e1c0f641a1b209fd47c30b2524f672176a28de34
Proposal
Make the use of a bot to submit teams for battles that reward SPS a violation of Splinterlands' terms of service.
Purpose
To simply make the use of a bot to submit teams for battles that reward SPS a violation of Splinterlands' terms of service. Not asking to create policy on what actions to be taken if found violating this TOS, simply to make it against TOS.
Execution
Amend Splinterlands' terms of service to include the use of a bot to submit teams for battles that reward SPS a violation of Splinterlands' terms of service.
Proposing botting is against TOS without explaining how to identify bots is a non-starter for me. I'm not going to start the foundation for a witch hunt without clear guidelines on this.
I agree, IDing and proving its a bot is insanely hard. Which is why I did not include anything beyond making it against TOS. Im not a subject matter expert there and will not pretend to be. Hopefully people from the community with that kind of knowledge can flesh it out for us in the future.
offering an option without a reasonable way of making it become reality is called populism.
that's why Brexit failed so miserably.
removing bots reduces the number of games played drastically.
new or bad players also have far less chance to win against veteran players.
Rental income would dimnish if the entire Bot base can no longer make a profit, and players who dont want to play manual constantly will likely start adding cards to the rental market instead of taking them off.
you will have people who own cards and bot on several alts start selling or renting those cards also.
on top of the fact that town halls mentioned botting was legal on several occasions and it wouldn't change in the future.
removing a method of getting a profit from assets = asset value drops, thats simply how a market works.
removing predictability by having populism overrule old verdicts = less chance of long term investing.
Yes, removing bots would harm the battle liquidity (like in modern, when the split happened) and likewise the rental market will suffer as well.
That's a no brainer.
Tbh I think NFTyArcade is the best product to tackle the profit of asset holders in such a case, combined with a much better onboarding procedure in place.
The worst experience for players starting with no clue of the game mechanics is getting owned by some creepy bots even in novice all day long, which operate on their databases.
Always loosing won't get you to swollow the splinterlands pill!
As you said:
"on top of the fact that town halls mentioned botting was legal on several occasions and it wouldn't change in the future."
I would answer with a quote from @yabapmatt:
"Initial plans are never perfect and it's important to be able to make changes to the initial plan later on."
that they damage the rental market is but only the first look. because the whole look is. they take it away from us from the reward pool and give us a small part of it back via the rental market ;)
and what's worse, it's not even given back fairly. they take it away from the lower reward pools and through the rental market they give it back to the people from upper leagues for the most part. so in addition it's a redistribution from the bottom to the top
no, once bots are banned. then the starting shot is given to figure out how best to eliminate them. because even a plan made now would eventually be circumvented by bots therefore it is a constant process.
but for this the legimatimation must first be created!
is pretty easy with bots, aggy even said that himself, because bots access the game differently, they enter commands, card numbers etc. no human does that, we click on a card with the mouse! ;)
That's not entirely true! Just use a search engine of your choice and lookup "selenium python".
With that a bot would click on a card almost in the same way like you do.
It just uses the code behind those graphics you see to know which card to choose.
Before trying to tackle bots one would need to ask the right questions beforehand and discuss this maybe with some folks who have some developing background to get at least an idea what could be a possible way to get this problem "solved".
This is usually the issue with topics like these: developers (like me) are saying that there is no 100% way to determine who's a bot, that it would ultimately result in witch-hunts and that many bots/software-solutions would go undetected (thus punishing the honest players), but then non-developers come around and argue: "I don't care, find a way".
The real solution IMO would be something like:
Love both your solutions. Now i don't care how you do it, just find a way to get it done! 🤣
you're really comparing 20 fights to 20 hive votes?
you can see that some people don't give a shit about the game, people like you even find the game annoying. in good games people even take time off from work to be able to gamble more.........
there you can see the problem that arises when investors vote on things in the game.......
I highly doubt Aggy said that ("bots enter commands, card numbers, etc.")
He ain't that ignorant when it comes to tech.
i'm pretty sure he mentioned it once in a stream. but maybe i didn't understand the context.
