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RE: XBOT's stance on Battle helper (Proposal 8470)

in Splinterlands9 months ago

I'm going to address this part of your reply:

*In my opinion, these proposals are crucial to the future and survival of Splinterlands the game. Although the company started off with a bot agnostic position, over the past few years and especially the past few months, we as a community have seen the consequences of what happens when bot and battle helper use ramp up to such high levels. The reality is that while Splinterlands has always strived to ensure that bots do not have an unfair advantage over human players, it has become clear that over this entire time period the bots have maintained an advantage and that advantage has steadily grown over time.

The competitive aspect of the game disappears and skill becomes marginalized when everyone is using a bot or battle helper. Win trading within a botnet jeopardizes the integrity of the system. We have seen many human players give up and either leave the game or turn to botting (“if you can’t beat them, join them”) resulting in a cascading snowball effect.*

You say the company started bot agnostic and in the past few months we have seen the consequences of bots and Battle helpers. The damage was done by bot farms with 1000s of accounts farming DEC when it was over 10x peg. Even some team members were mass botting, at the time. Now that several individual players have decided to bot their 1 (or few) account(s) is when we have a problem? Now that regular players have access to public battle helpers we have a problem? Was it better when only a few had access to their own private battle helpers? This is my biggest issue with the whole anti bot and anti battle helpers stance: for many whales it only became a problem when the small fish got access to them. It wasn't the bots advantage that grew, it was the number of players with access to them.

You talk about win trading but that happens with those huge bot farms. Doesn't happen with regular players using a bot. It has been a problem for a long time and should have been addressed with bans. It isn't even necessarily a bot issue. Human players win trading should be punished too.

Another big problem is the definition and it being impossible to enforce. The current definition that went to vote doesn't allow for any help. So, a streamer taking hints from viewers is breaking the rules. The problem with those rules, taken from MTG, is that they are impossible to apply to online play.