To me using the reasoning we need the bot farmers due to our player base is bollocks. SM can easily deploy their own site bots that take 0 rewards. Players will be much more accepting of site owned bots then player owned ones. Make them easy to beat so they never leave the level they were intended to help with starting games. We have to remember these reward cards are capped so allowing bots to claim oodles of them isn't good for the game. I gave a perfectly good solution to the bot problem which I will outline below.
Human Check Done By A Human
Captcha is out of the question because many believe its centralized and the devs simply don't want it. Banning is out of the question .... Nuking cards is out of the question because it goes against the this is a blockchain game crowd. So with all that in mind .....
Lets have human checks. If an account has been playing for XX hours straight then a pop up with a SM team member starting a discussion with the dedicated player starts. If they don't respond then kick them from game play. We make the XX hours high enough so The majority of human players will never be bothered with getting a pop up. Once a player gets kicked the frequency in which they get pop ups increases until its determined a human player is actually using the account.
Maybe... it might indeed be a solutjon. But some people have bots that don't run all the time. And I assume it isn't that hard to add some code that makes the bot 'sleep' for a while and then start over again.
I did notice some new bots today. One was called Noobhelper (or something like that). It was an easy-to-beat level a bot in Silver 3.
It was a welcome change for once :0)
My suggestion is just the base model of it. After implemented the next step would be ... The tables getting policed via the players sort of like they already are except we could have an official email/channel to send in the compiants. XXX amount of complaints about XXXXX account and they get monitored and if needed a pop up as well. My suggestion comes from other gaming industries tactics of fighting bots and keeping in mind that centralized solutions can't be applied.
I think it's indeed important to see how the other gaming industries deal with things. After all, they have the experience...
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