I just recently saw this tweet of Chris Clay as a reply to someone asking when last week's reward packs will be released and he replied:
30,000 bot accounts? That's quite a lot! If we look at this stat, GU's current highest number of unique players is 50,474 per day.
No. of Matches / Unique Player per Day
At this time, we don't know yet if those 30k bot accounts are operating all at the same time which will decrease the number of real players in the game from the graph above.
Update: GU Team has confirmed that 75k weekly active users does not include any bot accounts:
Last of all, you may have seen we celebrated some wins from this year, such as having 75k weekly active users. This remains true! We’ve been hunting these bots for the last few weeks, and removed the suspected bot number from those findings before we published them.
What does this mean for GU?
As we don't know a lot of detail on how much cards / $gods token was farmed by these bots, it's a bit early to assess the impact on Gods Unchained's economy moving forward. But it's good to know that the GU team is doing something to mitigate the proliferation of bot accounts.
We might see a little bit of price appreciation for Core and Divine Order cards in the coming weeks if fewer cards farmed by these bot accounts gets into the marketplace. Might be the same case with $GODS as 30k bots mining the coin and dumping it to the market is just another source of selling pressure that's keeping the price of $GODS down.
I hope the $GODS that were farmed by these bots are recovered (i'm not sure if that's possible) and added to the rewards pool that can be earned by real players in the upcoming events.
Update: It seems that they are holding off on distributing $GODS token until they cleared all the bot accounts. This is good news!
Blessing of the $GODS: Unfortunately, there is more work to be done to verify Blessing of the $GODS rewards after these bot attacks. Token delivery will be delayed until next week. The good news is this will mean more $GODS for all our real players!
Lessons learned
I'm expecting that the devs enhances their security even more to proactively avoid this kind of abuse. In addition, a more user-friendly way of reporting possible bot accounts should be a priority. The current in game reporting system causes a lot of issues while you are playing so it's very discouraging to use it.
Conclusion
I've seen other games get farmed to extinction so I'm appreciative of the efforts and transparency of the GU team to let their players know that this is an issue that needs to be resolved.
As a player, we need to do our best to also help by reporting suspected bot account behaviors and if there is any information that can lead to identifying the main account of the bot farmer as well.
PS: I wrote this prior to the official announcement in Discord. I'm updating the contents while getting new information from the GU team.
Source: Official Announcment in Gods Unchained Discord Server
I'm glad those bots account were detected and suspended, they tend to spoil the fun in the game.
yeah definitely, this is a good sign that the developers are making sure that the interests of everyone are protected.
I have a feeling there are also trading bots on IMX market. Not everywhere, but only about some cards selling for GODS. I was obsessed by buying and selling cards and watching things closely last 3 weeks. I did 381 trades during this time :)
And I have noticed you can try selling a cards for many days without result because, in a minute or two after you post a card on the market, two other (previously cheapest) cards slightly change their price to stand before you. First, I thought it was a real person, a stubborn and insane one like me :), but no this is not possible. 1stly, I wake up and go to sleep at a quite random time and this is strange that I encounter these things at any time of the day. 2ndly, there was a pattern about changing prices - a real person wouldn't repeat the same price change every time. 3rdly, price changes endlessly. What to do? Sell your card for ETH, not GODS. I believe someone was buying for ETH and selling for GODS and decided to develop the super profitable business by means of using a bot... It is fine but such bots can make the market dead.
Would be good to have a way to report such things. I would even explore things through immutascan.io, it can be just one person with a program... But I don't want to waste my time since, most probably, I won't able to reach GU devs with this info and nothing would change.
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Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:
Hope they keep doing good work towards the game
definitely, the team's track record is great! it gives so much confidence to the community.
Exactly! Hope they keep doing the good work cz this game has potential