This is a really nice post that expresses a lot of concerns that players have about splinterlands future and bots.
It is known that AI bots have beaten the top profesional players in DOTA, Starcraft and many other WAAAY more complex games that what we have here in splinterlands so Im fairly sure that pretty soon we would have umbeatable bots here too. Ofc bots wont ever be completely unbeatable in splinterlands because of the RNG nature of the game but Im pretty sure bots will factor this in and win in the long run.
In FACT the simpler a game is, worst would be for bots.
I see mainly 2 advantages for bots over humans.
1. Bots can pick a "perfect" team given a selected ruleset and mana cap. And the way the best bots work right now is they collect data and Win % of thousand of fights and make a database of the best compositions posible. Also bots can simulate hundreds of fights in seconds and get you the best composition posible for a certain ruleset and your cards.
Its true that humans can also do this, in fact the best players out there are really good at this but it requires a lot of mental efford. For a bot after is programed its just no efford at all, just reanse and repeat.
2. Another way bot can take advantage, and I been very vocal about this in the past, is that they can not only pick the best team for the ruleset but ALSO pick the best team against a CERTAIN OPPONENT. A bot can see all your past battles, can analize your patrons of play and check your entire collection, simulate hundreds of battles against your cars just before summiting a team. And ofc after all that they can just add your IGN to the database and next time they face you they will be even stronger.
And this will be what the strongest bots out there will feature. Can a human compete with this? I dont think so.
As an example of this the ARCHMAGE BOT decided THEY WONT PLAY TOURNAMENTS. I think this is because they know it wouldnt be fair and the community wouldnt just accept that. So, it would be a really bad business decision.
The "hide the enemy name" update was supposed to be the solution to point N° 2, but that solution didnt featured tournaments where high end bots will reside. Lets face it, a smart bot its only made for leaderboards and tournaments. Theres no other reason to make them. So, why just limit them on ranked play only? I think its just because the team dont see this as an issue (YET) and the update was just meant to stop the win trading in bot farms (wich didnt work as we know).
Thats why im really sceptical about bots. I think they are ruining the game right now with their bot farms and that they can ruin the game in the future if they become unbeatable.
The solution for all this? I think a good first step would for devs to apply the "hide your enemys name" update to tournaments to at least show us and bot developers that they wont have a staking card bot ruled game.
A (smaller) advantage of bots is in addition that they have no emotions, are never tired, nervous, distracted, frustrated, impatient. They also never accidentally confuse cards or rule sets.
oh, ofc, I was taking those for granted, but very true