Splinterlands - Trying to use a bot to play the game

It has been a big challenge for me to play the game regularly. At the same time, the rewards from the game are also pretty good and I don't want to miss it. I have rented out the cards that I'm not currently using. Apart from that, I have a deck that is capable of reaching Diamond III league and I try playing that deck every season.

I was introduced to a Splinterlands Bot by one of my friends. I knew bots like this existed but I did not give it a try. Today I wanted to give it a try and see how it goes. At least my ECR will be effectively utilized. That was one of the main reasons why I wanted to give this bot a try. It is also based on Node js and easily understandable for me. It is open source too. Even though I did not review the code, I tried setting up the bot today.

To start with I tried running the bot from my local laptop. I notice that the bot is playing the game really well and it appears that it is not as intelligent as humans. I was surprised to see a bot using cards that I don't usually use in my games. It is said that the bot will collect data from the top players and use that logic to play the game by itself. I'm curious to review the code and understand how it works but for now, I will just be an end-user, and kudos to the developer. Good thing is that he made it open source.

I'm guessing the simple website design is one of the reasons why it has opened opportunities for creating bots. If the Splinterlands team had built the website with a technology that is not friendly to the bots, it would be a challenge to create an innovation like this. I'm hoping to see some more features around the bot and especially an improvement to the way the bot works. Right now when I tried using the bot, I noticed that the losing chance was quite high for the bot compared to the winning chance.

The developers are using a data API to get the game data and use that data to decide which will be the best deck to play against the players. I noticed that there is also paid data API available that will increase our winning chance. That's something for later to explore.

https://github.com/alfficcadenti/splinterlands-bot

Above is the code repository. There are instructions available on how to use the bot. If you are planning to use the bot and need help in setting it up, you can contact me. If you find it very useful, you can give some donations to the developer and encourage him to improve the bot.