Written by: WMP, Bankless
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
On-chain games attract a class of extremely efficient players: bots. When bots are involved, can real players still remain competitive?
Fully on-chain games put everything (including assets, logic, rules, and state) directly on the underlying blockchain. In this new gaming universe, every move is ultimately recorded on-chain.
This functionality offers various benefits, such as transparency and the possibility of novel gaming economies. However, it also attracts an extremely efficient type of player: bots.
Are real people competitive in on-chain games?
Dan Elitzer, co-founder of venture capital firm Nascent, recently asked at X, “Is it possible to make a game that is completely on-chain, where real people can compete without assistance?”
Elitzer asked this question in a tweet from plotchy, a security researcher at Nascent Security, who has dominated the leaderboards 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 pets, plotchy then wrote a bot to hunt down other Kami and began quickly climbing the game leaderboards.
In light of this operation, plotchy has been in discussion with the Kamigotchi team, who have been iterating continuously. Players are also adjusting their play styles to better survive. The team has introduced a new mission to guide players to collaborate against plotchy's pet army.
Despite this, bots in on-chain games still exist.
Lethe, one of the developers of Kamigotchi, pointed out in a tweet that on-chain games must accept robots 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 bots 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 groups of automated accounts, anti-sybil measures may be increasingly adopted.
To be sure, Sybil attacks remain an open problem in crypto with no perfect solution. However, a combination of personal identification techniques, such as through social media registration, community reporting programs, and AI analysis, could prove fruitful in curbing bot swarms in on-chain games.
On the other hand, another strategy to combat bots is to engage in direct confrontation. As my former colleague FaultProofBen recently said, “The best way to combat 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 crypto. When you have a large group of real players working closely together, you have a fighting force that can rival or even 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-skilled players.” Think of things like game plugins or services that make it easy for all players to optimize their gameplay. At the very least, this approach helps level the playing field.
It’s still early days for on-chain gaming, so it’s no surprise that the space is now grappling with bots. I encounter bots when I play mainstream games like Fall Guys or Overwatch, which operate on more closed tracks, and bots are just one example (of little consequence) of the game.
However, I do not believe that the existence of Bots will forever position on-chain games as niche games. As this field matures, progress and innovation will help weaken the dominance of robot players so that real players can still thrive. There are still many challenges ahead, but I am optimistic about the future.
