Bots and Splinterlands, a love and hate story!

Hello Steemians and Splinterers!

I don't know if Splinterer is a thing but I would suppose so :-)

Splinterlands (formerly Steem Monsters) was, and still is a revolution to me, be it as a player, as a game creator or as a programmer.

I invested in it and I played it for months!

And today, I would like to contribute with a honest an in-depth post about the bot situation.

Splinterlands was the first and only cryptocurrency game to have satisfied me plentily!

As a game, I discovered CCG tournaments but also new strategies and the Splinterlands concepts

As a cryptocurrency game? that was so new to me, and so excellent. A revolution going forward.

Even if I came so many months after release, and contrary to so many other cryptocurrency games (would I say all others?) I was not into some sort of "evil scheme" stealing my money or making my investment non-competitive over time. I really have been disappointed by all other cryptogames I invested into.

But not Splinterlands. And never even after more than a year. Market liquidity is high, purchases even of last year still gained interesting value, we can even rent cards, Splinterlands has value and clarity.

So when Splinterlands organized a Game Jam contest last year, I worked for weeks on Splinterwars (you have its logo above).

I thought Splinterlands needed a new gameplay contributing to our existing card value. I wanted to use my game creator assets to fulfill this vision. So I deconstructed another project I had (a fantasy project) and then constructed Splinterwars piece by piece.

I did not exactly succeed; I mean I made a polished game prototype during the game jam but even if it connected to our Splinterlands collection it was not really a playable game.

But that's okay. Sometimes in life, we fail "at first". It only needs perseverance to succeed!

Since then the Splinterlands team added numerous features since, like the Dark Crystals (DEC) and its market, Guilds, the Untamed collection, an upcoming mobile app, and many things I can't summarize here.

This made me realize that Splinterlands was already into great hands. As I had absolutely no financial way to support myself at the time (I worked freelance in IT at that time to self-fund my efforts) I had to stall the Splinterwars project - for the time being only. There were other ways, I thought, I give value to our collections, and I had to ponder and polish my things before delivering.

After many months I progressively had to stop playing. I worked so much in IT to self-fund myself that I did not find the time to continue.

At that time I let my 11-year old son play passionately in my stead!

I followed him in tournaments, I cheered him up and the community also was excellent - some of his enemies even rewarded him with cards. The community is good as that!

And when my son himself eventually stopped to focus more time into his "sports career", what did I do?

I still let my little programmed players - my faithful bots - continue playing.

Ewww! Let's talk about bots!

I was so proud of Splinterlands because it had an open API. This allowed many projects around Splinterlands to come to fruition and support the whole community.

When I invested my crypto-money into Splinterlands I went into even more efforts and I equipped bots with proper decks. I made my own programs for it.

Why does someone program bots?

I would not know about what inspired other programmers, or if they are evil Siths or good coding Jedis.

With a family to support I thought it was a great way to combine my passion for Splinterlands, my investment into the game, my programming skills and my hope to participate into "this dream of earning money while playing" !

I could not find the time to continue playing, so I thought my little AIs would do the trick, and that thanks to that I will have even more time and funding for my own game creation process.

Bots could take weeks or months to give back the money you invested into them. But overall you never lose the value of their cards anyway. Also, you still invest, and re-invest into Splinterlands, keeping a "close relationship" with the game.

Was it wrong to do this?

There are different programmers regarding bots.

I have come to believe that some elements in bots are very supportive of the community and Splinterlands, especially early.

But some elements in bots are also extremely destructive of the value and gameplay of Splinterlands.

I tried to talk about it with other bot programmers but the talk would quickly go badly. There is no constructive way to do such a talk as a player; we have no authority on other programmers to make them understand the same things we do know.

I was also afraid to talk about it in a post.

I do it here but I was always afraid people would yell at me mean words, cause anxiety, or that I would have some kind of bad rep. I still am afraid of that.

Some months ago I read a post by the Splinterlands team which said that bots were currently hurting the economy and that actions were underway to address that.

I felt bad reading this.

But I felt also that as a bot programmer myself, there was a lot to share.

I did not find the strength immediately to write about it.

I mean, the Splinterlands community has always been great, but that would be a hard test of it. Also, since I stopped playing some months ago, there was no player I would hope would know me or like me as a player; except great persons such as Steamdan with whom I still traded cards, I thought everyone forgot about Elindos at that time!

And now that bots were singled out as a problem, I did not know if there was any way to talk about it properly. So this post is a real attempt at doing this.

What in bots is "destroying Splinterlands value"?

Let's speak about the obvious points first.

