Splinterlands: (Updated) Thoughts on Bots

The Splinterlands ecosystem and economy continues to evolve and I find myself often looking at the implications of changes made throughout it. Over the last couple of months the development team and community have been working together through a set of proposals to update the way rewards are distributed. The target of these changes has really been to incentivize the ownership of assets and to provide a interesting pathway for players to improve and upgrade their Collections to progress in the game. An implicit target has also been to materially decrease the potential exploits of large bot farms in the ecosystem.

I, personally, have always had a love-hate relationship with bots within the ecosystem. It got so far that I took the approach of no longer trying to beat them, but instead join them. Therefore, for a number of months I was also using bots to try to optimize my accounts. However, I quickly realize the way developers were going and decided to once again get more involved and instead of optimizing enjoying the journey along the way. I now only use one account for playing and separate accounts only for renting my extra cards. With the changes, I doubt that my approach will change in the short term.

I decided to share some updated thoughts on bots because I think there is the potential to go too far and also impact the experience for others in the ecosystem as an unintended consequence. I think some of the actions taken over the last couple of seasons have been very quick to implement and not taking into consideration the impact to a sub segment of players that are struggling to get started or have gotten started under a set of assumptions only to see things change very rapidly. I think this is clear when we look at the volatility and daily active players over the last couple of Seasons as well.

While I do believe that certain limitations and constraints need to be put in place to avoid the exploits of the bots, I do also believe that there are a number of alternatives that would’ve been a better approach to handle the box. I truly believe that if the Development team were to accelerate the development of lands, for example, it would allow the bots to have another sub segment of the ecosystem to focus on while leaving the gameplay to mostly players. This would benefit everyone in the ecosystem as it would maintain the activity and engagement while allowing both sides to focus on their strengths. Instead, tweaking all of the reward changes has left the door open for disgruntled players and bot operators which have also been a cornerstone to the ecosystem for years.

I am not only defending the bots here but I do believe that not having them around has limited the engagement in searching for matches during the season. This also impacts the player experience as many of us do not have the time to wait for games to be matched. This could be even worst in scenarios where more automation will be needed for other aspects of the ecosystem like the land system. I think bots will thrive in that future but we risk losing them in the short term if we become too aggressive with our changes. However, I trust the development team as they approach their long term vision to the ecosystem; remaining encouraged by much to come!

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