I agree, they do. But not at the game. They suck to play against. After losing 4 matches in a row in Gold II, all of which appear to be against bot accounts, I will bring my argument for why they suck.
I usually label an account as a bot when they have a ridiculous # of matches since their account was created, they have Zero transaction history on https://peakmonsters.com/@_UserNameHere/history, own almost no cards of value, have serious rental obligations, and completely ignore rulesets (things like using Ooze in reverse speed or double healer in a no healing match.)
Bots in Gold are typically dropping around 2.5k dec/day ($26.86 at time of writing) for rentals (at least the ones in my history)
Lets look at some accounts from my recent history. To maintain anonymity (and I'm not sure what rules are on using account names) I will just refer to the Bots as 1-4.
Bot 1: Owns 2 reward cards, 2,454 dec/day in rentals, Zero transaction history, 62.5% WR
Bot 2: (Actually has bot in their name) Only owns a days worth of reward cards, 2.15k dec in daily rentals, Zero transaction history, 57.5% WR, 508 matches played since account was created sometime this month.
Owned cards -
Bot 3: Owns a days worth of reward cards, 1.85k dec a day in rentals, zero tx history, 53% WR, 3.3k matches since August.
Bot 4:
Only new reward cards owned -
You get the idea. So here is why this sucks, and if I mistake a player for a bot, my apologies. You can often tell a bot from a human from their account details, match history, etc., but nothing is 100% accurate.
First of all, spending $25 a day to play in Gold is a pretty steep price. The ROI on that is just making everyone else's experience worse (accept for the top of the food chain, which I'm sure is happy for the rental prices constantly inflating.) Sure, I rent cards, but bots seeping up all these cards to produce barely a return just means that they have to work in massive scale (more and more bots) to see any reasonable profits, which just drives prices up further. Like EoS, I imagine bots may just drive every day rentals to be negative EV. I know if I'm struggling as someone whose been around longer than your average person, well, I feel for our newer players out there.
The other thing that sucks is the bots always bring max level cards for a league. Sure, sometimes their splinters don't line up, but more often than not, as someone who doesn't rent or own many maxed cards for a league, playing against them just feels bad. You either have a free win or crushing loss. Basically, they just smash op cards down and you either have the answer or you don't. Checking battle history does often display their full range of cards. But, Even with a diverse roster, unless your cards are of comparable level, its often just over before the match starts.
I think most of the people claiming bots suck at the game must have a very high level and diverse collection of cards. Personally, keeping up with the power level of cards just to compete with bots doesn't sound that enticing.
My favorite thing though is trying to complete my daily on a budget in a sea of bots with maxed out cards. When their splinters don't line up they just outright concede before you can submit a team. Welp, maybe next time.
Sure, maybe I should just drop my rank to silver, but honestly my cards feel over powered there. Free wins are kind of boring and I don't feel good about smashing some of our newer players with maxed out silver cards. I thought maybe the reward changes would incentivize players to increase their ranks, but it seems like its just the bots doing that. I wonder what their ROI looks like at those rental prices.
I'm not sure that the RoiBots siphoning a significant amount of the reward pool is the healthiest thing for the game. I know I don't enjoy their approach, but I also agree with the Devs take on banning them outright.
I just think about my own experience and a new players. I know that this botting is good for the bottom line of the main players here, but if bots suck the return dry I imagine new players won't be as quick to latch on.
I don't know what the answer is or if there even needs to be one. But I think we should understand what a new player experience looks like, and that the bots aren't doing anything to help it.
