Can real players remain competitive in blockchain games flooded with bots?
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Can real players remain competitive in blockchain games flooded with bots?
On-chain games must accept bots as part of their user base.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: WMP, Bankless
Translation: Felix, PANews
On-chain games attract a particularly efficient type of player: bots. When bots are involved, can real human players remain competitive?
Fully on-chain games place everything—assets, logic, rules, and state—directly on the underlying blockchain. In this new gaming paradigm, every move is ultimately recorded on-chain.
This setup offers various benefits, such as transparency and novel possibilities for game economies. However, it also attracts an exceptionally efficient type of player: bots.
Can humans compete in on-chain games?
Recently, Dan Elitzer, co-founder of venture firm Nascent, asked on X: "Is it possible to create a fully on-chain game where unassisted humans can still compete?"
Elitzer raised this question in response to a post by plotchy, a security researcher at Nascent Security who has dominated the leaderboard of Kamigotchi—a brand-new fully on-chain RPG-style game.
Despite Kamigotchi's early testnet smart contracts being unverified and closed-source, plotchy managed to reverse-engineer the game’s architecture and built an indexer to parse its data.
With access to detailed in-game information—including the locations and health statuses of Kami pets—plotchy then developed a bot to hunt other Kami, quickly climbing the game’s leaderboard.
Given these actions, plotchy has been in ongoing discussions with the Kamigotchi team, which continues to iterate. Players are also adapting their playstyles for better survival. The team has introduced a new mission directing players to cooperate in fighting against plotchy’s pet army.
Nevertheless, bots persist in on-chain games.
Lethe, one of Kamigotchi’s developers, noted on X that on-chain games must accept bots as part of the user base due to their open nature, and the team’s challenge lies in adjusting game design to balance this reality.
In other words, the ultimate goal is to create a game environment where both human and bot players can coexist—one that remains fun and doesn’t become unbearable for real players. So what might the future of on-chain gaming look like in achieving this balance?
As for reducing users who deploy large numbers of bots and manipulate gameplay through bot farms, anti-Sybil measures may see increasing adoption.
Certainly, Sybil attacks remain an unresolved issue across crypto, with no perfect solution. However, combinations of proof-of-personhood technologies—such as social media registration, community reporting programs, and AI analysis—could prove effective in curbing bot armies in on-chain games.
Another strategy to counter bots is direct confrontation. As the author’s former colleague FaultProofBen recently said: "The best way to fight bots in on-chain games is to join a guild."
FaultProofBen knows this well—he’s the founder of WASD, the largest on-chain gaming guild in crypto. When you have a large group of closely collaborating human players, you form a force capable of competing with, or even outperforming, bot players.
Of course, if you can't beat them, join them. FaultProofBen also predicts: "Bot usage will become democratized, accessible to non-technical players." Think of game plugins or services that allow all players to easily optimize gameplay. At the very least, this approach helps level the playing field.
On-chain games are still in their early developmental stages, so it’s no surprise the space is currently grappling with bots. The author encounters bots when playing mainstream games like Fall Guys or Overwatch—games running on more closed systems—where bots are merely a nuisance (and insignificant).
Yet the author does not believe that the presence of bots should permanently relegate on-chain games to niche status. As the space matures, progress and innovation will help diminish the dominance of bot players, allowing real players to thrive. There are many challenges ahead, but the author remains optimistic about the future.
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