On-chain gaming attracts an extremely efficient type of player: bots. Can real players remain competitive when bots are involved?

Fully on-chain gaming puts everything (including assets, logic, rules, and state) directly on the underlying blockchain. In this new gaming industry, every move is ultimately recorded on the chain.

This functionality offers various benefits such as transparency and the possibility of a novel game economy. However, this also attracts an extremely efficient type of player: bots.

Are real people competitive in on-chain games?

Recently, Dan Elitzer, co-founder of the venture capital firm Nascent, asked on X, “Is it possible to create a completely on-chain game that real people can compete in without assistance?”

Elitzer asked this question in a plotchy post. plotchy, a security researcher at Nascent Security, has dominated the charts for the game Kamigotchi, a new fully on-chain RPG.

Although Kamigotchi’s early testnet smart contracts were unverified and closed-source, plotchy managed to reverse-engineer the game’s architecture and create an indexer to parse its data.

With access to detailed game information, including the location and health of Kami's pets, plotchy then programmed a bot to hunt down other Kami and began quickly climbing the game's leaderboards.

In light of this operation, plotchy has been in discussions with the Kamigotchi team, who are constantly iterating. Players are also adjusting their play styles to better survive. To this end, the team has introduced a new mission that guides players to collaborate against plotchy's army of pets.

Despite this, bots in on-chain games still exist.

Lethe, one of the developers of Kamigotchi, pointed out in the post that on-chain games must accept bots as part of the user base because of the open nature of the game, and the challenge for the team is to adjust the game design to balance this situation.

That said, the team's ultimate goal is to create a gaming environment where real players and bot players can coexist in a way that's fun but not overwhelming for real players. So, what does the future of on-chain gaming look like in terms of achieving this balance?

As for how to reduce the number of users who deploy many bots and manipulate the game through automated account groups, anti-witch measures may be increasingly adopted.

To be sure, Sybil attacks remain an open problem for the crypto industry with no perfect solution. However, some combination of personal identification technologies, such as through social media registration, community reporting schemes and AI analysis, may be fruitful in curbing bot swarms in on-chain gaming.

On the other hand, another strategy for fighting bots is head-on confrontation. As my former colleague FaultProofBen recently said, “The best way to fight bots in on-chain games is to join a guild.”
FaultProofBen knows this too. He is the founder of WASD, the largest on-chain gaming guild in the crypto industry. When you have a large group of human players working closely together, you have a fighting force that can compete with or better than bot players.

Of course, if you can't beat them, join them. FaultProofBen also predicts that "the use of bots will become democratized and accessible to non-technical players." Think of things like game augmentation apps or services that make it easy for all players to optimize their gameplay. At the very least, this approach helps level the playing field.

On-chain gaming is still in its infancy, so it’s no surprise that the industry is now grappling with bots. The author encounters bots when playing mainstream games like Fall Guys or Overwatch, which operate on more closed tracks, where bots are just one (inconsequential) example within the game.

However, the author does not believe that the existence of bots will forever position on-chain games as niche games. As the industry matures, advancement and innovation will help reduce the dominance of bot players so that real players can still thrive. There are still many challenges in the future, but I am optimistic about the future.

[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.

  • This article is reproduced with permission from: "PANews"

  • Original author: WMP, Bankless