Is it possible to eradicate bots from Splinterlands?

Conversations about bots in Splinterlands has persisted for a long time. There has been intentional moves to eradicate bots as they are considered to be the scourge of Blockchain gaming.

Regardless of your opinion about bots in Blockchain games, there's no doubt that they are with us. They make up a decent chunk of activity in the game and the conversations are warranted.

During my playing days, I encountered a fair bit of bots in the lower leagues. They often pose a challenge for new players trying to climb up the ladder.

If you're a new player, you'd find it quite frustrating at times to play against the bots. It sucks out the P2P nature of the game and generally isn't very encouraging, if you're just playing for the first time.

This is something that I experienced first hand when I dropped down the leagues after taking a break and something that I know I will still see when I decide to return to ranked battling in the future.

Bots are inevitable

Despite the best attempts by Splinterlands team, it seems like there's no way to avoid them. Bots will still play a role in both ranked play and other aspects of the game.

The question of whether they're good or bad is still up in the air. Yes, they offer an unfair advantage to their owners who easily milk the reward pool without "lifting a finger" but at the same time, they sort of keep things moving, if you know what I mean.

The presence of bots ensures that there's always an opponent to play against and on the trading side of things, "botted up" accounts also contribute towards activity. Now, like I said, I'm not saying they're good but we can't deny their "input" in the day to day activities of the game.

Splinterlands is constantly heralded as the Blockchain game with the most daily transactions and while I'm not privy to the data concerning how much input bots contribute, they are involved. Kicking them out will also mean kicking out all the transactions they contribute towards the activity level of Splinterlands.

When we complain about bot activities in Splinterlands, most of the focus goes into eradicating them from ranked battles. However, there are also trading bots that are flipping NFTs and skewing the market to suit their automated desires.

We don't talk about those trading bots as much and I my opinion, if you want to actually tackle bots as a problem then it has to be a clean sweep. We can't pick and choose various aspects of a larger problem, and try to tackle it without tackling the other.

What I'm saying is that it will be impossible to eradicate bots from ranked play if the community is still cozying up with trading bots because they make it easier to buy and sell monsters in the market. I mean, technically, we could also say that bots in ranked play make it easier to find opponents.

Also, keep in mind that the owners of the bots are actually Splinterlands players that are running virtual servers that cost electricity and money, so to them, this is an investment. This means that any anti-bot measure you put in place will be net with a counter measure that slides through the cracks.

I hate to antagonise anything that resides in the grey area of a discourse and bots are there. We accept trading bots but don't accept bots in ranked play, so we can't say they don't have their uses.

Any decision that is made has to be considerate of the bot owners that are also Splinterlands investors and has to be approached in a way that isn't outrightly antagonistic.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta