Curious about the Steem Monsters 'miners'
Although I have been playing @SteemMonsters since I got a starter pack at SF3 and have faced lots of apparently automated accounts I have not looked into how they operate.
Here is an example in @minnow.helper. By the time I looked at their progress after defeating them they had played another couple of battles and managed about 50 in an hour. A lot of these accounts tend to use the Life splinter, but this one likes Water. They have also used Death and Earth.
They started around the same time as me and have fought nearly 17,000 times. I have clocked up 1441 by doing daily quests a few times per week. I do not play every day.
Although they have ranked much higher before they seem to have settled into the Silver leagues as I assume it is easier to win there. Previously this would not have been worth playing too often as you can only do one challenge per day to win cards. So is it more about DEC (Dark Energy Crystals) now? I looked on Steem Engine, but there is nothing there. They may be using a Tron wallet to sell what they get. I guess with that many battles they could be turning over several thousand tokens per day, which could be a nice income.
Looking at their Steem wallet they are only making a few Steem per week from selling cards. They have a few hundred Steem sitting there that I guess they will sell some time. Their last posts are a load of Drug Wars battles 3 months ago.
Via the SM Discord I can see they are holding a fair few cards.
Now, this is just one example and there are lots of others. I guess there is a nice income to be made from this if you sell the DEC. I am curious about what sort of automation is behind this. Has someone built a toolkit that lots of them use? It is all just transactions on the blockchain and those can be generated by code. It would need some 'intelligence' to assess what the other player is likely to. They could quickly review my last few battles whereas I will only see their most recent unless I open another tab to check up on them. You only have 2 minutes to select your cards, so I have not been doing that. Using all that time would slow them down a bit.
There must be a lot of bot vs bot battles going on. Is there any way to prevent this? There would have to be changes to the game to enforce some sort of human interaction.
Does anyone have further insight into what goes on behind the scenes? I am still likely to keep playing the game manually for fun and a little profit via buying votes for DEC. I do not plan to set up my own bot. I am unlikely to get much higher than Gold unless I start spending a lot more on cards and I am more interested in powering up. Are others still just enjoying the game?
I have yet to play in any tournaments. I have not really looked into it, but I assume I need to find one at a convenient time for me.
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I have tried to find the scripts behind the 'battle bots' and come up empty. It's not something that is generally advertised unless perhaps you are looking in the wrong places.
The bots were incessantly battling before DEC arrived, and now it's even better for them. You will see they are not making a lot due to the VP effect.. perhaps 4 or 5 per win but it adds up.
I wonder if there are some secret Discord channels where it all gets organised. If an automated process can make you dollars per day then it is worth it.
Hmm. I should have stock with coding eariler on :p
It feels like cheating to me, it may not be since its just a bot, but not sure it was intented for bots, dno, not a fan xD
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It goes against the spirit of gaming, but there is money to be made, so someone will do it. I do enjoy beating such accounts.
Ye it does, which is why it annoys me.
But true
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i've been dumpin my dec for trx using tronwatch.market -
my income is shit right now - and i'm just holding my other bags tight (because i'm not a trader) - so it's definitely a good way to get smaller investments rolling ;)
I've not used the Tron wallet. I'm getting all these tokens on Steem Engine and wondering whether to just sell for Steem. I wonder if interest in them will last, but it is early days.
Bots playing card games is nothing new. It happens even in Hearthstone.
Certain decks can auto-pilot with a fair win rate. (i.e. Pirate Warrior, Secret Paladin.)
You bet there are organized rings doing this.
I'm sure it is organised as multiple accounts means more profit. Could be interesting to investigate if someone has the time. Not sure anything can be done about them as it stands.
If a company like Activision-Blizzard can't do it, I highly doubt much is to be done here.
Could these bots possibly impact a new player like myself negatively? Would it hurt my chances at being successful playing steemmonsters? I was looking into starting to play, but if it's going to be seriously crippling, I might wait until a solution has been implemented.
Well I was actually looking at leasing some of my cards to new players to get them started. If you go into the lower leagues with decent cards you should progress. The bots seem to be mostly around silver that I've seen. If you do get a starter pack then leave me a message with the splinters you want to try and I'll lend you some cards. You could probably soon win a few cards.
There have been loads of conversations in Discord about the bots. The developers know about them and they are not against them.
I was able to find a script when I was curious some months ago. It was written in python if I remember rightly. however, the bots don't all work in the same way but, for the most part, they just pick good general winning teams, play to a certain level and then lost their way down again.
There was one which would read your cards and then play the exact same cards at a higher level. The developers didn't like that one and added the setting so you can stop your cards being read.
When I was curious about them I easily found one ring that contained 28 accounts all playing at the same time.
Believe it or not it seems to be better since DEC and resource credits were introduced although I notice there are a lot more red team bots these days. 😂
I heard about them being able to see your cards before the battle. There was also an issue with knowing what was in card packs. They had to sort those out. As the games are controlled by their own servers it ought to be possible to have some way to limit what bots can do. I just like beating bots when I play :)
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I wondered about the viability of DEC mining as well. I thought I read at one point there would be diminishing returns on what you can earn in battles to try and mitigate bot mining operations like this . I don't know if that is accurate though.