First of all: thanks for your reply, and of course it is no problem that you see things partly different than me. I welcome the discussion whatever opinion anybody has.
Let me answer a few of your points:
I know that quite some absolute top players are using bots for sure, just trust me, even if I don't like to mention the names of single users here (ok, I mentioned yours above, but I knew you wouldn't feel attacked - as normally you prefer to attack yourself, hehe). :-)
The problem which I see is that sooner or later bots will be simply too strong. In my eyes (based on my experience with other games) that is only a matter of time.I am curious, when exactly you made that test in Bronze leauge? My experience is that in these low leagues one is facing nearly solely strong, logically built teams, I nearly never had opponents where I had the impression that "Well, finally, finally I met a real beginner!" In a beginner league one would expect to face obvious tactical mistakes from unexperienced players (which are the ones for whom these leagues are destined). Never ever!
So in case someone is really new an unexperienced, how would they win games there?I think in times where there were/are not enough players to find opponents fast enough one could simply reduce the numbers of different leagues to increase the number of potentially available opponents.
Another option would be non-optimized bots provided by the Splinterlands team."I doubt the bot issue is such a serious danger"
Here of course we disagree (otherwise I wouldn't have written my post).
I am sure that sooner or later we will have to face a complete bot dominance like in many other games as well (look for examples in my post, where I also described that for instance in chess there was simply no other choice than banning chess software).You have a valid point that there would be kind of a dilemma when trying to ban bots in a decentralized environment. My post was written mainly to point out my worries, it was not yet about possible solutions of the problem.
We should seek for any clever ways to detect bots without to remove anonymity of the players in ranked matches. A very difficult (impossible?) task!
The problem to avoid complete bot dominance in the game but at the same time keeping untouched its decentralized nature is very difficult to solve ... and thus my worries about the future of the game.
thx for the well thought reply, gimme time over the week to answer properly
Yes, just take your time ... there is no pressure at all.
here).Maybe interesting are also the ideas of @marianaemilia (you find her comment