A few questions/observations...
With the anonymous matchups, how do the bots know they are facing each other? Is there a pattern match based on the information presented and if some players outside of the bot farm are beneficiaries, it is a flaw that comes with the territory in developing these bot farms?
With as many bots as there are, you can check the Hiveblocks of each account and possibly get to the root of it all without scrolling through Peakmonsters. You can also query the blockchain through the Hive API.
The toothpaste is out of the proverbial tube and ranked rewards, daily quests, and end of season rewards have to be re-imagined. Bots are already active buyers and sellers. They are upgrading their decks to be competitive in higher leagues and possibly transferring SPS Airdrops to the farm owner.
The bot farms are invested in the game. It's just that their new money into the ecosystem is not being used to directly invest in the game assets. They create these accounts and some choose to engage in win trading with these bots to accrue game assets.
If the bots leave the game, the liquidity of the game goes off a cliff. We take it for granted that we can get a ranked match any time we want, but the bots go away and it becomes a bit of a wait.
The marketing effort is confusing. I'm going to be getting into this a bit in an article to be released soon, but I don't understand why they are directly incentivizing spammy content. Who is the target audience? What's the user persona you're aiming for? What type of income level? Geographic target markets? Overlapping interests? Everyone's Time & Attention is worth a different amount and how we interact with this ecosystem varies.
RE: Splinterlands: Bot Win Trading is Real And Here is the Proof