No witch hunt is needed to take a first step. We all know what services are openly displayed as a botting service. With this change something can start to be done. Simply cease and desists orders can progress from there or proposals on how to enforce this but with what lawyer fees/source of money? From the DAO? Do we vote on that? How much is that going to cost? Is the cost predictable? Do we have that $ at this point?
I was waiting and waiting for this...can't believe it took so long for the first banning bots proposal!
As far as this specific proposal goes, while it would be easy enough to make the ToS updates being proposed, there are no details at all about how this restriction should actually be enforced (or maybe it's not intended to be enforced at all?). For example, is Splinterlands responsible for identifying accounts that are using bots? If so, how should we go about doing this? What should be done if an account is found to be violating this ToS policy? What happens if someone feels that they were incorrectly identified as a bot? Is there some type of review/challenge process? There are probably even more things I couldn't come up with off the top of my head here, but the point is that there is a lot to think about and detail out when it comes to a realistic plan to ban bots and it's not just as simple as updating the ToS.
That being said, even though I don't personally support any type of ban on using bots, I do fully support the collective, super-majority decision of the SPS stakeholders via the proposal system. So if you, or anyone else, is serious about a bot-banning proposal, here's what I would propose:
Since the SPS DAO controls the SPS token, but not the Splinterlands game or things like the Splinterlands Terms of Service, I would suggest that the proposal be structured around not allowing bots to earn SPS rather than updating the ToS and/or banning them from the game. The proposal could be for SPS stakeholders to elect a committee that would be responsible for identifying which accounts are using bots to play and then no SPS tokens would be awarded to accounts on that list for winning ranked battles, in loot chests, or other areas that the committee decides. The committee would be responsible for coming up with a reliable mechanism for detecting bot use and for handling any disputes or other issues that come up from accounts identified as bots. If it is the wish of the SPS stakeholders then the Splinterlands company would work with the elected committee to provide any relevant information and data they may need for performing their duties.
There would need to be some more details about how the committee gets elected and things like that, but at a high level this would be a workable proposal to prevent accounts using bots (or at least those identified as using bots) from being able to earn SPS tokens in the game, which is fully within the control of the DAO and not up to the discretion of the Splinterlands company as something like updating the ToS would be.
I just want to clarify that I in no way would be in favor of such a proposal, and would likely vote my personal SPS stake against it. I don't ever think there should be a person or group of people responsible for deciding who can or cannot participate in a supposedly free and open system like this and it leads to a very slippery slope of censorship, personal biases, and politics, which can easily bleed over to other areas of the ecosystem.
However, like I said above, even though I am personally against it, it is not up to me (which is a good thing), and I would be happy to work with the community to effectively implement any solution they collectively approve.
I would support a ban on (gameplay) bots in general. But having a "committee" to identify and judge who can and cannot obtain SPS seems like a terrible idea and I would in no way shape or form support that. I'd support dao funds going to the SPL team to take an anti (gameplay) bot stance and implementing tools to deal with them. These should ONLY target bots and not even remotely go close to anything involving personal bias, politics, etc. Of course, nothing is ever going to be perfect, but it should heavily discourage the use.
Well you're just saying that the SPL team should be the committee then, which is definitely an option, but it is still a "committee" (meaning a small group of people) that will be deciding these things and choosing who can obtain SPS through gameplay and who cannot (which is the result of "implementing tools to deal with them").
If only that were actually possible. There is NO way to 100% determine if someone is using a bot or not. So whoever is in charge of determining that will have to do the best they can and then the question comes down to how to deal with disputes, which is mainly where personal biases and politics come in. That stuff is just human nature so it doesn't really matter whether it's an elected committee or the SPL team, if it's humans then human biases come into play.
So basically to me you're saying you don't support a committee to judge who can and cannot obtain SPS through battles, but then you say you'll support basically the same exact thing as long as it's the SPL team that is the committee, if I'm reading this correctly.
