200,000 bots for gaming. Bots, the scourge of the classic video game world, are also making their way onto web 3. Although it’s no surprise, bots are abundantly populating play to earn. They negatively affect the experience of real players. The phenomenon raises questions about the interest of the player to engage in an average game if the particularity of play to earn loses its meaning because of the bots. Solutions are then sought by the projects in spite of real demoralizing observations.
Jigger’s observation on bots
The co-founder of Jigger (an anti-bot protection company) Levan Kvirkvelia, published on his twitter account on Monday, August 29 a clear statement. According to Jigger the proportion of bots in play to earn games represents almost half of the players. Almost 40% of play to earn players would be bots on average, on a list of 60 play to earn analyzed. In total it is nearly 200,000 bots that have been identified in their sample.
For their analysis, Jigger members gather wallet addresses of token holders. Their algorithm will link the different wallet addresses according to their links. Thus via graphs, multi-wallets (wallets acting in relation to each other) are distinguished from classic wallets.
If we go a little further, we can also see that some DeFi platforms without being play to earn are besieged by bots. Still according to their study, BiSwap, a DEX operating on the BNB Smart Chain has for example 35% of holders who are bots, that is to say 12679 wallets. Their research suggested that a recent affiliate program on BiSwap was the cause of a surge in bots.
Solutions to improve
Some small reservations are however to be expressed on the analysis in question. Indeed, the evidence of boting is associated with individuals with multiple wallets. This makes the number of pure bots slightly less accurate.
To solve the problem of these digital malware, several implementations are at work in different projects. The company Jigger, whose very expression of its publication is to present its service, proposes a captcha PoH system (proof of humanity) “undetectable” by bots and effective also against multi-wallets. In fact, when they think that wallets are suspicious, a captcha asking for a selfie of the owner will appear on the screen.
Then comes the question: Who wants to send a selfie associated to his wallet?
Indeed, this kind of solution scares away bots and also classic users…
However, every effort remains a step forward in the direction of making gaming experiences fairer. Even so, in rare cases, bots have the unique quality of bringing liquidity to sparsely populated plays to earn.
The scourge of bots has still not been eradicated in the world of classic video games, even though it is much larger than the world of gaming 3. The future is therefore very cloudy as to its disappearance in this same field with the addition of a lucrative principle. We must add to this the farming groups residing in poor countries for whom the interest is multiplied, as we could see for example with the case of axies Infinity. In addition to being mostly insipid, play to earn still have big challenges to raise interest in their players for more than a month.
