Splinterlands Bot Wars : Archmage vs Xbot

A little while ago I decided to investigate using a Bot to fight my Ranked Battles in Splinterlands so that I could free up time and still have my cards available to just focus on the Brawls. Initially I just wanted to get a comparable return on investment to the Rental Market I have been using, but after a bit of poking around I discovered that there were 2 fairly advanced Botting products available so I decided to evaluate them both. This post is a short summary of my evaluation process and findings.

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Both services use a Hive Engine Token that represents a Digital License to use their service and I was able to loan an ARCHMAGE Token while also trying out the Xbot Service by utilizing their free 7 Day Trial. I had 2 playing accounts with a decent set of cards to experiment with – my own @buggedout and also the SGS Community account @ssg-community which I manage. So what I did was set up one account on each botting service and then once they found some equilibrium in the Ranking I switched the services over to see if there was any significant differences in the equilibrium points for each account. Here are the marked up Ratings Charts for both accounts as I made the switch.

Obviously I am dealing with a fairly small sample size and there is likely to be some Noise in these charts, but it was quite obvious to me that there is not a significant difference between the two services in term of their competitiveness in the actual battles. If anything I might put Archmage slightly in front – which was a bit of a surprise to me as it appears to be the cheaper (and older) option.

On the reliability front, there were a few games dropped by both services and Archmage has also recently had an extended outage. It only allows you to play 4 games an hour so it spaces battles out quite a bit whereas Xbot will use up all your stored Energy in the one session if you configure it that way. Both services offer a budget subscription which involves feeding a Rewards Delegation (Both Battle and Focus) to the service in exchange for a subsidized subscription license. Archmage takes 35% and Xbot (Mini) takes 30% and these subscriptions are fairly comparable in terms of the performance, reliability and ongoing costs. Where they differ is in the initial subscription cost. The ARCHMAGE Token can be picked up for around $11-12 USD, while the XBOTMINI Token currently costs around $20 USD.

I did end up buying an XBOTLITE Token (which doesn't require a Rewards Delegation) and I have started experimenting with the Battle Helper product they also offer. In hindsight I probably should have just stuck with Archmage but it’s been fun and interesting to try and benchmark these products. I should also note that both services are currently respecting the Bot Ban in Modern Ranked. I personally am not a fan of playing against Bots, but I can see that they do have some value in generating a return for investors – particularly now that there are Soul Bound cards that can only be acquired by playing your account. For me, I simply don’t have the time to spend all my Energy each day battling in Ranked but I still want to stay in touch with the game and play Brawls.

Has anyone else experimented with both of these services? Is my comparison reasonable or do you have other experiences to share? Please comment below!