First of all, thank you to everybody for the controversial yet insightful discussion.
My view on bots is relatively simple: I think they are not good for a game in the long run, but I would not want to use technics such as captcha etc which would require users to use the official UI. This would be against the spirit of a blockchain game.
At the moment, there is a problem in the sense that a bot has an unfair advantage as it can react in the last second - which is difficult to achieve manually - and also very inconvenient, especially during night time.
When I designed Rabona I thought about bots quite a bit - and I actually did think about this here as well. My initial idea was that it can be changed when it becomes an issue - and this is clearly what has happened now.
I think the solution going forward will go in the following direction:
The formation is no longer sent in an unencrypted way but instead will be sent encrypted with a nonce. This nonce will be added to the transaction son - encrypted with the public key of the game.
The backend will then decrypt the formation and save it.
When the game is played, the game details will include the nonce so that everybody can check that the formation was valid.
I think this should work well, even though it involves some other problems such as the API, which needs to output the formation also in an encrypted way.
Overall, this might take a little while, but I am sure that we will get this problem sorted.
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Thank you @rondras , I think this is a great initiative!
Yes, completely understand your stand on why you don't want to take a hard anti-bot route. Bots will continue to exist in blockchain games....so as long as it's a fair playing ground for everyone, I think it's all cool!
We gotta come together from time to time to talk about controversial topics ;) It's an essential step in moving forward.