With less than 2 days left in the season and coming off a glitch that set back the season run significantly it was looking like XBOT was going to have to settle for a Champion III finish for the season. But the bot stepped up in the clutch and out together its best 24 hour period of the season! After utilizing the new setting to adjust sessions down to every 6 hours instead of every 24, XBOT had a relatively mundane session 1 and session 3, winning fewer than half it's battles. But it had an absolutely massive session 2, stringing together a 9 game win streak, including a few wins over some Champion I opponents, and netting over 300 rating in the session!
This was simply an amazing performance in what is typically an extremely difficult period to climb. Normally I would stop here for the season in order to avoid falling out of Champion II and to start recovering ECR to prepare for next season. For the sake of completing the test though I will allow XBOT to finish out the final day. Who knows, maybe it could even duplicate this performance in one of the final few sessions and make a push for the leaderboard? It currently is right on the edge!
Since this is where my season would typically end I think now is a fair time to draw conclusions though. The best way to do this IMO is by comparing the number of chests earned. This is because chests are always the same bases on rshares earned, while SPS amounts can vary from season to season and are more difficult to compare.
This season so far XBOT earned 115 champion chests and 76 diamond chests. Last season I earned 122 champion chests and 68 diamond chests. This is a very miniscule difference in total value. Last season I played 444 battles, winning 53% of them. This season XBOT has played 568 battles, winning 51% of them.
When I first started this experiment I really had 2 different questions. First off, was it even worth using XBOT, and is it a viable competitor to Archmage? And then if so, is the bot actually better than a human player and a threat to drive humans out of the game altogether?
I feel pretty clear that the answer to the first question is a resounding yes. While I lack data to declare XBOT superior, it is at worst close enough to Archmage that its cheaper price tag at the champion level will earn it a huge share of the botting market.
As for the second question, I don't feel as if the bot was technically superior to my own play. It is close enough that it's worth using as a time saver if you don't want to manually play 500 battles in a season. But Im not going to feel as if I'm harming my account by playing the battles myself, and I believe that is great for the game. We could be in trouble if bots truly do become the superior players. These bots are improving rapidly though, so I do hope Splinterlands has some good plans to address this issue down the line.
Despite not playing any battles on my account myself, this season has truly been fun. This is likely my last blog post on the season. My final report and extended wrap up will come here in a few days via video format, so be sure to catch the final results there and see if XBOT finishes on the leaderboard!
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