Why aren't more people offering scholarships in Splinterlands? This is a question I get asked often, both by potential scholars hoping to break into Splinterlands and by potential investors trying to figure out how they can profit from cards they aren't actively using themselves. And it's a multipronged answer that I'm not going to dive into too much immediately. But there's actually an alternative answer. We DO have a huge volume of scholarships in Splinterlands. But those scholarships aren't going to humans. They are going to bots instead! Many investors and guilds have decided not to "hire" scholars to play with their assets, but instead to use bots that can do the work for free (yes, some of those same guilds who claim their primary goal is to empower impoverished communities are quick to jump at a chance to automate away their services).
I could write an entire article about which is better for the game, human scholars (contribute to the community) or bot scholars (more likely to reinvest profits into the economy). But that's an opinion piece for another time, by another person. But what I do want to explore is how the ROI compares between the two. Is a bot truly a superior way to manage your assets? Does a human outperform a bot on the battle field? Can a human bring value to guilds in other ways beyond simple ranked battle earnings to offset their cost?
To get answers to these questions, I'm starting up my own scholarships! I will be running 3 scholarships side by side and then comparing the results of each. There will be a pair of bots, one with enough power for Silver III and another with power for Gold III, and one human with enough power for Gold III. That human is our very own 
This experiment is going to be fascinating, because I have decided to make things extremely challenging for DBofficial and his bot counterpart. To determine which can generate the best return, we need to push their skills to the absolute limit. To do this, I spent the last week attempting to acquire power as cheap as possible, while spending very little on cards that are actually useful for either player (and keeping those useful cards the same on both sides). An account needs 100,000 power to reach gold. I spent $1,340 last week to acquire 222k power, or about $165 per CP. Most of these were on max level reward cards, many of them being gold. Remember, they will not have the summoners to take advantage of a max level card. Cards were maxed out because they give +5% CP bonus when maxed.
Their first challenge? Can they make gold league (and if so, how quickly!) with a very bare bones deck. Outside of the currently in print reward cards, they were each given a set of all 5 Fiends, Wave Brood, Tusk the Wide, and Creeping Ooze. That's it. Will that be enough? If not, I will slowly add in more functional cards until we find the minimum investment that will allow each account to compete at the gold level. Even beyond scholarship ramifications, I'm fascinated to find out how expensive it is to reach Gold!
As the journey progresses I will keep you all updated on our human vs bot scholarship battle! Once we get some initial data I will be sure to have a video or two discussing the topic, while DBofficial will also have plenty of content on his own channels. I hope you all are as curious as I am to see how these 2 perform!
