Due to the sudden rise in Pixels’ daily active users – which recently exceeded 100,000 DAUWs – there have been discussions about the proportion of bots in the data.
In response to the speculations, Pixels CEO Luke Barwikowski has posted on X, saying “If people aren’t trying to bot your game – it’s not because they can’t – it’s because they don’t care enough to do it.” Out of its estimated 115,000 DAUWs he reckons about 40%, 70,000, are real unique players.
At the same time however, Barwikowski acknowledges that measures against bots are necessary for any sustainable game, especially those powered by web3 economies. “The more rewards you give bots, the less your incentives reach real users, which lowers impact & growth”, he says.
Different games take different approaches in tackling bots. Among other games, Splinterlands and Alien Worlds have had to deal with this issue in the past, and as a result see their DAUW numbers decrease by up to 70%.
As painful as it might be though, in the long run it’s better to reward and retain actual unique players rather than hold on to superficially impressive data.
In terms of Ronin’s new crown jewel Pixels, Barwikowski suggests three main lines of action.
First is a battle pass VIP, which costs around $35 upfront and serves as a barrier to withdrawals of Pixels’ token BERRY. He argues that bots will actually come out on the losing side as this eliminates the incentives to bot in the first place.
Pixel Reputation is another means by which the team tries to tackle multi-accounting. Only recently introduced, this keeps track of a player’s actions and essentially rates it based on game progress, if they link their social accounts, and whether or not they purchase LAND or VIP. A high reputation expands player’s trade limits. In contrast, players’ reputation will decrease if they behave badly, e.g. giving away too many resources to low-reputation users, and more.
Finally, Pixels is implementing a cap on resource generation. Currently there is no max-cap in palace, but this is about to change, where resource generation will be on a per LAND basis, rather than per player. Barwokowski explains that guilds will play an important part in regulating this too as guilds owning a LAND wouldn’t want bots to extract resources from them.
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