Botting: The Breaking Point

Now before reading THIS article you should read this, or this, or this , or this (Yeah not new issues). So you at least have some context before you start going into this deep dive. If you follow my talkings, the state of botting, and everything else in SPL this article shouldn't be a surprise for you. I have been talking these points for ALMOST 2 YEARS WITH ZERO PROGRESS MADE TO COUNTER THESE MAJOR ISSUES UNTIL VERY RECENTLY! Happy Splinterbirthday to me.

However, here is a TLDR for those of you not in the know: The majority of active SPL accounts are bot farms run by a rather small playerbase. This section will go over why this is a problem on various levels including: esports, legality, optics, and overall human player enjoyment. There will not be sugar coating in this article, so buckle up it's gonna be a bumpy ride. This attempts to shine light on things and present the potential perspective for viewers outside of HIVE.

Brass Tacks: The Bad

It's Market Manipulation

(taken from a SPL tech update notification in their discord)

The glaring issue here with this is that 1) they have knowledge of how many bots there are, and have had this knowledge and capability from the games inception.

2) they are publicly admitting to knowingly misrepresenting botting statistics and having accurate knowledge of how many human players there have been SINCE THE START.

3) all instances of them calling bots "players" and implying there was a large human playerbase are obtainable via subpoena via twitch/twitter. Even though the broadcasts aren't live anymore there are various instances in which it has been recorded into youtuber's videos etc., and the broadcast itself is obtainable via twitch's parent company Amazon in the event of a lawsuit.

4) Knowingly calling bots "players" to entice new users or buyers is market manipulation.

The Esports Dilemma: No one wants to watch someone fight robots

Quite frankly, no one wants to watch an autobattler where the player fights a bot with no one at the helm 90 percent of the time. No one wants to watch this with any other video game, why would they want to watch it here? They wouldn't. No one would watch the Teamfight Tactics legendary ladder if they knew 9 out of 10 of the competitors were AI AND there were no entertaining animations to boot. The draw just isn't there for the majority of gamers (ie people who watch VIDEO GAMES).

Optics: Botting, an exploit.

Botting is not an aspect of the main game, and aside from being viewed as an exploit by web2 gamers also makes the game appear "so boring, or such a grind" that players use these third party services instead of actually playing. What makes it worse is the vast majority have stopping playing the cards, meaning it's NOT FUN ENOUGH TO PLAY MANUALLY FOR THE MAJORITY OF ACCOUNTS. Keep in mind this is from a "fresh" perspective, those who have been here a while know that these bots are in fact "bot farms" owned by a handful of people and not actually "individuals".

Legality: Inflated Statistics, Market Manipulation

For the longest time the devs would call all accounts "players" when presenting the game in AMAs or wherever else they would appear. Previously all accounts were called players deliberately to give the appearance that all accounts are human players and garner much different numbers than the current "bot churn". This makes the account numbers seem like a MUCH different statistic and is by definition market manipulation. More info here

Soulbound Cards: A Nail in the Coffin

Some of you might be asking, why are soulbound cards bad? Doesn't this keep bots from burning DEC value? The truth of the matter is that SOULBOUND CARDS DON'T SOLVE ANY ISSUES LONG TERM. This next section will cover why, and what the real intent of this update is. This is NOT an "anti-bot" update, this update actually harms incoming players the most and only accomplishes a few things in the short term. Bots remain relatively unaffected, they will still bleed the overall economy and will still continue to sell rewards cards en mass. The only difference being they will have to pay a fee to list their cards and sell them to extract the value, this brings dec a modicum closer to peg but that isn't the true purpose of this update.

What's the point of this update?

This update is meant to make the "market volume and sales" statistic seem much more inflated than it actually is, where previously cards would be burned to gain value if they weren't selling for more than their burn value. Now all cards have to be sold, this will pump up the "24hr trade volume" statistic and allow it to be mentioned instead of the flatout lie of "player activity". It will be HEAVILY implied that this volume comes from humans or "players" and actual "demand" not just bot lords cycle buying from other bot lords in a centralized fashion.

