Are bots KILLING the game? Win-trade/surrender practices

in Splinterlands3 years ago

Lets take a look at the win-trade/surrendering bots.
It is possible to IMPROVE the rewards system to be more fair to the player?
Absolutely.
Lets debate.
bastard.JPG

Im a botter myself. I have a "massive" 50 accounts in Silver III, doing the daily quests, and averaging 10-15 battles per day. My bots are incredible profitable for the "human" player, since most of them, even holding/owning 15.000 CP worth of cards (100-120$), are quite predictable and will lose 70% versus any human player. Considering that if you have a 70% WR you will be climbing leagues as much as your CP allows you, this is incredible profitable if you just want to grind your quests, get your DEC, and move on to the next day. I dont sell the cards, in fact I hold all the rewards, plus I keep buying packs/cards. Why? Because the game and the HIVE blockchain are incredible undervalued, and most of the bots run on tight margins. I dont care if my "assets" takes 5-6-10 or 20 years to do a x100, but most of the bot farms needs to sell daily to keep the operation running and survive. Thats completely fine for me, the rewards system are designed that even you do 400 battles per day, your dec gains will be pretty similar to someone doing 25 battles per day. So what is the problem with the current botfarms?

- THE HUGE PROBLEM

When you face an opponent, you can see his nickname. So if I face JustinBieber, I will see his teams, and I will try to submit my team. In the lower leagues many players dont own any cards, and bots just rent to reach 15.000 CP, or 100.000 CP, to get the daily quest and the dec rewards from the battles. Since they are renting for CP -the cheapest one- and not for cards/aiming WR, most of the battles that happens are with identical cards. Let me ilustrate with a screen of 4 of my bots, thanks to Alinubu Bot for his amazing work. (https://github.com/Alinubu/SplinterlandsRObot)
draws.PNG

As you can see in the picture first column is ECR, second winds, third is draws, and fourth is losses.
My bots are drawing aprox. 15% of the time.
It means that, if I start the day at 100% ECR, when I play 25 battles, 4 of them wont give any DEC, and I will lose ECR from those battles.
If I were a scummy person, I would simple put that, once I face one of my others bots, either surrender or put one card, so that 4 draws become a win, and I will get 0,4 DEC x 4 = 1,6 DEC per bot account more per day.
Now imagine that instead of having 50 bots accounts, I have 5k bots. Not a huge amount, pretty sure some people hold about 10k? Probably their number of draws are even higher than mine -keep in mind that my bots own summoners leveled, and gold cards, so if their bots are drawing 20% percent of the time, thats 5 more wins per day. Lets talk numbers:
5 wins * 0,4 DEC * 5000 accounts = 10000 DEC

I dont know exactly how many of the battles per day are between bots, but Im pretty sure the number should be close to 50% in Silver/low Gold.
So if the numbers are right, 500.000 battles per day, 20% of them draws,100.000 battles.
100.000 battles * 0.4 = 40000 DEC.

I think I was pretty conservative with the numbers, but you get the idea: scummy bots are taking dec from real players/honest bots.

- PROOF

You dont need to be incredible smart to know which bots are doing scummy practices. Just take a look at any battle history and follow the trail:

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- HOW TO FIX THIS?

Rewards must be revamped. Based on starter cards owned from the lineup on the battle get a bonus. Also give another bonus if your CP is owned instead of rented. The game is incredible cheap to play/earn from a crypto point of view. I made a guide in which you would get a ROI close to 100% on 1 year with just a 100$ investment. There is no need to give dec rewards to botters who DOESNT OWN any card, and if you do so, you should reward more players that invest their time, and money, holding cards.

- BUT THIS WILL HURT NEW PLAYERS!!!

Absolutely not. With 10$ you get a spellbook, with 1$ you can rent your way to Silver or Gold, make your daily quests, and average 0,20-0,30$ per day. You get your spellbook money worth back in less than 3 months. You wont get rich with 10$, at least not until 10 years, but you can be damn pretty sure that if you enjoy and learn the game, in a 1 year lapse of time your 10$ will become 100$ even if they lower dec rewards from scummy botters :).

- BOTS ARE EXITING

Many people are selling his bots accounts for 2-3$. Why? Because they dont own any cards, and they know that pretty sure these kind of bots will get so low dec/cards rewards in the future that they wont be worth it anymore, so I expect that sooner than later, cards and sps prices are going up again. Keep in mind that as soon as "real" players are rewarded properly, compared to scummy bots practices, supply is pretty low in almost any card available, even in Chaos legions commons.

If you take a look at #peakmonsters Peakmonsters, there is not enough supply to even max 2 Sunkai Harvesters without pushing the price... 300%? So the team really need to push towards rewarding cards holder better, even if they are bots, and try to push away as much as possible the scummy botfarms.

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Thanks for sharing/reading.
#splinterlands #peakd #splintertalk #peakmonsters

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