The Exponential Soulbound Bot Farms Are Coming!
Recently there's been a big fear campaign about soulbound bot farms being the death of Splinterlands.
The theory is that players will use their high end decks to farm a bronze or silver level deck of soulbound cards. Then, they will move their good cards onto another account and do it again to create another soulbound farming account. Supposedly you can use this strategy to create a bot farm that grows exponentially since each time you do it, you'll have a new account that can replicate the strategy of creating new accounts.
So now, one account became two accounts and two accounts will be comes four, and on and on until you have hundreds or even thousands of accounts.
Hopefully, you've already found the glaring flaw in this system.
The glaring flaw
Soulbound rewards cards can't create a replicating bot farm system because the cards are soulbound.
- Account A has all my cards for Season 1.
- In Season 1 I win enough soulbound cards to have a standalone silver level deck in Account A
- I now move my non soulbound cards to Account B so now I have 2 farming accounts. (A and B)
- After season 2 I have enough soulbound cards in Account B to move my non soulbound deck to Account C
- My Account A also won some new cards so its time to take the Season 1 cards from Account A so I can make an account D since I want exponential growth.
And its that last step where the problem with the exponential theory lies. I can't move anything from Account A to make a new deck. It's all soulbound.
"The death knell" and the answer to 
dreams
A very popular Splinterlands youtuber is out there telling people soulbound bot farms could be the "death knell" for Splinterlands. In a short time he was able to use his champion deck to farm a silver team. So his new focus is building these accounts because multiple accounts earning are better that one. Duh
So clearly everyone is going to go get to champion now so they can take advantage of this loop hole right? I mean, go to champion for one season and get this exponential ball rolling right?
Well we already established its not exponential so that won't work. Oh, I got it! The player base are all just going to have to make to to Champion every season so they can keep minting silver teams!
Hats off to the team for this stroke of genius. They finally are going to get the player base out of bronze and into champion after 5 years of trying everything. Get ready for mass combining of cards because there aren't enough champion decks out there for for this to scale at all right now.
Sounds like the death knell to me.
But what about those already in Champion?
But OK, some people who already have champion level decks are going to do this right? They'll build 12 to 24 silver levels soulbound SPS farms each in a year. If they all do it, that's a few thousand accounts farming bronze and silver and not adding anything back. That's bad right?
Well, if you don't mind your champion deck making bronze season rewards each season because you keep starting new accounts, this works fine. Remember, the season rewards chests you get is determined by the highest league you made it to last season. New accounts didn't have a last season.
Go ahead and give up those $50-100 seasons so you can build a bronze and silver level bot farm over time that makes pennies each. Your fellow champion leaguers will surely thank you. Oh, and your champion deck will slowly lose its edge because you don't have one account with high level soulbound cards in it since you keep moving around.
So far so good for the bot strategy. Let's tear it apart a little more.
Enter SPS player staking.
The SPS chain just quietly went live. This is the prerequisite for functioning validator nodes but it's also the prerequisite for SPS delegation and player staking.
Yep, player staking is coming probably sooner than most people expect it.
Player staking is going to dictate the rewards an account can win and will most likely affect RP, which not only controls your SPS winnings but also how many chests (soulbound cards) you can win.
That means if people start doing this strategy en mass and a bunch of new accounts pop up, they will all need SPS staked on them to win anything at all.
Oh but whales have ore than enough SPS to stake
OK, but these are champion players and they have enough SPS to make a bot farm for sure right?
Yes, some probably do. But the thing about player staking is that it's a market. Your bot farm hanging out in bronze and silver is going to have an abysmal win rate and there's opportunity costs to consider.
Win rate is everything when it comes to RP and rewards, including the rewards of the person who staked on you. Are you going to stake that SPS on your shitty bot farm thats fishing for pennies in sewers or on players who actually win more than they lose but don't have the SPS?
What's going to be more profitable in the short term? What's going to help your overall investment gain value in the long term?
I'm betting its staking on real players who actually win sometimes and might refer a friend or buy a card or at least on your bot farm that has enough cards beat the sea of soulbound leachbots.
But SPS staking isn't here yet!!
We don't have to look at SPS taking to tear this apart. Let's say the strategy works so well that we get hoards of these farms. Are they going to win a lot? No. They'll do some win trading with other bots with the same cards but they'll get destroyed by players and bots with real cards who will quickly put together strategies to stomp them and their 40 cards (if they manage to get all 40 in a season).
But what about their rewards?
They will win some battles and get some rewards right?
The rewards would be tiny and only get smaller. Each new account will be battling for the same finite pool of already small rewards, and with such a low win rate, winnings will never add up to much per account.
But! They have a bunch of accounts and it will all add up!
Then they will have to buy so many $10 Spellbooks and that will add up much faster. Let's not forget that running bots isn't free. Don't think you're going to go pick up a $25 xbot token and pay that off real quick with your SPS winnings.
But even if it doesn't quickly pay for itself, that APR might be worth it!
Maybe. Let's say its a 5 year pay off. Not too shabby. But are you confident enough that after you invest your money in this strategy that the team and community don't plug the hole or at least nerf your strategy soon after? Maybe before it becomes the "death knell" of the whole game and all that?
I'm looking at a game economy that is 150% different than it was a year ago. What will it look like in 5 years?
Well what about all those bot farms that existed before?
They have the spellbooks and they don't need archmage and xbot tokens. OK, so let them rent and buy enough cards to go farm those rewards cards for a few months. It will spark the whole economy and about the time they are fully up and running again the rules will likely have changed again.
At the very least by that point we are back to the SPS staking problem. If they want to spend months renting dimaond and champion decks en mass just to have to buy and stake enough SPS to manage all those accounts for paltry rewards right after, who am I to stop them?
But! But! BOTS ARE BAD and you're just dumb!
OK, so let's say I'm missing something huge and this whole death of splinterlands thing plays out with the exponential accounts and all that. I've definitely overlooked things before in my assessment of this game.
So this works really great and there are just millions of little money trees sprouting up in the once fertile Lands of Splinter and they drink everything up.
At what point in this process of expansion is one of these soulless leachbots going to realize that by renting or buying just a few key cards, their win percentage against all the other clone bots goes up dramatically?
And even though they hate the thought of contributing anything to the Splinterlands economy, maybe they can hold their nose and just rent those few cards so they get more of the finite reward pool for themselves?
Might we suddenly have this exponential bot army trying to outcompete each other by coming up with new card strategies that could outwit their opponents so they can get more rewards? We should call these new gaming wars something cool.
I know! We will call it "web 3 gaming".