is confusing. I'm going to be getting into this a bit in an article to be released soon, but I don't understand why they are directly incentivizing spammy content. Who is the target audience? What's the user persona you're aiming for? What type of income level? Geographic target markets? Overlapping interests? Everyone's Time & Attention is worth a different amount and how we interact with this ecosystem varies.

Like @crootin mentioned, having bots playing is actually good in ways, but I do think that the win trading is cheating, and should be stopped.
I hope this has been exposed in the Splinterlands discord, and a discussion started?

I support bots, but it's clear at scale it extracts significant wealth from the economy. I hope SPL is paying attention and these new rewards system changes will affect those bot farms. Sharing this on https://twitter.com/PraetoriaDigest.

i am definitely for a strict bot ban, they have no positive benefit for the economy, at most the waiting time of the battles, but to what extent that would deteriorate exactly without bots no one can say today. i do not know exactly how to get rid of them, but i am firmly convinced that we have clever minds in the team that could do it if they really wanted! unfortunately i have the faint suspicion that people from the team and their friends own large bot armies and therefore do nothing against it!

or they are really only interested in selling spellbooks, from which they have the most profit, that would at least explain for me why they first advertised in countries where it is known that most bots and the least money come from....

but i don't know what the real reason is, i can't understand allowing bots without having a secret self interest to pursue!