I changed my vote from no to yes after giving it some thought. Originally, I thought the wording was just a little too vague, even if it's mentioned that this was done intentionally.
After reading some of the comments and more of the text below the proposal, I decided to vote yes at this stage to start a conversation. I would need a more detailed proposal to vote yes at the next stage.
The pessimist in me thinks that if there were a human league, botting would just morph into something more like a battle helper. In fact, little birdies whisper that this is already how players in the top guilds operate. Not with Xbot, but with private ones. It's worth exploring what options there might be, though.
I'm someone who uses botting services to auto-battle for me sometimes but does think it would be cool if there were a way to ensure that only real people were playing in certain circumstances.
It will morph into battle-helpers. Don't kid yourself. It might sound nice, it might give you a cozy feeling of "finally we'll do something about bots", but since we can't enforce anti-battle helper measures and financial incentives are there to use them, there will be a lot of undetected activity going on. And then the question is: how good are these solutions if you can't enforce them?
Enforcement is not the point. The point is to get the ball rolling and the conversation started. A human taking the time to manually submit battles, even with the aid of a battle helper is exponentially better than automated bots doing everything with no human involvement whatsoever.
I still believe creative team building trumps bot 'winrate' stats.
Did you ever use a battle-helper? If yes, how was your experience when changing the proposed matchups?
Then people would start running a bot locally that picks the teams based on the suggestions from the battle helper.
I'd argue that battle-helpers are the lesser evil compared to fully automated bots. Because then time and capital become the limiting factor, people will need to play themselves. Now the limiting factor is only capital.
Yeah, I think overall, you're right. In Champion, I think the top players who already dominate the leaderboards and tournaments would still find ways to cheat if they can. If the API-blocking technology mentioned in the updated proposal could block any sort of battle helpers, even private ones, now that would be pretty interesting.
I think they should've tested that technology out in tournaments before ranked battles, but first we have to see if the proposal passes, I suppose.
!PIZZA