I wanted to add some more information to this that may be helpful. There are third-party services that can be used to prevent bots from being able to use APIs, and they are supposedly pretty good from what I understand. So if this proposal passes, the plan would be to use one of those services in front of the battle API for modern format battles and the Splinterlands team would not be spending any resources "policing" the system or trying to identify bots and things like that.
If this initial trial is successful and we continue this on an ongoing basis, I would probably make a proposal to ask the DAO to help cover the costs of that service, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
This only works as long as you don't decentralize the game, as soon as you distribute the games state so others can maintain and run their own API, this won't work.
are there actual plans to decentralize the game ?
That has always been the plan all along, and this has specifically been brought up by Matt in the townhall that is specifically what he is here to build. There are many other centralized games on the market and people are free to play all those other ones, but this team, and this project, is here to build the worlds first decentralized trading card game
nice! doesn't seem easy ...
If only the Battle API is put behind a bot-detection system, what's stopping bots from submitting teams on-chain?
That works unless the bot is entirely browser-based, which mine is.
I don't think browser based bots are much of an issue. They scale horribly and aren't a huge drain on the reward pool.