How does this effect onboarding? Non-linear progression at a snail's pace

Currently you cannot spend what you earn on cards without waiting 4 weeks to unstake, you cannot trade or sell your reward cards you earn from gameplay to expand your collection either (without paying a fee bots will easily afford and just use as a "base selling" price and increasing the price to incoming players artificially). The in game progression is the slowest I've seen in ANY CARD GAME, even blockchain games, being p2e isn't an excuse. If a player plays religiously for weeks he should be able to get some cards, currently there is a HIGH CHANCE a bronze player playing everyday for two weeks will not be able to acquire any new cards at the end of season without putting in outside money. This is a step too far and many of us have lost sight of what this game looked like when we entered it, this is not the game we used to play... it's something else. The argument presented is "well the rewards cards are valuable and can be sold for value" (if that's the case how does this stop bots at all? the answer is it doesn't, it is a veiled pro-bot update), but new human players can't sell them to get new or different ones to improve the variety of their gameplay. Most gamers won't be masochistic enough to grind all day all week for weeks for numerous copies of the same common cards (IF THEY SHOULD BE SO LUCKY) and no additional game variety while playing against the SAME BOT LINEUPS EVERYTIME, ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE ARE OTHER GAME TITLES OUT THERE THAT OFFER BETTER IN GAME PROGRESSION. This isn't a matter of tokenomics, it's a matter of the gameplay being very stale for those "playing to play". The reason Splinterlands WAS unprecedented was because it was implementing web3 tech to allow a p2p market for in game assets, Splinterlands is no longer unprecedented and has lost that edge.

The Council: A Gesture

The council that will be elected to "make player decisions" is also a farce, because it isn't 1 PERSON 1 vote it's 1 ACCOUNT 1 vote. This is handing the council over to bot lords while acting like it's a "fair democracy". They will just vote with whatever amount of bots are necessary to enter the council and lock in the current pro-bot trajectory, which is the trajectory the team wants, don't be fooled by any "it's out of our hands" bullshit. It's NEVER been out of their hands. These positions are purely ceremonial, in fact the whole current voting metric is just "smoke and mirrors". NO DECISION HAS HAPPENED THAT THE DEV TEAM HASN'T WANTED AND TO TOP IT OFF THEY MAINTAIN VETO POWER. Think about that and also how SPS isn't really an investment or related to company decisions whatsoever. The real purpose of this is spread the blame out across more people instead of the team being confronted with every update that THEY IMPLEMENT FULLY VOLUNTARILY. If they wanted any of these quote on quote "governing bodies" to have ANY power they would add it to the whitepaper AND ToS, otherwise it's just blame deflection to have the community blaming themselves instead of directing their concerns where they should be going.

The SPS DAO is not a financial institution according to the ToS and operating as such while labeling it as "not a financial institution" is in fact illegal to do so.

Where did all the money go? Not game development.

In short, mismanagement of funds. Holding over half of it AS CRYPTO INSTEAD OF A FIAT THAT CAN BE USED TO PAY SALARIES AND OPERATING COSTS. YOU DO NOT HOLD CRYPTO OR UNSTABLE ASSETS TO PAY PEOPLE'S SALARIES AND OPERATING COSTS IF YOU PLAN ON HAVING A TEAM HIRED FOR ANY EXTENDED PERIOD. This is a very very very very basic business management concept and not rocket science, and the fact it was borked should be a red flag.

It shouldn't have been spent on ANY OTHER ASSET (this would include buying plots of land or whatever other asset aside from holding funds to pay salaries and operating expenses, not just holding crypto). The priority purpose should've been hiring the appropriate team to develop your game, or AT LEAST setting it aside. Instead we got 50 percent of it held as "volatile" crypto, and the rest of it pissed away on rather half-cocked promotions and hires (ad-time with Alliestraza despite this game being a hard pass for Hearthstone gamers, the waka flaka promotion because why?, hiring a dude to animate two swords in the maintenance screen and giving him a full salary etc. etc.). Considering both of these promotions cost quite a bit of capital and resulted in almost zero human player retention when only 50 percent of the capital was well... capital. This was a foolish use of these funds when game development has ALWAYS taken back seat compared to "eye candy". There wasn't enough game to pitch to gamers, and waka flaka fans would at most get JUST the waka card. Eye candy is not meat and bones, and at a certain point you need meat and bones. No one cares about a one hit wonder rapper who was popular a decade ago, and hearthstone players won't come to play this game either EVEN IF A STREAMER THEY LIKE PLAYS IT (in fact Allie was met with serious backlash and had to stop streaming Splinterlands completely due to her having a similar issue when she pitched another game in an ad months before, her fans were not going to tolerate a boo-boo shill a second time).

Some Numbers: How much down the drain?

The team has made AT LEAST 3 Million from Untamed packs and another 3 million from land sales. AT LEAST. On top of this, various "personal assets" were sold at all time high by the team for further potential funding.

