Voting No.
There is no way to reliably and accurately check for bots. Any measures taken can be quickly and easily avoided, for example checking for tokens would be bypassed by having users pay a fee monthly and send an message encrypted so that only the bot service can read it.
And so you know Captia will NOT stop bots in any meaningful way.
In short there is nothing that can be done to prevent bots without a fundamental change in how the game operates. The focus should be on how to make sure that no account can drain significantly more than they spend.
I agree with the weaknesses you've noted. If a bot service is determined to bypass the rules, some will find ways as long as the economy creates the incentive. But I think that if there is a line in the sand, some current bot users will respect it.
However, I do want to challenge you on your closing concept here though:
First of all, this is not how economies work anywhere. Splinterlands has a fairly complex economy and there are many different ways to participate. In real economies, people tend to specialize in offering services in some area (ie employment) and consuming in other areas. Then supply and demand should help balance out the supply of various inputs - labour/time, skill, capital, innovation, etc. All of these have some value in an economy and allowing people to participate in the ways that they can add some efficiency makes sense.
But if we create the scenario that "NO ONE" is able to get more out than they put in, then the entire project literally becomes a money pit, not an economy. There is no return on time, skill or efforts. Which maybe is fine if we just want a fun game, but then we might as well eliminate the reward pool, let asset prices adjust downwards, and make fun more affordable for everyone.
Aggy can explain the money pit scenario but you have to be an Alpha guy and keep botting to keep up
Exactly this even if they managed to identify every single bot then the issue is just humans looking at battle helper data and manually entering battles like a bot. Unless there is some way to stop all of this this just improve things for bots that stay hidden or humans who manually use automated tools.
I am voting no too for various reasons, but there is one way to stop bots, KYC. that would be hard to circumvent. and at best people could only run one bot per proven identity
I disagree, that's like arguing we shouldn't treat people in hospitals because death is inevitable.
Anti Bot measures are always a race between botters and game developers. But the harder you make it, the less widespread their usage gets. Its a big difference whether someone with 4 weeks of programming experience can build a bot for the game or whether it requires years of experience to figure it out.