A few days ago I posted about the fact that the amount of rentals and the dollar value of those rentals had been stuck for several weeks.
Yesterday I posted about the fact that I am pretty sure there are now bots running major whale accounts and undercutting everyone. Since then I've seen many different clues to suggest I was right about the bots.
The strategy of the bots seems to be to undercut the market with a single listing by about 10-15%. And the second that listing rents out, replacing it with another. This way it doesn't appear to be a wall of inventory so people aren't as keen to undercut it.
Usually one anomalous listing will get picked up Pretty quickly anyway so if you're next in line, you just let it get rented and then you get to do business as usual. These bots make you believe thats the case but then your inventory never gets touched even though you're always just a few away from being next in line.
The price will stay in one spot because no one cares to undercut one listing. When someone finally does undercut it, that price will be undercut again within minutes in the same way with some listing with 3 decimal points at the end.
So almost every one of my cards when a listing expires is coming back on line with prices 10-20% cheaper than they were the day before.
So far the bots aren't managing every card so there's still soem room to compete but whales in this game seem to move together so I'd have to imagine they will start managing more and more inventory. So if you're out there trying to earn an income, you are now at a very unfair advantage and new strategies must be built.
Whatever you do, don't undercut a bot with a wall of inventory because you'll drive the price right to zero.
It's sad but I guess it's time to start building bots to compete with the bots.
This is of course how the robot AI wars of the future start. Right here in the Splinterlands rental market.
Now all of this becomes a non-issue if the rental markets were growing but they aren't. No additional cards are being rented even though new players are coming in droves.
People have pointed out to me that sales are down because of CL coming and that makes sense as I've stopped buying to make room for CL myself but why aren't they renting?
I think the reason is because most of the account growth right now is also just bots. People signing up for not 1 or 2 but 10 different accounts and setting it up with a small deck to go farm the game.
While bots playing doesn't concern me, it does concern me that it means there's a chance all the explosive growth we're seeing isn't real. I think it was in the beginning because when it started out all of metrics were going up together as expected. But now it's really just active accounts, spellbooks, and games played that continues to move higher like on a perfect conveyor belt while the metrics that should be moving with them are sputtering out.
What do you think? Is the Growth real? Does it matter if its real or just several people opening 10 accounts? Curious to know everyone's feelings on the matter?