Thank you for doing this. After years of playing this and building up my deck I was losing hope on ranked and brawls because of the botting, the battle helpers and also that all of the content creators are openly botting. It was becoming bizzaro world where the cheaters are the normal ones and the people that don't like it and feel it is ruining everything about the game are the weird ones and "salty."

I had given up on ranked and I was seriously deciding to exit ranked and my guild because of the cheating and just focusing on renting out all my cards and playing the land game only or exiting the game entirely.

Everyone in my guild stopped brawling except me. Since SPS staking came into effect 2 have started brawling again and I got hope for ranked being playable again so I started battling but I could still see bots in modern they were just renting SPS. Now that the bot ban in modern has been implemented I just tried it out and ranked is better now but I can tell there are still battle helpers being used.

Downvoted for the only reason that i would like the ban in Wild Tournaments to be in a later stage ;-)

These are my personal thoughts as a player (not as a team member).

The two proposals (“SPS Governance Proposal: Update Terms Of Service To Prohibit Use Of Battle Helpers in Modern Ranked, Tourneys, and Brawls” and “SPS Governance Proposal - Update Terms of Service To Prohibit Bot Use In Tourneys, & Brawls”) are the MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES that have come up before the Dao, even amongst all of the 39 completed and 1 active proposals.

In my opinion, these proposals are crucial to the future and survival of Splinterlands the game. Although the company started off with a bot agnostic position, over the past few years and especially the past few months, we as a community have seen the consequences of what happens when bot and battle helper use ramp up to such high levels. The reality is that while Splinterlands has always strived to ensure that bots do not have an unfair advantage over human players, it has become clear that over this entire time period the bots have maintained an advantage and that advantage has steadily grown over time. 

The competitive aspect of the game disappears and skill becomes marginalized when everyone is using a bot or battle helper. Win trading within a botnet jeopardizes the integrity of the system. We have seen many human players give up and either leave the game or turn to botting (“if you can’t beat them, join them”) resulting in a cascading snowball effect.
 
Before I started playing Splinterlands in 2019, I spent a year playing CryptoKitties which I enjoyed. But the dominant and optimized bots in CryptoKitties pushed out the human players like me, and now I worry that I am seeing the same thing happen in Splinterlands. We’ve already seen what happens to games that become primarily bot-driven - do we want Splinterlands to follow the path of Alien Worlds?

How is Splinterlands going to attract and retain new players if the ecosystem is full of bots and most of the human players have already left? What is the player experience going to be like when you are constantly beaten down by over-optimized bots and battle helpers? How are we going to be taken seriously in the Esports community and get corporate sponsors for tournaments if botting and battle helpers are the norm in tournaments?

I do think there can be a space for bots in the Splinterlands ecosystem. At the moment it is Wild Ranked and maybe in the future there can be specific formats (botting league? bot vs human challenge?) that are specially targeted for bots. But I definitely do not think that bots and battle helpers belong in tournaments and brawls. And before the human-only Modern proposal was passed, a large number of community members agreed with that, even going so far as to informally agree to @davemccoy 's pledge to not bot tournaments and brawls.

The recently passed and implemented proposal “Splinterlands will try to implement anti-bot measures in Modern format” is a step in the right direction but by itself its impact will be very limited. It’s only a half-measure because battle helpers are not covered in the scope for Modern ranked. Furthermore, the impact of battle helpers is greatest in tournaments and brawls which are supposed to be about competition and skill.

I realize that many of the human players who have since resorted to botting or using battle helpers might now like the extra time that has freed up. But if you ever enjoyed playing the game, if you ever prefer playing against a human player, or if you want Splinterlands to grow and be able to attract new human players instead of just being a massive botting simulation, then I encourage you to vote in favor of both of these proposals. Even if you have more free time or earn higher profits from botting or using battle helpers, I hope you agree that these two proposals are what is best for the future and survivability of the game.

I am confident that the Splinterlands Dev team can identify the use of bots or battle helpers to a high degree of accuracy and that they can implement measures to significantly reduce and deter such use.

I dont't like this. Will downvote. The way to reduce bot usage is by technology not some bullshit lawyer who thinks he knocks down your door and bring law inforcement into your house. Also there is the risk to suspend accounts who are humans and have nothing done wrong.

i like the idea but i feel we need to be clearer with what we want and a path to do so. A blanket ban in tournaments won't work as services need a way to earn to stop them from just updating their tools to just play in tournaments. We also need to detail what will happen to accounts that break x rule. We need a path for human vs human and a path for people to bot so we have a middle ground so services will get on board with this like they did for modern ranked. For tournaments, it should be a setting for host to choose if they want a human vs human tournament or not so then Splinterlands can keep their decentralized approach to things while allowing others to make the human vs human league. Matt said before that host and sponsors should have the opinion and finding a middle ground for both partys to be happy will be the most successful way to do things.

tournaments is an easier task to do this over brawls as brawls will need a full rework to have a path for human vs human or services wont get on board with this and will still allow their tools to work in brawls.

i love that you have tried to tackle all the most at once but i feel tackling them one by one will yield a high result to get people on board and find what areas we can get success with the human vs human part of the game. Also separating bots and helpers is a good idea but if we find a perfect middle ground then we can tackle them together.

the only parts missing in this really is 

1. how to handle accounts that break this rule to stop them from just doing it on another account by moving assets 
2. how can we set this up for tournaments to still allow these bot/helper services to make money so then we can keep them out of the human vs human league 
3. how can we change brawls to allow bots/ helper services to make money so we have human vs human brawls while keeping a path for people to bot brawls
4. we need to use what the team did with the modern and wild split by allowing these services to make money in wild while allowing us to have modern as the human vs human league as the only reason we got the bot free modern league was because the team made the bot/helper services get on board with allowing modern to be the human league.

as i whole im happy we are actually looking to make steps on working on the underline issues without spl but we need to do it well otherwise any attempt after it fails will make things worse to re try again.

"NOTE: Bot play is acceptable in the Wild Ranked Format"

Am I correct in presuming that if this passed Wild ranked would be the only place bots were accepted?

This is a no brainer. Thank you!

I voted down on this for now and will likely do so on the official proposal as well if it makes it through, not because I disagree with the sentiment, but because rules without plans for enforcement are a non starter to me.

I'd personally like to see how the bot ban in modern goes so that we as a community can gather data on how it works in that test environment first then expand implementation from there.

I personally would have prefered to include battle helpers, too, as also battle helpers are clearly superior compared to human players and eliminate the skill factor from the game.
However, every beginning is better than no beginning at all. :)

Let's Go Dave! TeamPH appreciate your support and actions! We salute you.