Well let me preface this statement with the disclaimer: the following message is a reflection of my person experience and observations of some random gamer.

I have played video games as early as I was allowed to, I had my big conquest convincing the family to get a desktop comp so I could play my first video game ever, Warcraft I, or as it was known in the day, Warcraft.... ;)

My first experience with botting was in the game Runescape, which I still play 20 years after first trying that very interesting new type of game, coded in javascript, as it once stood. No disk space downloads, meaning I could play at school, not like I ever did, but I could....The first bot I ran into playing Runescape were PK bots(Player Killing), they would do skill combinations and swapping of spells and prayers at speeds that were just unable to match. These annoyed me, I didnt like PVP anyway so I just stuck to the bank, standing, as it was known as..... My hoarding skills and saving skills lead me to fill a key niche in the game, the person who buys all the stuff you collected for a low price but reliable valuation, you can do better if you goto world 2 or what not, so most people just sold me their random items. Then people would come into the bank needing a particular item to do a quest, or skill a particular skill. There was no grand exchange and no accurate item drop information, it was usually easier to just buy it on the spot for a little more.

So that was my arbitrage, and the perennial law rune for 1000 gold, even tho I never fail to find someone to sell me law runes in bulk at 300 ea. But the buyer only ever wants 1 law rune at that price, for just that teleport. Interesting market standards that developed looking back at them.

In one of my common bank spots, Seers Village Bank, We began to be visited by many of these non-armor wearing female lvl 3 (minimum combat level at the time) with 0 skills on account, going to the field to the south collecting flax from the floor, which required no skill built up, and running the full sacks of items to the bank, back and forth, like a relentless army of white walkers.

I caught one of these botters at the keyboard one day and asked what they were doing. Up until then I never even saw anyone pick up that flax, for any reason and it was like 100 to 200 gold each. This was the entry level botter spot, low risk, you could bring a fresh account here and if u got banned, u didnt lose any build up skills. So from a stable price of 100-200 gold each, prices gradually dropped to a low of around 10 gp. I acquired massive quantities of this item, because although a slow process, I could always afk spin the flax into bowstring, worth 200 gp each. from a 10 gp item. This profit was protected by the fact that a decently high level of crafting skill was required to do it and it was a very hard and expensive skill to increase, and botters would not risk getting banned after sinking so much gold and time into the account skills. Then the great Bot nuke of 2011

Runescape great botnuke 2011

and you can see a month later the forums thread discussing the economic impact, how raw materials were no longer being produced and prices were spiking randomly as the economy went through price shocks and rebalanced one item and activity at a time. These price spikes were saviors to players, finally they could earn gold while playing.....

Runescape botnuke economy forums post

Today the price of flax is 102 gold down from a high of 182 gold in november 2021, 15+ years later, settling in the same price range as when I started playing.

The relative utility of flax is unchanged, it can be spun into bowstring, a necessary ingredient for making any bow with the fletching skill. This item is always needed in the economy in the long run, it derives its value from the output items value, bowstring. On average flax yields a 2x return when spun to bowstring, but the bots killed the raw material price by producing so much. Even though players could skill one of the most expensive skills in this way, and every 1 gold the price of flax went down, it increased the percentage return on spinning it, demand for bowstring never changed, and in fact real demand for flax by players to spin it skyrocketed. But every time the flax price rallied, more bots came on to exploit the easy profit. The bots continued to farm the game progressively one skill and item at a time, until it wasnt worth the time of the farmer, but they always made money selling gold for real dollars so they would farm anything no matter how little the profit.

Does this sound familiar @splinterlands ?

The reality is, as long as there is positive financial returns for botting in Splinterlands, you should expect to see an increase of botting over time, as others seek to cash in on this easy profit. This goes for any game where botting can be used to earn an economic return. We see this happening in all the play2earn games, like a plauge. The decentralization our founder and ceo @aggroed and @yabapmatt talk about(which in my opinion is a noble ideal to aspire to), are guaranteed to lead to an economy that has been sucked dry of all rewards, who will step in to buy these over supplied cards in the face of unrelenting endless and likely to increase supply of cards. Honestly you guys really created a situation where you built the rental system mostly reliant on bots or new players being the consumers. Players usually buy their decks if they stick around, I personally have not rented 1 card myself in the past 6 months from someone else. We will get rid of the bots and the next day, see player base collapse, and the passive income pillar of splinterlands, the rental market, will be shattered. With the raw amount of cards the team printed, real player demand cannot even in your wild dreams sustain 50% of current rental demand.

So we need to keep decentralization and honor the spirit of the project and our founders, while limiting but not eliminating the incentive of bots, while increasing the incentive or reward for actual humans playing.

One idea I came up with as a quick fix with minor coding required was a new potion since they had the quest potion coded into game they just have to change the potions features, the code is there, bought with Dec, SPS, or Vouchers, Giving 100% bonus dec income from battles for example, but this exp bonus, would require some form of activity check periodically. You can incorporate your planned minigames here. Let people do this activity when they want to, and pick which, whether they complete a captcha, complete a bank pin entry of their security pin that shifts locations like runescape, a minigame like pinball or slots people play for a period and interact with an ad, and earn something then go back to game no time lost. If they dont activate the activity check in a certain period, or fail it, they will lose the BONUS portion of dec. This allows humans and bots to play with the same rules, but have different likely outcomes.

This is the model you need to aim for in all your economic plans, dont aim to crush the bots, aim to make then bottom feeders who can only reach the scraps of the human players feet.

Heres a simple one, the new reward cards you are giving out, only drop in Gold/Diamond/League chests, at 10%/50%/100% of card drops for example. And lower leagues can earn the previous set of rewards, and keep 2 sets active always. There are so many options!!!

This boils down the supply and demand at the end of the day. Even though the profitability of spinning flax to bowstring only increased over the cited period, also while being able to make gold while skilling one of the most expensive skills at the time. This shouldn't have occurred in my opinion, but this what happens when supply and demand are not balanced, and you combine the words markets and momentum.