Quote from: ivanlabrie on June 05, 2014, 01:07:32 AM

Quote from: HunterMinerCrafter on June 04, 2014, 11:58:42 PM

Quote from: greco on June 04, 2014, 11:03:25 PM

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Not to mention my own direct opportunity cost

lol, that's exactly what botters take from human miners.

I'm pretty sure that we only remove indirect opportunity costs... that person is going to be spending that time playing that game whether we are in the scenario or not.

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Profit (again, to me) means above breaking even. The cost to bot Motocoins is lower then the cost for a human to mine.

The energy cost is probably much higher, brains are very energy efficient and food is cheap.

The time cost is probably the real factor, eventually, but not yet. My bots currently average a block every couple of minutes - on par with what a dedicated, skilled player could do. However my bots can run 24/7 where a most dedicated human can probably only mine about 16/6 or so, realistically. (And still stay sane.)

As difficulty continues to increase, I'm sure the bots will soon be mining much faster, and will overtake humans on "time efficiency" of mining....

This brings to mind an interesting point: perhaps the "real" problem here is the level reset on new blocks. I suspect we could find a way to allow players to continue working on their current map indefinitely, and submit their "win" if/whenever they do happen to find it. In this way, bots could quietly mine away "in the background" and would still compete with players (via TargetTime) but wouldn't disrupt those players. I have a rough idea of how this might be able to work: when you start a map you create a tx announcing your intent to play and your game doesn't start until your tx is mined and then seeds the map with the block in which your tx was mined. When you submit your PoW it must reference your tx hash to be valid. The initiation TX could even be given a fixed fee (like Huntercoin) which would help to create demand for the coin. (Since you'd need one to start a game.) This model would be similar to what has already worked well for HUC I think.

Now we're talking...I think it's a sound idea.

Dev?

Ah good idea. This is how I thought the game worked until it actually launched.

This could actually work quite well if you need MOTO to start a game with the TX thing. Now I'm not sure how bots decide what levels to complete but if it has to keep generating new levels a lot to find a good one, it will use up quite a bit of MOTO in the process.