Recently Addressed Issues of the Past Regarding Botting

I am posting this in order to bring notice to an issue within the ranking system of the Splinterlands play-to-earn trading card game. I am very fond of the gameplay and earning mechanics of this card game, and I do play competitively. There have been slight tweaks and measures slowly being put in place in order to make it less advantageous for players to just keep bringing more bots into the game and flood matches, such as the one implemented last season to lower the minimum rating gains as one progresses further out of range of their competitors, in order to prevent these bots from spamming thousands of matches over time and propping themselves a hundreds to thousands of rating points ahead of players ranked just beneath them.

Reoccurring Issues Regarding Botting via Pairing Imbalance

For quite a number of seasons I have been taking note of these repeating patterns of botted and likely botted accounts consistently receiving far higher pairings than any of the players attempting to compete around the same levels. To give one a clearer understanding as to why this would happen, there has been this measure put into place that would tag botted accounts that would maybe submit matches way too fast and too often, since if they encounter another bot, they could have their teams submitted against each other in no time, and then onto the next competitor it is. An account tagged like this would then have a much higher priority to match itself against a player instead.

So now we have a situation where the matchmaking system is splitting into two different tiers of pairings, one being for active players, and one for botted accounts. I have gathered and still can gather more evidence in screenshots of how different the pairings are between us players and botted accounts as this seems to happen on just about a daily basis where bots go on a roundabout landing top pairing after top pairing, while players will typically struggle to land themselves a single one. This makes it extremely difficult for higher rating players to get chances to knock these top tier bots as their chances of pairing to one are extremely low when the game has plenty of lower rated bots all constantly searching for matches. I will be providing sample images of some of the recent top matches history in the silver league from about the second day of the current season, and you may compare their matches, or even new matches in the top battles, with the battles of mine or any other top known players within the league that are active in the Splinterlands Discord channel.

Sample Images: Top Battles

So here are a few images from some of the top suspected bots that are closing in on half of a thousand matches within the first two days of the season.

Note how often their three names come up again and again, and even against each other on multiple occasions. I dare anyone to find a player with pairing opportunities like this.

It remains awfully difficult for active players to outpace bots who can consistently pair on matches that will potentially grant the same rating that could take an ordinary player almost ten matches to do in some cases. I am actually ranked slightly higher than these bots thanks to a couple of them having almost a hundred losses, so the excuse that they're higher ranked and therefore are placing top battles because of that can not be used. Example:

What players take around a hundred losses or even more and still place this high... in the first two days at that?

I could go on and on, but I do not want to flood this post with too many images to look at. The evidence is still present and forming itself for any to see. We have the tools to look for ourselves. I do hope something can be done to resolve this issue. If the bots are here to stay, we would at the very least like them and players to be on an even playing field.

Is there a solution?

I honestly can not think of a solid idea at this point other than what could be proposed as a temporary solution until we find a real way to deal with bots hugging the tops our leaderboards due to these imbalances. They are granted way too much room to lose vs players, since their pairings have lower drops, but higher gains, since the pairings are often high. I have once proposed we possibly cut the leaderboards in two and pull half of the prizes for the bots to fight over, and making them ineligible for the players' spots, but that would require being on constant watch for other bots that could also just pose as players. They would at the very least not be able to play an unrealistic number of matches and have more equal pairings if they're not tagged to prioritize placing vs players, but if they are caught, then they could be put in their own bot-leagues if they started running through matches way too quickly or people keep spotting their odd surrenders, like so:

I welcome any other idea for a solution from the team, and I am sure the Splinterlands team welcomes any other new ideas presented to help finally level the playing field here.

Thanks for reading.
@kira1995

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