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RE: Splinterlands - the bot problem in higher leagues.

in #splinterlands3 years ago (edited)

Thx @jaki01 - better to discuss here as on Discord. However my quote here was bit taken out of context:

Here I also cannot save my friend @uwelang from mentioning him. He wrote in Discord that people would only complain about bots "because they are too stupid or not skilled enough to beat them". Well, he himself cannot beat them either, and thus is using a bot, too. :)

My "harsh" comment was related to discussions around bots destroying experience of new players in Silver / Bronze etc where I used to play a lot with only spellbook cards and did beat most opponents without even thinking about team setup (can not 100% confirm if i played against bots though).

Similar on the Top 50/25 area, no idea who uses bots, assume many do - I also use a bot (for ranking) but not always, I use it mainly due to time constraints but am confident I can beat manually also bots lol - tried 2 days ago after 8 losses with bot and suddenly had a 6 game win streak manually.

The bot discussion is pretty popular since start of the game, in the earlier days without bots the game probably would have died already - you might remember times where you had to wait 5 minutes before it broke up to find opponents. My main concern while I was "attacking" some people is ongoing discussion without any news in this Discord, the content and engagement there used to be top positive, now it is only complaining which is not helping to the outside world. I doubt the bot issue is such a serious danger - I feel the main issue is when players are negative and that the "anti bot rules" as they were currently considered (mainly the ECR part) are driving manual / human players away from the game.

Bots are common everywhere, but to ban bots in a "de-centralized" environment on a blockchain (no matter how de-centralized it is in the end) is that much against the blockchain approach in general - which is maybe a reason of the discussions, some come as a gamer without blockchain mindset, others startet being a Hive / Steem user and might be heavy blockchain fans but less gamers :-).

Even players that use bots from time to time are not only botting but also spend time in-game to do other stuff such us buying assets or talk to fellow players - when the changes such as ECR reduction will be implemented indeed only bots will benefit and there is no reason to play manually and spend time in-game anymore -at least for me.

EDIT: Just to add: I talk about manual players that use bots, behind bots usually are humans that drive / handle a bot like a driver in Formula 1 :-). I do not talk or am releated to any bot farms with thousands accounts.

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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