Over the past two seasons, I've been running an experiment pitting the two prominent bot services for Wild Ranked in Splinterlands: XBOT in ArchMage. The goal is to see which is better bang for my buck ("my" is important, as the results below will be somewhat specific to my account. not to say this has nothing to say for the general splinterlands player, but the results should be taken with a grain of salt).
Interested readers can see the original layout of the experiment and the halfway report after I finished the first season with XBOT.
The experiment
For a quick recap, the experiment consisted of letting the bot pilot my account for a full season with the following constraints:
- No changes to my deck
- Keeping my staked SPS near-constant
- Keeping track of the length of the season
The outcomes of interest
As a quick recap, the outcomes of interest were:
- Primary: Net rewards per day
- Max rating
- Number of battles using Rebellion cards
- Number of wins using Rebellion cards
Calculating reward value
- SPS is valued at $0.0233 (its value on 1/30)
- Champion chests receive value from SPS and potions. Everything else is "valueless"
- Use the EV for chests rather than actual rewards, so all that really matters is the number of chests (actual rewards are too high variance)
- Diamond chests have an EV of $0.18
- Champion chests have an EV of $0.48
The results
Below shows the results for the two seasons.
The above images are plots of my rating over time in the two seasons. The first season, run by XBOT, you can see it sat in Diamond III for a few days before jumping up to Champ. This led to more diamond chests during the season. The second image, showing the plot for Archmage, shows that it jumped into Champion quicker, although it did have a drop shortly thereafter back into diamond. This led to more champion chests from Archmage over the course of the season.
These trajectories led to the following rewards:
| Metric | XBOT | ArchMage |
|---|---|---|
| Length of season | 15 days | 16 days |
| Daily diamond chest | 30 | 18 |
| Daily champion chests | 18 | 60 |
| Season champion chests | 58 | 61 |
| Battles with Rebellion | 53 | 151 |
| Wins with Rebellion | 36 | 90 |
| Win % with Rebellion | 68% | 60% |
| Total rewards | $64.70 | $71.3 |
| Total fees | $0.76 | $2.42 |
| Net rewards | $63.94 | $71.37 |
| Net rewards per day | $4.26 | $4.31 |
Overall, the final net rewards per day were remarkably close: within 1% (which is about what I guessed mid-way after seeing XBOT in action for the first time). Archmage was a higher earner (mainly from getting up to Champion II slightly faster than XBOT so getting more chests in that range), but this was offset by the tripled fee.
My advice to each bot
Both bots have their strengths and weaknesses that I saw in watching my account over the past month.
For XBOT: Incentivize the bot to use more Rebellion. I know the set is perceived as a bit weaker, and I imagine making use of some of the positioning is harder on the bot, but I've had great success when I've use Rebellion manually. And Archmage got better at using Rebellion even in the two week time frame I measured it. With how much rebellion people are holding for conflicts, using it more will be a boon to the service.
For Archmage: Figure out how to avoid failing to submit a team. I can't emphasize enough how demoralizing it is to see a battle with no team submitted. The bot needs to have some sort of fallback fail-safe team to submit. Losing is whatever. Not submitting a team is really frustrating, and the psychological aspect shouldn't be overlooked.
What bot am I using going forward?
Asking the hard questions I see. With my primary outcome basically a wash, it boils down to preference. Because the primary outcome was a wash, and the other outcomes revealed pluses and minuses, I had to find a differentiating factor. One thing I also checked was what was the value solely from SPS. In this metric, XBOT came out ahead, solely because of the lower fee (the amount of SPS earned were similar, mainly driven by the bulk of chest value coming from potions). I don't like paying 3x the fee for a similar service. And selfishly, if I ever hit a jackpot chest with 1000+ SPS, I'd like to keep and extra 100+ of it for myself.
For these reasons, and because I need to choose one, and because I want to get a little more experience with XBOT, and because I like XBOT's interface a little more, I will be using XBOT in the near future. I might revisit this if ArchMage adds new features, or, crucially, eliminates forfeited matches (I cannot stress how annoying those are).
Do I have any advice to other players from this?
Wow, another hard hitting question from my headlines. The not really helpful advice is: do what I did. Run the experiment, keep track of the rewards, and decide for yourself.
But what if you don't want to do the work and want me to tell you what to do? That's harder. Assuming you don't own either token to begin with, you need to factor in the cost. Currently, XBOT regular and Archmage Alpha are similar in price (~$50). I do think XBOT has a bit of an edge if you're gunning for leaderboard slots (but if that describes you, you probably aren't reading this article, as you don't need my advice). I think the two are pretty comparable for most accounts. I don't see either service closing shop anytime soon. So I think, unfortunately, it boils down to preference.
Referral
Interested in getting in on Splinterlands? Interested in using a bot? Want some free cards? Use my referral code below, and I'll get you started in the game with some cards.