I absolutely disagree. Like I said, it should be a system only going after accounts for botting. This is not making them a commitee of anything else. It could also expllicitly mention that any ruling on any other basis than suspicion of botting would not be within the authority of this system. Of course, SPL team could ignore it and rule on politics or whatnot in secret, but they could do that already if they wanted to. It's not like you don't have the power to ban people at the moment. This would merely extend what falls under bannable behavior to include botting gameplay.
Like I said, it's never going to perfect, but you can heavily disincentivize it. It should err on the side of caution when making judgments. Just like a court would (or, rather, should). You might as well say it's 100% impossible to know for sure if 99% of crimes committed have actually been committed, therefore we should abolish the legal system. That makes very little sense to me. The people who go after bots, should only judge based on bot behavior. If any other motive is suspected, it should be cracked down on. Just like you should crack down on a corrupt judge or juror.
A lot of your reply doesn't match up with what's currently being proposed. It was not without reason it did not try to create guidelines of how to enforce or even if it will be enforced at all.
"the point is that there is a lot to think about and detail out when it comes to a realistic plan to ban bots and it's not just as simple as updating the ToS."
I agree 100% here.
It's meant to be a deterrent to botting and a building block for experts to make their proposals/suggestions on how to enforce this in the future, if it's approved at all. I believe more people will be willing to work on IDing bots and what to do about them if botting battles for SPS is actually considered against the rules.
Thank you for your insight on how you'd go about this though, appreciate your time.
I understand that, my reply was to help other people reading this understand that there is a lot more than this that needs to be done to actually ban bots, and to provide an idea of how it could be accomplished. I appreciate you getting the ball rolling on this though!
this is a rabbit hole splinterlands doesn't want to go down. Blizzard has an asston more $ than SPL ever will and botting is prevalent . its just a sink of assets. if bots need asets to get rewards whats your beef? stop being triggered and move on with your life.
I don't think the idea is to enforce anything related to bots. I think the idea is just to make it forbidden, so that those people who currently run bots would stop unless they don't mind going against terms of service. So basically the idea is to reduce botting by trusting that at least a portion of current bot runners would stop simply because they know it is not allowed.
Again this is a catch 22, how do you decide who will be part of that comity and how can you enforce to make sure anyone in charge to decide what is bot and what's not don't get bribe or use and protect their own bot, collusion or Ban hammer abuse by those with this power etc.
I'm not a big fan of bot but I agree with Matt original vision that is to try and build the game itself in a way to keep it decentralized and where both bots and human player can be part of the same ecosystem and trying to find a balanced way without having to police the game all the time which cost money and time and that will pissed off over what looks like 80% of the players out there that looks like they have both main account and dozens of bots to generate more value for themself.
I still think we should try to focus on finding ways to reduce exploiting overall and find ways that whether you are a human or bot account, the fact that you play our game = you generate and bring to the game as much value as you can take out to avoid having only leeches bots.
Right now, Player Staking SPS to earn reward and soulbound cards are already a good step in that right direction without the need for this bots crusade IMO.
And really, the entire "ban bots" rhetoric is always about bots = bad but without any constructive solution to solve the real problem suggested to back that.
Personally I will vote against that proposal until someone can come up with a fully detailed way how to get rid of bot that make sense and that is not hurting the economy itself like cards rental or affecting the time it takes between battles if you get rid of the 3/4 of the current account that are not players.
I'll gladly vote in favor when someone can come with a detailed solution plan that hold the road but until then, that's a no for me.
To me, this proposal goes against the main principles of web3 and account ownership, and I would vote against this. I would be more supportive if you were to revise your proposal to have separate leagues or divisions for botted and live accounts. But I appreciate your passion for the game and that you want to do things to make it better.
I figured one of these was coming. I went ahead and voted no. Trying to stop bot farms is one thing. To make it against the rules to use a bot service to play is a whole different thing and I do not support that. Not even, like, a little bit.
who would want that? is the question serious? splinterlands is a game. if accounts do not play regularly with bots can not empty the reward pool. this means that more is inside for the people who really play. but for many probably unimaginable that people who really play a game get more in the game than people who have no time or desire to play. really shifted perception here of some. want to have everything in the game without playing and such people then also have the most sps power and vote for a game......
