A Narrative on "The Bot Problem" in a Historical Context of the Game

"The bot problem" is an unavoidable topic that pops up the second people find out there are bot farms within the game that reap rewards among the exponentially growing population of real life human players. If you bring this up the second you find out they exist, don't worry you're not alone. But there is a rationale in dealing with phenomena, in game and believe it or not the game has learned to cope with them in a very healthy way.

What is paramount to understand is the game is aware of them and has dealt with them since day one. The game's position has always been to make the player experience of humans the most important component moving forward. The game has worked tirelessly to make manually playing your matches the highest advantage in comparison to programmed accounts, or bots.

Splinterlands has had this issue pop up in virtually every single AMA, been questioned about it and there simply is no eliminating it. The game's position has always been to enhance the live player's gaming experience while eliminating any advantage gained from botted accounts.

While it may seem frustrating when you see a botted account play against you with the same name and a different number on the end that of course is a blatant botted account, and/or a series of multiple owned accounts by the same user or user group. There is extreme frustration in losing to these accounts when you play, of course, but there are other considerations you must take into account.

First, if these bot accounts are to remain viable and reap any rewards typically they have to continually reinvest in the game. Simply dumping their daily and season rewards over time would eventually render them fairly useless. If your account is populated with solid cards in many different splinters then typically you as a player will fare very well.

Early on in the game there was a serious issue with low level botted accounts abusing season rewards reaching ridiculously high levels. That has been corrected and improved the game in the sense of collection power. The game has also solidified immensely in placing players over time in their correct divisions and levels of attained rewards because of it. If a player winds up in a certain level there is no question now to whether or not they deserve their reward bonuses.

As you play your daily quests you will easily recognize the goofy bots that have a series of the same name without a problem. But, those that were coy enough to label their multiple accounts differently you will not unless you do some homework looking at how often they play, and other factors. As you scroll through your wins and losses in your daily quests you will very likely notice your win/loss record against bots is very solid. Which introduces an interesting phenomena altogether.

Humans get frustrated when they win say 25-30% of their matches. Bots do not. Bots do not care about 10 game losing streaks, humans do. Humans tend to add the cards they need to avoid these things, bots plow through their daily matches until the user who controls realizes what's going on and then weighs factors of whether or not to add cards to that account--which in the end again causes the bot owner to reinvest in their account pouring resources back into the ecosystem as a whole to continually improve a given account to make it viable.

The higher the human percentage of players grows, as it has exponentially as of late, the more these bots take a beating. Sure they may reap a decent little reward over time but the human that is playing to maximize their rewards will essentially over time overtake these accounts, without question. The bot owners are essentially playing the game with a "minimum reward expectation" while the manual player is looking for a "maximum reward expectation."

All of that sounds too simple I am sure to some of you. I am not going to convince every single person that bots are not the root of all evil. As you play the game over time you will realize the bots are providing match liquidity (very short waiting times at any time of day for matches) and they are providing you with a "sparring partner" that helps you gauge whether or not your deck is "up to snuff" at the current level you are playing.

As the growth continues it's going to get more and more difficult for bot farms and bot owners to eek out solid gains like they have seen over the years, that is without question. These did well because there were fewer users much earlier on, then the game did a series of events to prevent them from overrunning the experience and leeching away all of the rewards--which it has been immensely successful, and I think will be continually better as we progress into adding an astounding amount of newer human players that beat down these bots.

Another consideration is at some point the bot owners will be bought out by human players. The gains they could realize without having to even mess with the issues of programming, re-programming and whatnot will be overwhelmed by buyer influx. Their prices or expectations will be met just like any manual player of all their matches, and they will sail off into the sunset and do something else.

But make no mistake, the overwhelming amount of these bots are not keeping people from advancing to higher levels. Almost 100% of the time that is the combination of the player's deck level and their ability to strategize with it to beat their opponents at their given level is the ultimate determining factor of relative success in game. There are some that are very good yes, but the vast majority of them are very easily beatable in the level they are at, and I would go out on a limb if you looked at your past week of daily quests you have beaten many more bots than realize to complete your daily quest and help you level up to the level you ultimately attain in season.

The Splinterlands has addressed this issue and has the manual, live player in the center their mind and has combatted this perceived problem in the past to great lengths. The game has actually improved greatly as prior mentioned collection scores, DEC energy capture rates, and other methods to eradicate the inherent advantages that botted accounts may hold over human players. I would be willing to guess the dev team as time rolls on will find other more inventive ways to further the human experience.

Bot owners are now in a "hanging on a wolf's tail situation." They must continually plow rewards earned right back into these accounts or have the high likelihood of losing all momentum gained to this point by letting go of the proverbial "wolf's tail" and getting devoured by the player base.

The in game rewards moving forward are highly built for more account consolidation, more higher leveling of cards and many other dynamics that will slowly erode the incentive to continue these bots over time. SPS rewards is definitely going to provide a high level of an antidote to the bot farm endeavor. It will be far more lucrative over time to hive a high end elite account that takes advantage of all guild bonuses, land bonuses, and other in game bonuses to come than to simply have a lower level army of less relevant accounts. Live players are not striving to become "the bare minimum attainable account at their given level" but much more so on the growth end, continually getting better, buying, renting and leveling up their standing in the game on a basis especially correlated to the amount of accounts they are manually playing.

This is all just an opinion of what I have seen develop over the past three years (plus) being involved as a player and fan of the game as it has developed. I of course welcome any opinion to the contrary of what I have said above, but also bear in mind it comes with careful consideration and analysis of how the game has progressed over time. Thanks for the read and I look forward to your comments and thoughts on the issue.