I just recently saw this tweet of Chris Clay as a reply to someone asking when last week's reward packs will be released and he replied:
We're about to ban ~30k bot accounts and we're purging them from the Weekend Ranked rewards and BOTG event. Things are a little delayed as we work to make sure we're getting it as right as possible.
— ChrisClay (@ChrisClayPlays) January 13, 2022
30,000 bot accounts? That's quite a lot! If we look at this stat, GU's current highest number of unique players is 50,474 per day.
No. of Matches / Unique Player per Day
At this time, we don't know yet if those 30k bot accounts are operating all at the same time which will decrease the number of real players in the game from the graph above.
Update: GU Team has confirmed that 75k weekly active users does not include any bot accounts:
Last of all, you may have seen we celebrated some wins from this year, such as having 75k weekly active users. This remains true! We’ve been hunting these bots for the last few weeks, and removed the suspected bot number from those findings before we published them.
What does this mean for GU?
As we don't know a lot of detail on how much cards / $gods token was farmed by these bots, it's a bit early to assess the impact on Gods Unchained's economy moving forward. But it's good to know that the GU team is doing something to mitigate the proliferation of bot accounts.
We might see a little bit of price appreciation for Core and Divine Order cards in the coming weeks if fewer cards farmed by these bot accounts gets into the marketplace. Might be the same case with $GODS as 30k bots mining the coin and dumping it to the market is just another source of selling pressure that's keeping the price of $GODS down.
I hope the $GODS that were farmed by these bots are recovered (i'm not sure if that's possible) and added to the rewards pool that can be earned by real players in the upcoming events.
Update: It seems that they are holding off on distributing $GODS token until they cleared all the bot accounts. This is good news!
Blessing of the $GODS: Unfortunately, there is more work to be done to verify Blessing of the $GODS rewards after these bot attacks. Token delivery will be delayed until next week. The good news is this will mean more $GODS for all our real players!
Lessons learned
I'm expecting that the devs enhances their security even more to proactively avoid this kind of abuse. In addition, a more user-friendly way of reporting possible bot accounts should be a priority. The current in game reporting system causes a lot of issues while you are playing so it's very discouraging to use it.
Conclusion
I've seen other games get farmed to extinction so I'm appreciative of the efforts and transparency of the GU team to let their players know that this is an issue that needs to be resolved.
As a player, we need to do our best to also help by reporting suspected bot account behaviors and if there is any information that can lead to identifying the main account of the bot farmer as well.
PS: I wrote this prior to the official announcement in Discord. I'm updating the contents while getting new information from the GU team.
Source: Official Announcment in Gods Unchained Discord Server