How Bit Hotel Will Prevent Bots
How robotic Hotel Guests will be found and banned for good. Or not?
We’re getting some questions on how Bit Hotel will ensure a bot free environment. This article aims to explain how Bit Hotel, as a play to earn game, will try to prevent bots as much as possible. Without spilling the beans too much to prevent the smart botters to circumvent us.
For better or worse, online play to earn games almost automatically attract a lot of bots. These bots are automated programs that are coded to be able to play the game. Some bots are better than others, but the idea is that if they do well enough, they can earn enough to be profitable.
So in short, bots are stealing from profits that players could be making. But are they really an issue? Economics says otherwise, sometimes it’s a necessary evil.
First of all: Bit Hotel will be a highly competitive, social game. Bots won’t be able to do their work, except if they’re built on AI. Here’s our thesis on bots:
HFT (High Frequency Trading) Algorithms
The closest relatives to gaming bots are HFT algorithms. These algorithms are unnecessarily seen as negative. Many argue that HFT being a major component of modern stock markets is wrong. Truth is, we couldn’t do without HFT and day traders in general, because we’d have a big problem in the market: insufficient liquidity.
Day traders with their HFT algorithms, connect with buyers and sellers in the market, and provide the liquidity that might otherwise be lacking. The profit made from the price difference is basically payment for the enumerated liquidity. The higher the volatility, the higher the profits.
As the amount of trades become more saturated by these bots, profits decrease. Consequently the number of bots is reduced, because it is no longer profitable. This make it a self-correcting system.
Match Liquidity Providers
A limited player base in Play 2 Earn games means that you might have to wait a very long time before you’re matched with another player and can start a game. Even with a large player base, players can end up being matched to people who are way more advanced and skilled than them.
Bots can in some way solve this issue. Bots could be matched with other bots, but it’s more likely they’re matched to humans. Bots are average players with a moderate skill set, and they’re a perfect competitor for players who also perform average. The difference being that Bit Hotel might create its own bots to make up for player shortages in the beginning, while player-built bots will be recognized and only allowed in times of low daily active users.
If you remove bots from a play 2 earn game entirely, we start to see match liquidity problems. You’ll encounter longer delays between match requests and match starts. It’s also more likely you’ll have to compete against much more advanced players. So preventing and removing bots isn’t necessarily a good idea.
Preventing bots can actually cause more harm than wanted as it can make Bit Hotel less enjoyable for players. As long as bots aren’t stealing too much of the profit, trying to eliminate bots isn’t the best idea, even if they do take their share of revenue generation of the game. Luckily the Bit Hotel economics will not be a zero-sum game, meaning even if bots take some profits, it will not deduct from real-player earnings.
Player Headaches
Besides a decrease in match liquidity, players also encounter problems when a game introduces anti-bot measures. Think of increasing cooldown times, locking NFTs that are continuously traded between the same accounts, reducing payouts as a person plays more often, and many other options are used to make botting less profitable.
Making a loss more painful is another common option. Since bots are more likely to lose, they’ll be coded to only play matches they can win.
Actions like these make a game more frustrating and less profitable for players. The goal is to make a play to earn model that is organic and enjoyable, not one where the players have to jump through a lot of hoops or handle a lot of excess anti-botting measures.
What Bit Hotel will do about bots
So what is Bit Hotel going to do to prevent bots? As a Play 2 Earn game we want to ensure that human players are getting paid to play, and that bots aren’t absorbing all of the Bit Hotel tokens.
First, there are a few ways of directly handling botting.
- Do nothing, and let the botting happen is of course the easiest option. By doing nothing, the platform is hoping that the market is self-correcting. Markets usually are. As bot farms end up competing with themselves, it becomes less profitable. This is however not our preferred way to handle this.
- Official bots are another option. The platform can run a number of bots that work to out compete the bot farms and make sure there are always enough players to match up with. In this way, the lost revenue from botting just goes back to the platform to spend on anti-botting tech.
- Sponsored bots are an alternative to internally run bots. These bots could be run by fans of the platform. They would be run ethically in order to ensure that players have a good time and feel challenged.
The last two options can offer solutions that still allow the benefits of botting, while reducing the negatives.
Declining rewards for rapid fire play, and limiting the ability to move assets between potential dummy accounts, isn’t a terrible option for reducing botting. But again, it needs to be limited, or it will take away from the actual game play. In general, market solutions are better than technical solutions.
Additionally, because the benefits of bots are that they provide increased match liquidity, it would be best to focus on improving the matching algorithm so that bots aren’t matched with other bots, rather than focusing on eliminating botting. Developers will find ways around anti-bot measures, but would actually be happy if their bots are less likely to pair with another one of their own bots!
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