RE: An In-Depth Look at Splinterlands: Invasion of the Splinterbots w Giveaway, Warning, Solutions, and more!

There are bots in most any PC game, every blockchain is absolutely swarming with bots, and most transactions on Hive are bot/automated transactions.

That's kind of just the way of the world.

The bot owners have the @Splinterlands team in a bind at this point, because there is literally no way to stop them without destroying the "values" that make the game worth anything at all. If the devs start telling people what they can or can't do with the cards & accounts that they own, then they no longer own them, and we're back at a normal centralized CCG.

Besides that, the bot owners (like fireking) could single-handedly destroy the DEC/SPS/Card market at any time, if they decided to (like any other whale)

Overall, I think that the gradual shifts that they've been making are the right option. It will limit the number of bots (as the investment required for a profitable one just shot up), without necessarily turning the bot-lords into enemies of the game (which would be its demise without question.)

I think they also need to do a better job in marketing and such to emphasize that point: THIS IS NOT A FREE TO PLAY GAME!! If you want to even win a match at a MTG tournament, you better have spent a bunch of $$ on your deck. Same for Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Hearthstone, etc etc. Nothing about Splinterlands is geared towards folks not wanting to spend money (those are called non-customers), but towards those who want to invest and compete.

I'd love to see less bots, and I think over time the ratio will continue shifting more and more towards real players... Unless things go crazy, because of some big change the devs make.