To whoever it may concern...
Last 27th of January @jabapmatt announced that the team is planning to remove the opponent name during ranked combat in an attempt to fight bots from exploiting auto surrendering.
My personal take on it
Opponent adaptation is an absolute fundamental of the meta-game of any card game.
I am totally against removing the name of my opponent, to me that is like trying to kill flies with a howitzer and it could have profound repercussions. Essentially, I believe there are other ways to penalise auto surrendering bots without incurring in dumbing down the game. Let's not forget that every card game has this aspect of adapting to opponent.
This game is advertised as a dapp or "decentralised app", which is like virtue signalling for transparency. Now, how transparent is blocking opponents names? How decentralised is having a central server temporarily obfuscating opponent names?
First you removed the battle data from HIVE blockchain and now this .. seriously guys you can do better than that. (I understood the technical reasons behind the decoupling of HIVE blockchain but I just don't see this).
Again, here are other ways to penalise win trading, examples:
Account A surrenders to Account B if this happens more than 3 times you ban both accounts (more than 3 times in a timespan of 1 month)
If one account is surrendered to more than the typical deviation it should get blocked (you can detect that statistically)
Just because the official UI says little about your opponent does not mean player info should not be exploited. If what you want is to create a more fair battleground, do it by enriching the experience instead of limiting it. (Create more advanced UIs for real players).
PD: free information will always be exploited better by smarter or better organised individuals/groups, you cannot change that. Now ask yourself this, you really want to combat free information?
Thanks for reading.
Cheers,
lightproject