People with bots earn many times the value an average player does, as if every bot is an average player. Of course, a bot owner also invests many times was an average player invests, but I said I will talk about the negative points.

Bot owners have usually a low interest in keeping or using these assets to upgrade their card level and their individual league capacity; so they dump these rewards on the market. The action of dumping DEC and dumping reward cards contributes to making these values not exactly "fall", but at least "stall".

Another problem with bot owners is that they can "scale" their assets and number of bots.

When they scale, they invest more into Splinterlands, which is actually a good thing. but they also scale the phenomenon above.

Now there is another big, very big issue.

I was in dispute with several other programmers because they also sent their bot into tournaments. Bots in tournament will multiply queue times for real players and extend tournament duration by A LOT. Bots in tournament reduce how real players can benefit from it because it just lasts too long.

If bots in ranked matches actually help in finding a match, in tournaments they reduce the opportunity a tournament represents to someone.

They also "exploit" the low to average positions in tournament and even have a chance to end very high, if you have a large bot population, because they can fight themselves and go up, so they don't exactly "play fair", doing like a multiaccount (I heard some players were multiaccouting and entering tournaments with several accounts at the same time) but at a superior level.

I realized very early that making bots participate in tournaments would hurt Splinterlands greatly. I decided never to make my bot enter tournaments, even if the rewards were interesting to me, and that it was the 'red line' I would never, ever cross.

I wanted to encourage other programmers to adhere to some kind of "honor code" and not send bots to tournaments, but I failed in convincing them. That was really disappointing, as I hoped we could do some kind of engagement never to engage in tournaments.

And the problems can scale!

Now the biggest problems for a game is to know whether a problem is isolated or if it can scale.

The bot situation can scale "over time" when bot owners themselves can add new bots.

But it can also "multiply quickly" when bot owners share their programs and allow other people to become bot owners.

Very early on, I decided never to share my programs to other people. I always admire people who share their knowledge and such transparency and open-source mind is the real Crypto way of doing things, but I just could did not want to contribute when so many people were being greedy and disturbing tournaments with their bots, something that I opposed strongly.

OK. So bots are so UNCOOL then, right? What in bots is "supportive" of Splinterlands value?

You know, Splinterlands is game with a market and assets, and what drives the market up has always been the "hope" and the "promise" of the game and its vision.

Bot programmers, just like top players, have high hopes in Splinterlands and they invest money in it. By doing that, they "pump" the value of Splinterlands. Good cards receive a good increase in value, especially those critical to their decks (ie summoners, some tanks, some sneak attackers, etc).

To earn more DEC, bot programmers equip themselves with gold cards, still keeping the market value up. Bot programmers also have a high need of "non-reward cards" to equip new bots, so they purchase these cards.

Until a few months ago I did not actually sell so many assets. Contrary to other bot owners, I had so much faith in Splinterlands that I wanted to upgrade card levels, invest in more bots but not sell my DEC or reward cards so much. I invested in Splinterlands funding campaigns and only sold assets to purchase more of them.

When the Splinterlands team posted about their intent to address the bot problems, I thought my little bots would soon not be able to play the game, so I admit I was more afraid than before.

I did not know how to talk about the situation so this post is like a critical attempt to discuss it.

Now, what other positive points do bots have?

They help players in finding matches. They also help them winning these matches and going up in DEC and league, since beating a bot is usually not that hard. I think it is good when bots are imperfect and can be beaten by humans. They act as some sort of "tutorial mode".

Bots also keep number of transactions and number of games played high, which can be used by the Splinterlands staff to justify their position as the number #1 game.

I believe bots contributed at first to the good promise and vision of Splinterlands.

So, what now?

Bot programmers have been good investors to Splinterlands at first and I think we must not make people afraid of losing their investment value.

But I strongly believe bots should be forbidden from accessing tournaments.

Actually, when I write this, I don't even know if that is the case - maybe they are forbidden already to participate into tournaments, I mean, I never tried to commit them there, so how would I know!

Also, I could adhere to any kind of "honor code" or transparency announcement about bots, like a measure or manifesto which would be supported by the Splinterlands team and make the action of bots more noble and more contributive to the Splinterlands gameplay and community.

I really don't want, in any way, to hurt Splinterlands economy. I love the game and I love its community.

Also, I tried with this post to help in knowing more about bots. I don't know other bot owners personally and I did not participate to the Discord recently enough, but I really hope this post would help.

Please understand I thought that it was the good way to act.

Cryptocurrency games were a revolution to me, and I plan to contribute positively to that revolution, with games, with services to the STEEM community (and other related crypto), but instead of remaining silent I thought I had some contribution to give.

You have all my love and admiration!