Brawls. We all love 'em! If you are already in a guild, you know how great brawling is!
And if you aren't in a guild... Why not? Go on, find one and join - I'll wait for you right here...
Ok we ready?
In Splinterlands, Brawls are the closest thing we get to a team event. There's no ECR. No ladder climbing. No seasonal resets. Just pure competition - Guild vs Guild vs Guild vs Guild....
There is a lot at stake in brawls. Bragging rights, crowns, merits, SPS. We jockey for position every 5-6 days.
So... What about Brawling Bots?
We all know that ranked play has a lot of automated gameplay. But to my knowledge, no publicly available battle automation service currently offers fully automated brawling. However, we know there are some tools out there to help with lineup selection. I don't know how to track all these tools. However, one of the most recent entrants to the arena of Splinterlands Automation Services is XBOT. They've gotten a lot of buzz and a lot of success.
XBOT has recently opened up their "Battle Helper" service to allow users the ability to recommend lineups for any match - including tournaments and brawls. So I started to wonder - how reliant are the top guilds on battle assistance tools?
Next: Follow the DEC
In order to use XBOT's Battle Helper feature, players need to transfer DEC to a dedicated XBot account for credits. So it was a fairly straightforward process to track which players, and in which guilds, have sent their hard earned DEC to XBOT since the launch of the new paid service. I queried the Splinterlands API on March 11.
Battle Helper Usage across Tiers
| Tier | Guilds Using BH | Total Guilds in Tier | BH Users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 4 | 20 | 33 | 53 |
| Tier 3 | 32 | 121 | 59 |
| Tier 2 | 24 | 257 | 40 |
| Tier 1 | 18 | 388 | 28 |
| Other | n/a | n/a | 32 |
| TOTAL | 18 | 388 | 212 |
NOTE: I didn't track movements of players between Guilds, so there there may be minor inconsistencies in the data. Out of the 212 users, I found that 32 users had inconsistencies in the data, mostly due to no brawl matches with their current guild. It seems plausible these may have been due to ranked play or tournament matches. Or they may be users that moved to a new guild. For my purposes I am comfortable to ignore, because I wanted to look at the top tier.
Tier 4 Guilds
There are currently 33 guilds in Tier 4. It's the most prestigious and competitive Tier in the game at the moment. These Guilds are meant to represent the best players in the game. Over half of the Guilds in Tier 4 have at least one player using XBot's assistant. And they seem to plan to use it more. Collectively, these players have loaded nearly 60,000 DEC's worth of credits.
For context, Tier 4 brawls have 21 frays, and most guilds in this tier generally have around 25-30 members.
| Guild - Tier 4 | BH Users | DEC to XBot |
|---|---|---|
| ✨[RKO] Outta Nowhere ⚡ 🧨 | 12 | 5,550 |
| Team Possible Hackers | 5 | 605 |
| Legendary Raptors | 4 | 6,000 |
| YGG Brawlers (Ásgard) | 4 | 11,000 |
| Legendary Wizards | 3 | 1,375 |
| PeakMonsters Pirates | 3 | 554 |
| [KoG] Guardians of Glory | 2 | 601 |
| [KoG] No Guts No Glory | 2 | 2,700 |
| Knights United | 2 | 10,500 |
| Legendary Lunatics | 2 | 920 |
| PeakMonsters [Archon] | 2 | 1,010 |
| Phoenix IVY | 2 | 1,100 |
| T&A Legion I | 2 | 300 |
| The Guild of Neoxian | 2 | 10,885 |
| Legendary Dragons | 1 | 1,000 |
| PeakMonsters [Legion] | 1 | 321 |
| PeakMonsters [PREMIERE] | 1 | 2,000 |
| PeakMonsters [Vikings] | 1 | 247 |
| Roaring Twenties | 1 | 1,010 |
| TOTAL | 59 | 57,778 |
What are we supposed to do with this?
I don't have an answer. I wanted to take a look at how prevalent the practice of battle helpers was. Clearly, there is a significant presence in Tier 4 especially, where the stakes are highest.
I have no data on other battle assistance tools or private automation solutions and can't really speculate further.
What do you think? Does this surprise you? Let me know.