Splinterlands and bots
I play the game since May, so I'm not a veteran. Still, I keep running into people talking about bots on discord almost every day. They say that there are too many very harmful bots. However, I never see a person who has one. I was curious how profitable it can be so I decided to try how many dec does a simple bot in Bronze III receive.
Creating a bot
I wanted to create the simplest bot I can as fast as possible. With the help of the Violentmonkey browser extension, I wrote one in a few hours. The bot uses hard-coded teams which means it is not smart at all, it does not have any AI (very few products have that anyway, it is usually a marketing expression and hides a bunch of ‘if conditions’). The “hard” (= boring) part is to write all these predefined teams, so first I only created a setting for the summoner called Malric. By setting I mean which cards should the bot use for different mana caps.
Results
With this very limited setting the bot has won 10 matches out of 20, starting from rating 0. That is 50% win rate which may seem to be low, but I think it is amazing for a simple bot like this. With the right cards and multiple settings, I think it could maintain a 500-1000 rating and earn chest rewards too.
Future and conclusion
I think in the long run bots can be profitable, so I will continue to develop mine. It should be able to use a summoner from every color and decide which to use to finish the daily quest. Some scouting features would increase its performance too (for example use water if the enemy has lots of armor). I will post about its performance later on.
Ehmm, what are you doing? lol...
Splinterlands allows multi accounts.. But I believe they allow it with certain use cases in mind, for example.. Lets say you got really good cards, for bronze, and you have a real shot at reaching the top 100 ranking, so you stay there, to appear in the leaderboard and maybe, get a prize.. But you also want to get more reward chests, so you could open a second account and rent and reach silver or gold or even diamond.. You couldn't do both things with just one account, right?
I like Splinterlands because its a somewhat casual game, you could play it for an hour everyday and still make progress, it's not like you have to grind it for 8 hours a day, in fact, if you do, your absorption rate of the crystals go down and you make a lot less DEC.. you can't trade cards between accounts without waiting a few days.. this things are in place because they are trying to prevent people exploiting the economy and creating a bunch of accounts and bots..
You do realize that the more people that use bots, even at bronze league, hurts the game and the overall economy of the game, right?
I'm a programmer too, I could program something like this as well, but I choose not to. There are other ways to make profit in this game (and that is probably one of the things I love the most about it). Just rent some cards and get to silver and have fun, you'll get the same rewards without abusing the system.