As more and more updates are rolled out, bot farms have become less and less profitable. Is this upcoming change the single decision that will put bots in the red? Coming up!
I want to start by saying that I am, in general, BOT NEUTRAL. I don't think massive bot farms taking rewards from lower levels is healthy for the game, but I also appreciate botting services like Archmage and Splintermate in that they can play for me when life gets busy.
Whether it's a few days that I'm not playing when on vacation, or you feel under the weather - these botting services can step in without me feeling like I HAVE to use up my ECR
All that being said, time and time again, the Splinterlands team has consistently driven towards incentivizing human players over bots. The team has stated multiple times that they will not outright ban bots, but will create a reward structure where a human player can outperform bot farms. The team has stayed true to this, and I think this upcoming pivotal moment is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back - or in other words, the change that dries up bot farms
Let's take a walk through the brief history that is Splinterlands, and what they have done to counteract massive bot farms. First was implementing the ECR system. ECR is a percentage that decreases rewards the more you play. This helped curtail bots that are playing thousands of games per day. Fast forward to more recently, the release of the new ranked reward system incentivized card ownership by significantly decreasing rewards when using ghost cards. The new ranked reward system also pushed players to higher leagues for better rewards.
Then, a little after that, the team changed the way daily quests and focuses worked in that you no longer needed to, and could not spam a specific splinter to accumulate daily chests. Even more recently, the team also implemented a 2-day minimum rental rule AND further reduced ECR if players ever dropped below 50%.
All those impacts put together has significantly reduced bot farm earnings. Jens, an active Maverick that also owns a bot farm, shared in the Mav chat one day that the earnings from his bot farm bronze chests dropped close to 80% with the recent barrage of nerfs.
This is only the reward chest side of the equation though. There are also earnings through individual ranked battles. I say that now, but this new upcoming change is about to significantly reduce those rewards at lower levels!
What is this change? It's the first ever proposal being voted on via the SPS governance token. In this proposal, which currently has 84% of votes voting FOR it, the reward structure will change in that SPS rewards for ranked battles will be allocated in pools by league.
Why is this significant? If the ranked battle SPS rewards are now going to be divided by leagues in the manner described in this post, then the bots will be fighting with each other for a fixed pool of SPS rewards
Rather than pulling from the entire pool based on reward shares, they will be pulling from a league-specific pool. With over 30K silver users and 50 to 70K bronze users, the actual rewards per user at those leagues will be cut significantly!!
Lower chest values PLUS lower ranked battle rewards looks like a double whammy for bot farms in bronze and silver. I think the majority of bot farms will no longer be operational once this update goes in effect. If anything, bot farms may combine cards to farm at the Gold / Diamond level.
I think that we will start seeing a steady decline in Bronze and Silver users - primarily bots - in the upcoming weeks if this proposal passes. We may see a slight increase in Gold league users, but the cost of cards go exponentially higher as you move up leagues!
What are your thoughts? Are you for or against bots? Do you own a bot farm yourself? I would love to chat more on what impacts all this has to the game economy! For one, I can definitely see rentals of single BCX cards dropping significantly!
Well that's it for this week fam! I wanted to throw my thoughts out there on this first ever proposal for SPS governance! Make sure to go vote and have a say!
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