Introduction
If you may not know, there's a proposal going for Splinterlands to try to implement anti-bot measures in Modern format and the voting is closing in one day. In this post, I want to share my opinion on this and basically why I'm against this proposal. You can read more information here on the proposal.
First Let's Confess
Ok I'm just going to confess and I hope not to get any haters but I might who knows. I am a botter on Splinterlands and not just one account but a few. I'm not crazy to the extent of 100s or thousands of accounts though. That's a completely different level and I don't approve of that level because that's just not healthy for the economy or the game.
There are a few reason why I became a botter. One I was influenced by my friend and mentor @aruchard who also bots; you may have seen his accounts in ranked gameplay before in diamond and champ. He was playing with owned cards by the way so it's not like he didn't have any skin in the game. Currently, he's renting all his cards to earn DEC for land so that's why you probably haven't seen his bots as much anymore. The second reason is botting allowed me to free up my time because playing daily did become a chore. Thirdly there was just so many bots and they were starting to get good so you know the phrase "if you can't beat them, join them".
In addition to that, I created a few accounts to fill brawl spots because wow we are really lacking players to play the game. I found it super hard to recruit responsible, committed and strong players to play in my guild even though I don't make any strict rules on having to donate DEC; it's completely voluntary and I do sometimes just ask for a bit of help. Almost all the good players will join bigger alliance guilds like ygg, team possible etc. Almost everyone is using alts to fill brawl spots or finding people with alts that are good to play. There's not many people that have strong owned collections so usually these are just accounts renting 100% to do brawls or if the person is a whale I guess they have enough cards to delegate to that alt account. For these extra accounts, I don't have the time to play daily on all of them and since I rented cards for the brawl it's kind of a waste so I found it ideal to just bot them.
I am thankful that I was able to recruit some great players like @certain, @captainwhoco, @ak08, @zactian, @izouky, @alokkumar121, @juniperscarnage, @theawesononso. They also became my good friends on Splinterlands to discuss the game, share strategies whether in investing or battles and to grow our assets in the game together. If I can't find any players that can be responsible and perform well, it's easier for me just to play and do it myself. I'm a super competitive person and I don't want to get dragged down by casuals not to be mean or anything.
Lastly, I am person that loves to be efficient and effective and that's where the idea of automation comes into play. I love the idea of automating and that's why even for renting cards out I use a service that adjusts the prices of the rentals daily. It would just take too much time if I had to set card rental prices everyday to get my cards to be rented out at the best value. Basically a combination of these things made me decide to turn to botting.
Even though I'm a botter I'm proud to say that I do play brawls manually , tournaments manually and I play on my scholarship account manually. I also do not use battle helper. I completely agree with brawls and tournaments to be bot free. Tournaments should definitely be the space that should be bot free as there are some huge prizes being given out there that currently are being farmed by super high end private bots.
Why I Voted NO
I have no problem with the idea of making Modern an anti-bot mode. That is completely fine for me. The reason why I'm against this proposal is because it's super half baked come on. You call this a proposal. If you're going to make such a big impactful proposal it should be more detailed with facts, data and on how the team will implement these changes. There was almost nothing to read in this proposal except for the idea of taking bots out of modern. I understand that it gave more leeway for the team to do what they want but this isn't right. I was hoping for this proposal to be rejected and have Yabapmatt or Aggy post a more detailed propsoal on what they will do to implement the anti-bot measures in Modern format.
Anyways Yabapmatt has left a comment on the proposal which I quote
I wanted to add some more information to this that may be helpful. There are third-party services that can be used to prevent bots from being able to use APIs, and they are supposedly pretty good from what I understand. So if this proposal passes, the plan would be to use one of those services in front of the battle API for modern format battles and the Splinterlands team would not be spending any resources "policing" the system or trying to identify bots and things like that. If this initial trial is successful and we continue this on an ongoing basis, I would probably make a proposal to ask the DAO to help cover the costs of that service, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
So now we know how they plan to implement the anti-bot measures. Do let me inform you that there are bots that are played locally and don't need to ping the API; I learned this from the Archmage discord and it explains why some of the big private bot users have voted yes on this. So in the end, there will still be bots in modern. With that being said, people will still complain because there will still be bots and these bots will still be taking those high ranking positions on the leaderboard. Even worse now these private bots won't have any competition with archmage or xbot users now. Until there's a better foolproof measure, I think taking the time to implement all this is a waste of time, money and resources. There's a high chance we will probably revert this change.
On top of that we could have problems due to waiting time to find matches. Do we have the data to prove we have enough players to actually match without playing the same person over and over. Take note we have energy now so once there's no energy people are going to stop playing.
Concluding Thoughts
I didn't write this to change your mind. I just hope you can have some insight on why someone would vote no on this proposal. I'm actually all for having a mode with no bots and they should start this at a smaller scale with tournaments. This would be really great for the ecosystem. I've always talked about having a mode free to play where we have access to all the cards without any earnings or NFTs. This will at least help people onboard to the game because if they like the game they won't mind spending money on the game. This could be a bad idea too but who knows.
If you think about it, all the root problems that are wasting the team's time now on developing the game could've been solved in the beginning if the team made a stance to not have any bots or multi accounts. I know there's no use talking about what ifs but who knows if we could be in a bot-free Splinterlands at this very moment if they made a decision to ban bots and multi-accounts. Playing the devil's advocate here, then there's also a possibility that this game couldn't have been successful without the bots because the bots were making the active player base data seem high. Anyways I could go on forever but I will stop here.
Thank You
Thank you for reading and supporting me. What are your thoughts on all this? Feel free to share in the comments below.
Referral Link
If you are interested in trying Splinterlands please use this link here. If you did use my referral link, let me know in the comment section, I will do my best to help whether that be delegating you cards, sending you cards and teaching you how to play. Once again, thank you so much.