[violet] wrote:Is there a usage case for opening up any of those things to bots?
I think it's good to support third-party scripts and tools that allow card traders to operate with better information. But I don't think it's good if we have bots that effectively replace traders, by doing everything they would do, only more efficiently. It seems to me that all of the listed actions, with the possible exception of collection management, fall into the second category.
Here are some for which I can come up with (what I think are) good use cases:
A few regions are now using cards as rewards for nations that perform various actions. These can be either rewards given out as part of special one-time events (e.g.,
TNP recently gifted 600 cards to all nations that cured others during the latest Zombie Apocalypse), or regular rewards for nations that carry out specific actions (e.g.,
TNP gifts an average of three legendaries per day to nations that regularly exchange endorsements or vote in the WA).
Right now, all of these rewards need to be gifted manually by the people managing the rewards program. Speaking from personal experience, this quickly becomes very tedious. Allowing the card rewards to be automatically gifted would make managing these rewards programs a lot easier, and could potentially greatly expand their scope (e.g., making it feasible to gift a card to everyone joining the WA in your region, or something similar). In turn, this could enable even more regions develop this kind of card rewards infrastructure, and therefore encourage them to invest in the cards game.
- Adding a card to a collection.
- Removing a card from a collection.
- Creating a collection.
- Deleting a collection.
- Renaming a collection.
There are a lot of nations that build collections ranging in the several thousands---e.g., to name just one,
Refuge Isle's collections of all of a season's ultra-rare cards. I think allowing the above actions to be automated would help make their lives a tiny bit easier, without deducting from other players' experience (nobody benefits or loses from someone else's having to go through 100 pages of their own deck, to add/remove cards from a collection).
- Placing an ask for a card.
- Placing a bid for a card.
These two can again help with massive collections---to use the same example as above, they'd make placing bids on all 5,000 S2 ultra-rare cards, or placing asks for 1-2 stray cards that found their way in your deck without being part of your collection, a lot easier.
But, in this case, I could see many ways in which this could be abused (e.g., I'd probably have a script making sure I always have the highest bid on legendaries). Additionally, one could argue that placing asks/bids is an integral part of the process of trading and creating collections, so it should only be done manually.
Outside of the above, I think everything else would end up being used primarily to make management of enormous card farms easier, which would be a bad development for the game. I have no objection to ruling all those other actions restricted in order to prevent this from happening.
Whatever the decision, I do think it would be great if it could be stated explicitly what is restricted and what isn't, to avoid confusion and to make sure people do not end up unknowingly developing illegal scripts.