You know, for the time it existed, I rather enjoyed the rotating daily challenge and having to win 5 battles to earn the daily chests. With the new streamlined daily focus and 24 battles each day, things are a bit more monotonous since the daily focus is not really that relevant anymore. I attempt to manually play my 24 daily ranked battles when I can, but when time gets tight and the responsibilities pile up I'd still rather have a bot running than rent out all my cards for value. In fact, I think if I did the math, I would probably still earn more by renting my cards than having them botted each season.
What keeps me coming back though, are the brawls and tournaments, two game modes that I LOVE playing by hand for the sake of the competition. When I am manually playing and I battle someone I'm familiar with, I will try to shoot them a message to see if it was really them playing live. Sadly, more often than not, you are right and it is a bot playing. But I am encouraged by the effort to limit bots in modern. This would definitely encourage me to pick up playing modern again manually and then let the bots battle it out in wild.
What started me down the path of botting in the first place was just trying to keep up and take advantage of those 24 daily battles. With those changes nearly a year ago now, they really reinforced the point that you were leaving value on the table if you didn't take advantage of all 24 battles each day. I try to carve out time every day, but sometimes that time is directed solely to brawls and tournaments, and writing Splinterlands content, and researching cards, and looking for deals. There is just so much to do within the ecosystem, that I feel the ranked play bots allow me to keep up with the competition so I'm not missing any value. But I do miss the chats and comments when playing a human v human battle, and that is becoming too few and far between. I'm looking forward to more human formats, if we have the technology to do it without being plagued by bad actors.
Fingers Crossed!
And it doesn't matter what it is, does it? Seems to credit regardless.
I think so. And if it continues as it is, I will rent my cards out, wait til a pump and sell them - because I am not enjoying playing that much at the moment.
This is what kills the community aspect of it. It annoyed me in the discord in the bragging channel, when it was just bots. Can't send a message and get a response - they aren't even there. I stopped trying.
I think this is where Azir would say - get a jockey/pilot or whatever he calls them! :D
Azir calls them scholars, but there are only so many good players to go around. NFTy arcade serves as a middle man to find scholars for your collection, but I have not tried that yet.
I do really miss all the trash talking, that was fun. But the rivalries I have now in brawl I think are even more enjoyable.
As for the ranked battle focuses, it allows you to earn larger rShares for your chest when you meet the conditions, but the bots are so finely tuned, that you really can't even afford to try to play to your focus anymore, because any suboptimal lineup will be punished.