Splinterlands : Will the Bot Ban Work?
The decision of the Splinterlands team to Ban Bots in Modern Ranked has been telegraphed and talked about for a while now. Both of the bot services that I am currently evaluating Xbot and Archmage have disabled Modern Ranked as an option so from the market leaders perspective – Yes, the ban has worked and the big bot makers are playing along. But is that all there is to the story? When it comes to making money and exploiting systems often it’s a case of “Where there is a will, there is a way” so the question for me remains – Are the bots really gone for good?
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No doubt there are other bots out there that don’t have the profile of the two I’ve mentioned and maybe they aren’t as scrupulous either. So today I wanted to have a play in Modern Ranked to see if I could tell whether there are any bots still there, plus I was also very curious about what sort of impact that this bot ban might have on the competitiveness of Modern Ranked if the ban has worked.
It’s only a very small sample, but after configuring my Archmage bot to run on Wild Ranked and putting it on pause I powered up some Energy with DEC and played 11 games on Modern Ranked as a bit of a Test. I won 6 out of 11 games and I am genuinely not that great at Modern so I would consider this to be a pretty decent result with my ranking going up slightly from 2636 to 2653. The first thing I noticed is that there seemed to be a greater variance in the Ratings of my opponents – which would suggest that maybe there is less players to match up against now. That makes sense if the bots have been removed but overall I did not notice a big difference.
Of course I am also interested to see what the impact of this change will be on Wild Ranked if all the botted accounts are now shifting to play there instead. I would imagine that playing only Modern cards in Wild would put them at a significant disadvantage so maybe I will go a bit better in Wild Ranked too for a while since my own deck has a lot of older Summoners and Monsters in it.
Have you tried playing Modern Ranked since the bots were banned? What is your experience and are you doing better? I’d be keen to hear how others are finding this latest change so please comment below!
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That's really great.
Youre right its no a complete ban of bots but basically just a shift to where bots would be eligible.
I think there's still some botting going on in Modern. The battle helpers need to go next, they are a blight.
The Battle Helpers might be a bit harder to ban (detect) because there is manual involvement.
I'm just trying out my daughter's account in modern at bronze level. The bots do indeed seem to be gone, but if the purpose of banning them was to encourage newcomers, I'm not sure how that will work. I've just come up against accounts with legendary summoners and cards in low end bronze 2, which newcomers wouldn't stand a chance against. I don't know if they are old players coming back in to test things out. As you were saying, I'm not getting many matches close to me points wise. The Llama took me out at 170 points, then another account with legendaries was at 600, with me sat around the 450 mark. I've got the odd legendary on mine too. I thought I'd fly through bronze, but obviously not. 😅
That's very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
It might be a bit of an anomaly since the season is well progressed already and if some players are poking their heads back in for a gander it might just be a short term phenomena. Definitely worth checking out though.
I think that this could be what's happening. I'm guessing if lots of bots have dropped off then the rewards potential could be higher, so they might be seeing if that's the case too.
One thing I always wonder is how you people fight battles and win
It seem complicated to me though...
Goodluck
I was always in favor of introducing the anti-bots measures in the Modern Format, and honestly if I had the power to choose I would have introduced the anti-bots measures in the Wild Format as well and created an additional league just for bots and players who wanted to play against bots.
The first positive aspect of my experience in Modern Format (diamond II league) is that I played 25 battles with 25 different players.
I also noticed a slight improvement in my SPS token rewards, and I am curious to see if this trend will increase in the future since the reward pool in Modern will most likely be shared by fewer players.
In my opinion, the anti-bots measures in Modern are a first step in the right direction because Splinterlands offers so many investment opportunities but the game should be for players only.
Thank you for sharing your experience in Modern and your thoughts on bots
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I can see arguments for and against bots so a balanced approach makes most sense. To compartmentalize the Ranking systems is a smart way to go.
Personally I am only looking at the bots because I am interested in the Brawls but don't have time to do justice in the Ranked systems. I was renting my cards out previously.
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i really hate those bots, people delegation they own cards to another of theirs bots just to win more rewards every season. it is annoying
I mainly play wild-eyed silver league. I find it easier to win. perfect time to move into gold
It's great that the Splinterlands team has taken steps to address the bot problem. Bots can have a negative impact on the game by inflating the rankings of players and making it difficult for legitimate players to win.
A clarification:
Just to be abundantly clear, the Splinterlands team didn't decide to bat bots. The DAO did. The community did.
The result is very welcoming.
We WILL ban bots/battle helpers in Modern, Tournaments and Brawls next. That proposal is on the way, and I am confident that it will be passed.
Thanks for the clarification. I do consider the active stakeholders of the DAO to be part of the Team, but it is an important distinction.
Are you confident that the bots are gone from Modern? There seems to be some questions over the effectiveness of the ban.
No. There are still bots in modern. At a order of magnitude or two less in numbers though
I've been hearing similar news for the last two or three episodes, so that's pretty cool because a lot of people stopped playing it because of that one thing, so they all came back. And we will see as soon as the market settles a little within the coming year, we may see a huge increase in its prices.
I tried it just out of curiosity as well and it's definitely easier now, the bots were tough to beat. I have always preferred wild though, more fun cards that you can use. The X Bot on wild did remarkably well, winning around 70 to 80 percent of the time when I let it run for a day.
This is a tricky one. Bots provide competition and a return for investors on one hand, but discourage real players on another and therefore an uptake from new users. I moved from manual play to using some bot accounts to get a return on investment after playing multiple accounts manually for a longtime. I can't really see how they can ban bot accounts without some sort of captcha or manual recognition element being implemented. I am guessing the rewards in Modern should benefit with the reduction of users in this format.
Yes, there is definitely 2 sides to the debate. I don't like playing against bots, but I also want to get a return on my investment and don't always have time to play.
I have seen other games successfully ban bots. Sometimes the threat of having an account barred can be an effective deterrent. Especially now with reward cards being soulbound. Seems like it'd be a nuclear option but there are ways...