That is simply false. Botting happens in every single game that requires upfront cost. This game in particular allows them to farm income directly instead of "selling in-game assets for gold to sell to players in a 3rd party market." This argument make no sense at all. The return on investment is worth the upfront cost.
Edit: One example is WoW. Its plagued with bots while requiring to buy the game full retail plus paying a sub fee every month. Thousands do so gladly and are profitable.
Ok, lets talk about wow. they pay how much, $50 for a leveled up account boost? $15 in subscription every month? lets say $70 in investment. and you have the possibility, albeit low, to get banned by blizzard. blizzard has a policy that avoids banning users if possible.
The bots here in bronze, they invested how much? $10? per account? and they can multi account even with the same IP? botting in here is way easier than wow.
This actually helps the economy. The bots in bronze will get less cards, no dec, only potions and credits, credits which they will use to rent/buy power from other users, raising the market prices.
The less appealing the returns are for the bots, the less bots we'll see..
How would you would have tried to solve the bot problem?
You're missing my point. Yes, bronze league bots will make less profit. My point is that bots will simply invest to play in a higher rank league. They can even rent cards for more profit. When the bots have to rent/buy up all the decent cards to play in higher tiers that takes those cards out of real players hands and raises prices - as opposed to just letting them farm rewards in bronze with starter cards and selling all rewards off to players. This hurts the economy and minting cards is not bad its good (there's a cap so it literally cannot hurt the economy minting more cards). My theory is devs probably just want to slow down minting because they can't keep up with new ideas for future expansions.
A verification system would be a better solution. One account per IP and doing a captcha or something to verify you are human every x number of games. They aleady added deminishing returns for DEC. Add more DEC sinks and remove potion drops for low ranks. Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
The goal is making players human, and stripping rewards make more humans quit playing alongside some bots. More brainstorming is required.
I'm pretty sure this is the best-case scenario, so It's a little comical that it was presented as a negative that "hurts the economy" even with qualifiers that it'll raise the value of cards and slow down the bots farming all the reward cards and dumping them (farming all the DEC too btw). Sure, the cheap reward cards are cool... until an actual player wants to sell one.
If bots need to rent cards then card owners get a share of all the rewards they are draining from the pool, which makes owning cards that much better instead of everyone just buying 20 spellbooks, so I don't think "hurts the economy" means what you think it means.
Also, "one account per IP" is nonsense because a lot of hardcore players run multiple accounts using cards they own, and being able to do that makes ownership even more valuable. Someone could have entire max collection and still want to buy your cards for their other accounts that need them - that is a good thing, not a bad thing. Just like bot army renting/buying is a good thing, not a bad thing. We want bots to actually participate in the economy rather than just draining rewards 24/7 with the spellbook.
P.S. captcha/verification/etc are cancer and tech-savvy bot operators could bypass them anyway. alien worlds had captcha on cloud wallets and it stopped my brother's automation of their
faucet"game" for like... 1 day.I can see how renting more cards is good for players in general, but I disagree that it is good economy that cards are artificially scarce from bots scooping them up, leaving less for real players to have available. A lot of the "big picture think" is nice in a perfect world but isn't practical in a real setting through the lense of a bot owner who thinks like a hacker. No matter how much you nerf rewards, bots WILL be there and WILL profit. It only hurts real players.
In general I personally am not a fan of multiple accounts in principle. I would prefer devs to force one account per IP. Players will be mad but it's for the better, transfer your wealth to one account quit gaming the system like a bot. (Once again artificial scarcity and hoarding is not "good economy," having more real players playing your game is.)
I agree captchas are aids. There has to be a clever and not annoying way to verify humans that hasn't been thought of yet that. Smart people assemble!
There are counters to what you propose. Captchas are a horrible idea. They tried it in alien worlds and it sucked, it didn't stop the bots and it got so annoying for the players that they removed it. You don't want to do a captcha every time you try to duel someone, trust me..
The one account per IP sounds like a better idea, something like a 24 hours time period where you can't login with a different account on the same IP but the devs said they don't want to do that.
There should be a limit though, something like, 2 accounts per IP max.
Maybe the idea is to limit the bronze bots for this season while they brainstorm for a better solution, idk.. better than doing nothing I guess.