Whales, players, renters, flippers, and even the developers are at the mercy of bot farms. Who really has the control of this game? If it is not obvious based on the rental and purchase markets, the bot farms hold the power. It does not matter if they are operating legitimately or not, the present state of the ecosystem is in a weird waiting period. It also happens to be one of the most competitive times in ranked rewards play, which will eventually be crushed once 200,000+ bot accounts return to Splinterlands. There are presently over 100,000 bots operating right now, but many have been pulled out temporarily.
The win trading bots are prevalent in the system right now driving down the price of in-print rewards cards and accelerating their removal from circulation. There are even Chaos Legion cards (non-summoner) being impacted because of the free pack issuances to the win trading accounts.
Regular Card Prices
Gold Card Prices
If you bought Rewards cards to rent them out, wait until December to rent those cards out to new players getting in on the next bull run.
If you did not get anything great in your loot chests, you can always just blog and buy the Rewards cards from a win trading seller account.
200,000 accounts coming back possibly in time for next season means that every day could be the old End of Season (this is the nightmare scenario) and there may not be enough rental supply nor willingness to fill rental supply to cater to everyone. This could be the Feast before the Famine for a lot of players, this will be misconstrued as great demand as if it is a great thing. However, all these bots will be doing is extracting rewards rather than investing any more money into the ecosystem beyond purchasing more spellbooks.
Players will go from actively playing the game to renting out cards to bot farms at ridiculously high prices because it makes more sense financially. At what level will the profitability of these bot farms be compromised? There may be a willingness to take a loss for a year or two, if it means that Year 3 generates the desired returns. It's a business as strange as it may be, owning a bot farm is a business.
This could indeed be the future of the rental market...
How can that be happening when these issues exist?
Spellbook sales are still in the double digits a day and we may be seeing players creating alt-accounts to extract Bronze Loot Chests during this exploit period. There are also new win trading bot farm accounts being created. The only way new money is being put into the system is through the purchase of a spellbook and new accounts are being subsidized $3 in accounts, this means $7 goes to development and $3 goes into the economy and account balances and holdings can be grown without further investment during this Feast time.
The ecosystem is still down 200,000 Daily Active Users from the old system.
The market has tightened a bit with rental prices going up and users taking advantage of the ridiculous purchase prices on the market.
If everyone is waiting for how a return of 200,000 bot accounts are going to change the ecosystem, this is not a healthy state of affairs. Nobody is waiting on decisions made by those with 5 Million Collection Power or higher. Even the development team is operating with the anticipation of what bot farms will do next. Bot farms are the most powerful force in this ecosystem, they have the power to drive card prices to the ground and inflate the rental market to the sky with their mere presence.
Bots are already playing the game and comprise the vast majority of players/participants in the ecosystem. The bots comprise most of the 160,951 Daily Active Users from yesterday.
Bots are basically miners in the system and this poses a lot of risk to Splinterlands' intellectual assets and marketing effort (which has been abysmal).
Bots are TERRIBLE for any sort of a cross-promotional effort.
Who is going to work with Splinterlands from a business partnership perspective if there are so few (and an unmeasured amount) interacting with their brand through the game? Bots are not viewing the cards, have no active engagement, and do not make purchasing decisions outside of Splinterlands.
"Bot Wars" has no appeal, but that is what it is. To present this game as having 160,000 or prior to the new rewards system, 360,000 Daily Active Users is disingenuous. Even Google Analytics finds ways to exclude most bot visitors from being counted in traffic figures for a website.
Using bots to compensate for not having a clear target market nor cohesive Unique Selling Proposition from the Marketing Team is a case for bearishness. This is a financial product wrapped up in a strategy game with a storyline that no one really cares about other than when they want to get free money from Splinterlands for blogging about it. How effective has this effort been?
Leeching, botting, and grifting are not how this ecosystem grows. Win trading bot farms are extracting rewards and immediately selling the cards at the lowest price. If they hold onto the cards for card price appreciation, there still exists a possibility that the game tanks due to the relative lack of human participation and interest. There's no amount of "Share Your Battle" posts (users create the instruction manual and present it as a marketing tool) to turn that around.
There are reasons to be bullish about Splinterlands, but the power that bot farms and their owners presently exercise in the ecosystem and potentially in the ecosystem's governance is a massive threat. There are those who want this ecosystem to be more "Corporate Friendly" for promotional purposes and appeal to outside investors as an investment vehicle for higher returns on investment, but the overwhelming influence of bots does not make it an easier sell for attracting attention and investment money.