Previous Projects: And How they look

If you follow the team like aggy and yaba it becomes apparent that yaba is carrying most of the weight of developing this project at this point. Aggy has essentially been in almost exclusively sales for his entire career (which is just selling a product, the how is usually immaterial as long as the product sells). This pretty much reflects each AMA that has happened up until this point (Matt answering hard questions, Aggy providing "hype"), it also begs the question why the team hasn't expanded in a meaningful way to fill the gaps with all the money wasted (see sections above and below on where the money went). Additionally aggy's previous projects like GETSOME have all been abandoned, and quite frankly are rather "cringey" at best.

(above is an example of an abandoned project, GETSOME)

Quite frankly it's no surprise GETSOME wasn't picked up by any publisher, but to top it off the followthrough on this cringey project that REACHED IT'S FUNDING GOAL (as you can see) is nowhere to be found and was abandoned years ago (right before Splinterlands was started up, coincidentally). Begs the question, will this project be abandoned despite already having been fully paid for and all the funding has been raised that is required to deliver?

All this makes this project feel like the shit that finally stuck on the wall after throwing turds like GETSOME (from an outside HIVE perspective), when it isn't that (or at least I hope it isn't). Quite frankly, Yaba has done a great job developing the GAME itself. I have the utmost respect for yaba as a developer, he's carried this project almost on his own and his back must be tired. He made the game mechanics unique and interesting and developed a GAME, quite frankly I'm not very sure what aggy even does for Splinterlands at this point aside from hype sales. I can only imagine the inner turmoil yaba feels when he sees how HIS baby has developed, that guy deserves better than what he's gotten. Maybe his time as CEO can have a better visual impact, it's hard to say what structuring is necessary but at least it's a start.

"Forking": The Hail Mary Pass

At this point all previously suggested solutions will be shot down from the drawing board (most likely, or "delayed" until the point it won't really matter), due to SPS voting becoming a by bots for bots operation as predicted ages ago. To top it off the whole DAO in and of itself is just a veil to deflect blame from the developers, THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN COMPLETE CONTROL AND MAINTAIN VETO POWER. Nothing has happened that so far that hasn't been part of the agenda, the DAO only exists to say "it wasn't us it was that dirty DAO". Additionally the DAO acts as a financial institution without being "a financial institution", generally this combination of ingredients doesn't have a long shelf life.

The only viable solution to address most of these problems at this point is a "fork" with an exit, and the DAO not being responsible for EVERY DAMN IN GAME DECISION. The only viable voting system that would work in the future is a 1 for 1 voting system where only HUMANS can vote, because that is true player representation. All the DAO does is allow for bots to keep the boot on the neck of this game and keep it from achieving actual attention or greatness outside of the nichest of niches, even among crypto games Splinterlands has lost most of it's steam to other games ( games that focused more on the game and less on flashy promotions and holding crypto ). Ask yourself, When the next bull run comes why would people pick Splinterlands over other videogames that have oriented more around listening to the playerbase and being a videogame? The answer is simple, they won't. SPL is no longer a big fish in a small pond, it's just another fish in the sea. Keep in mind I use the word "fork" but in reality it would have to be a complete reconstruction that allows an exit for existing players not technically a "fork".

Quick List: Pros of "Forking" - an esports environment people might actually watch - players having an actual say in development, not just wallets - retention of Splinterlands assets and usecase - the removal of bots and the problems that they come with - distance from the the dubious legality of the current game - no more inflated statistics

Cons: - initial cost

Some of you might think an "across the board bot ban" would work aswell, and you may be right. But at this point it is impossible to trust if bots are actually being banned, previous members of the team (since axed) had previously run bots in the 10s of thousands. How are we to know ALL bots are really getting banned? EXTREME transparency is needed on this issue, who's in charge of going against the bots? what projects have they worked on before? Are they really incorruptible? At this point it's hard to expect a bode of confidence.

Just Tell 'em about the bots already

Another solution is rather easy, just TELL THE INCOMING PLAYERS ABOUT THE BOTTING DYNAMIC IN THIS GAME. You don't even need to have the complete numbers, by merely mentioning it MANY of the issues with botting are parried. By doing so the illusionary bubble of a "PvP Esport" has to be broken, but also no incoming players would have any reason to be mad if they were told about bots in the tutorial and it's the RIGHT thing to do. Continuing to keep bots a secret at this point is incredibly dishonest to entering players when all that needs to happen is a blurb in the tutorial mentioning that bots EXIST. Not doing so at this point isn't a matter of laziness, it's intentionally withholding this information from the incoming playerbase on purpose to misrepresent the game's dynamics.

Is Splinterlands a Ponzi Scheme? Well....

For reference here is the definition of a Ponzi scheme as defined by wikipedia

"A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.[1] Named after Italian businessman Charles Ponzi, the scheme leads vi