This proposal is weak bots are a problem but this won't be that easy to handle Agree with Yabap :) Well anyways it was due to be a proposal haha
If I wanted to bot nerf though I propose no ghost cards after a period now with soulbounds we can do that may leave a few players who don't play in the lurch but it also makes it more difficult to bot with just a limited set of soulbounds so in the grand sum of things bots will rent more and need to have cards and recirculate some assets to earn more assets.
Note this should be implemented ASAP before bots own all the soulbounds they need and have less incentive to rent.
Similar to our previous reward card case and problem.
Thank you for participating in SPS DAO Governance @bushwhack!
You can place or monitor SPS Stake Weighted votes for and against this proposal at the link below:
Link to this Pre-Proposal
Updated At: 2023-02-06 18:08 UTC
I feel like the team has specifically addressed that they won't do this. Is there some reason why we think a DAO proposal would change their approach?
Not saying it's a bad idea - just wondering how this kind of proposal would impact the team and administration of the game.
From what I recall the hesitation was always the actual banning of an account. So this just leaves all of that out of the equation. "a land of rules and not rulers" I believe Matt said once. Well, its just a rule, I feel a lot of people would agree with.
i am also against bots, but i doubt that the proposal will change much, especially this method bears the risk that innocent people will be banned. i remember when worldofwarcraft automated this process. if you were too good in the arena, the opponents simply reported me as botting and the system automatically banned at a certain number of reports. that sucked and completely took the fun out of arena for me! that's why i think kyc is a better method, for example each person is only allowed to participate in ranking with a maximum of 5 accounts, that way you would at least curb the botfarms for now.
but i still vote for it. just on principle to show that bots have to go!
This proposal would be a foot in the door and an indication which way things could go bot wise. Indeed, to ban an account should not be taken lightly. Perhaps something like draining their ECR instead of an out right ban could alleviate some worries. I'll leave that up to people much smarter than me to figure out and share through future proposals and suggestions. This is simply about drawing a line in the sand.
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Oh boy, this proposal is a real doozy! I mean, how can we even be sure if the poster themselves is a bot? It's hard to know these days! If they are a bot, they are doing a pretty good job at trying to fool us humans.
Not voting for this.
I'd sign on a "I don't like bots" statement but not on a change of TOS unless the guidelines/policies are clear.
TBF, the statement "I don't like bots" doesn't do much, but that is basically the same as this proposal (esp considering that the DAO can't and shouldn't be allowed to change the Splinterlands TOS)
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My worry if this is implemented is that bots will hide in the shadows rather than be up-front. Right now there is an open discord for most of the mainstream bots. There is discussion for their pricing model, where and when they work, broadly speaking how well they work etc.
If you make it against ToS, regardless of the eventual punishment, it will push bots to be more secretive. So you'll 1) restrict a free market currently available to all and 2) make it harder to see what bots are up to and who is botting.
I suppose the best analogy is making drugs or prostitution illegal. Yes, it happens less when it's illegal, but 1) it's hard to estimate how much it actually happens 2) you lose revenue because it's all done under the table 3) it's hard to actually police because it's being hidden from prying eyes.
To me, the best answer to bots is to make bots unprofitable. I think the community has done really well to that end in the past few months (e.g., pushing rewards to higher leagues, removing RP from ghost cards, limiting RP from low-BCX cards). Soul-bound reward cards will do that even more. I think the better use of proposals and mental energy would be to develop systems that reward players more than bots. Someone mentioned KYC; I think that's a good idea (even if most crypto people are ideologically opposed to it). I'll keep thinking of ideas along this line, because I want to see bot farms gone.
thumbs up
When I rent out my cards why do I not have the "right to refuse service?" The same way businesses have the right to refuse service in the real world.
Give me the option "Do not rent to accounts with less than X amount of staked SPS."
Give me that right and option if you want to be all "free market and decentralized."
NO for me (based on this proposal).
I would like to see data that show bots are a problem. In my experience, I can beat a bot any day. High-cost, high-level rare cards kill me most often. I feel that rich accounts, bot or not, are the biggest reward hogs. But that's kind of how TCG's always go.