tl;dr 
HF 21/22 has been pretty effective at changing behavior on the blockchain. We're no exception. We've been using the SP on the
Stakeholders wanting DEC held onto Steem, delegated to the account, and when people purchased votes the delegators would receive DEC. It was essentially an easy way to purchase DEC every day for Steem paid at market prices and have it happen automatically for Steem holders.
Concerns
A complaint has been that running a bidbot paid for by a token reduces the value of Steem by trading for DEC, that's true, but the reverse is also true that it added a use for Steem Power and a reason to hold Steem Power. Ultimately people were holding thousands of Steem to earn less than ten steem a day, which would be used to receive DEC. A generally favorable arrangement for the chain.
The current most vocal complaint is that players using the bot aren't seeing any return because a handful of whales have started indescrimately downvoting content being upvoted by the bot.
While downvoting botted content that provides no value to the ecosystem is something we continue to support we don't think that down voting all botted content is a good plan. Promotional services have a place, and where as something like "Use the promoted feature differently" has it's place, it also runs into the problem that the community can't down vote promoted posts if they don't want to see them forever.
Vote bots allow a space for open and transparent vote buying for promotion to occur. EIP allows for flagging of over rewarded content. It's a balanced system.
Personally, I'm concerned that all of this effort against voting bots will simply shift SP into self voting, circular voting, and comment farming. We'll see...
Extreme views, actions, and a new plan
The rather extreme view point of a few whales in the community is that any profitable bidbot use will destroy the apparently frail ecosystem. To discourage bidbot use at all they have begun flagging with votes that are in this case larger than the purchased vote.
We think this is not in the best interest of the community, but not enough that we would start retaliation flagging. Instead we'll go with the flow and switch to manual curation. As of 1 week from now the bid bot will cease to operate. We'll allow Splinterlands team members to upvote content with full votes from the account.
Outcomes
We hope to encourage quality posts about our game to be written and receive rewards for it. We recognize that it likely means we'll lose delegations in part because we don't like the alternative system of simply upvoting delegators and it's not enough business to justify figuring out a system of selling packs for delegations.
It's our hope that people previously delegating don't simply power down and sell, but who knows... that could be a consequence of the whales indescriminately flagging botted content.
Receiving a manually curated votes
Players can drop links into #sm-post-promotion-only as long as they are about Splinterlands. By doing so they are submitted for review and those that are accepted will be voted on. Our team will also just be voting stuff we like with our account.