Having just noticed the recent proposal to adjust ranked rewards which has ultimately led to even gold players getting basically nothing for each battle won, I'd like to offer my perspective as someone with a lot of experience in exploiting high value loopholes for great financial gains.
I used to be a professional gambler. For about 5 years I smashed online bookies and casinos for every bonus they offered. I and a great many other people learned the maths of how sports free bets and casino bonuses ultimately swung the house edge in the punters favour as long as you understood which bonuses to take.
The implications of this were huge - since the dawn of online betting they hadn't had to deal with this threat to their business model. A gravy train existed for a few years, then in around 2018, one by one, pretty much every bookie and casino stopped offering bonuses that had any value for the punter, except a handful of big companies who would ban customers like me anyway.
Throughout this time I witnessed about 200+ companies trying dozens of different ways to nerf the value of these bonuses for "bonus abusers" (read: people who had no interest in gambling but were there for the guaranteed profits like me), while trying to still offer these value bonuses for regular dumb gamblers who they wanted to become regular customers on their site.
What did I learn? That it was impossible.
And that is analogous to what is happening in Splinterlands. If there is value for an individual customer - any value above zero at all - then bots will exploit it as long as the profits exceed their operational costs; costs which in most cases have already been underwritten, meaning that as that money can't be recovered anyway, then any value available on one account, well, you might as well run hundreds of accounts with a bot and suck all the profit one can get out of it. And if they do that, the values of cards go down down down (especially reward cards, which are overwhelmingly earned by a small % of bot owners with an incentive to sell sell sell). It is worth noting that in the short term, the value of regular cards can go up, as bots need to own the cards to earn the rewards, but if a lot of the rewards are reward cards that the bots keep selling, and if SPS rewards are reduced as they have been recently, then the value of regular cards long term also goes down, as their value is intrinsically linked to the value of any such rewards.
I have put around $3000 USD into this game, and for a brief window this past few months I was able to rent some great extra cards which upped my win rate to the extent that - along with the decent rewards structure - I was able to easily cover the rental costs. Now it's 0.14 SPS for my most recent battle win, about 75% down on what it was yesterday, and that's in gold and with 98% CR. These changes are only happening to stop bots apparently, yet it is evident that such changes also clearly nerf regular players - even gold players - to the extent that playing the game is scarcely or not worthwhile at all financially (even if it remains terrific fun)
It is extremely frustrating for me as someone with this experience to see the for/against bot debate happening when - while I acknowledge I am no maths genius and perhaps someone might have great counter argument I haven't heard (and I have read a lot of such debates) - I feel 100% certain that this battle can never be won; that bots can never be nerfed without nerfing pretty much all regular investors/players, and that therefore the only way for the game to survive and thrive long term is for whatever steps necessary to be taken for bots to be removed and banned from the game: - even if it means a short term market crash - it is better for a game to organically grow from such a position than to submit to a guaranteed terminal decline. Whether the team's personal financial incentives align with the game's long term survival is anyone's guess (and I am not judging - every human alive acts on incentives). And if is "impossible" to limit bots (it isn't), then at the very least, an attempt at keeping them at bay is worthwhile, and an ongoing patchwork of efforts to keep them out can be attempted and ideally successfully implemented.
At the end of the day I can't see a great many gold players who have invested thousands of dollars and who often rent a few extras sticking around to earn a under a penny per battle or get another pelacor conjurer or some merits.
Bots can't be nerfed without nerfing regular players/investors. It is literally impossible. So is this ever going to be addressed, or is the can going to continue being kicked down the road under this naive assumption that the laws of both maths and human behaviour will cease to operate so that bots can operate without wrecking the economy? Any value at all will be exploited by hundreds and thousands of bot accounts. The only way to stop them is to remove all value, and that as we can currently see clearly means removing value for real human players with one account too.
