The current SteemMonsters season has been disappointing for me. Bots and greedy people strike again and potentially ruin something great.

I suppose it couldn't last forever. Recently, @aggroed announced that the market cap for SteemMonsters had surpassed $1 million and this has meant that it has captured the attention of lots of people who don't give a shit about SteemMonsters or playing the game but rather how they can get the maximum amount of money out of it. What seems to be happening now is that people with lots of Steem to spare are buying maxed out decks and transferring their maxed cards between multiple accounts so that they can claim multiple pack rewards and SBD prizes for finishing high in the league. This could be quite lucrative in terms of packs because 30 packs are awarded to all accounts that exceed a ranking of 4700 and when you take a look at the leaderboard right now you can see that the top ranked player has over 14000 ranking points and the top 100 players will all be receiving 30 packs each. Now that more people are aware of the loophole I suspect there will be several hundred players claiming 30 packs each which when the lower pack rewards are factored in (like mine) will put a sizeable dent in the beta packs available.

I only heard about this from the chatrooms on the SteemMonsters discord and I was surprised at how many players who had been playing for a while were doing it themselves and justifying it by saying that if there is a loophole it was ok to take advantage of it until it was closed. I can't really argue with that reasoning I suppose although I am not going to be doing it myself even though the prospect of getting more packs is tempting because I can't afford to buy many.

Bots are also something that we are seeing more of in SteemMonsters which is disappointing with even veteran players with maxed out decks getting frustrated with the state of the leaderboard.

There are only 6 days left in the current season and aggroed has said that steps will be taken to attempt to deal with the things talked about in this post but by then tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of packs will have been awarded this season which will either be opened with thousands of cards flooding the market making the prices drop (good for me because I need to buy a shit tonne of cards to compete) or sold unopened at below market rates to existing users. None of what is happening is good for SteemMonsters but as usual greedy, unscrupulous people are ruining things for everyone so they can make short term gains.

Right now, there isn't much point in me playing because I have got a deck just good enough to get to the diamond league where the summoner limits are removed but this means I am playing the majority of my matches against people with maxed decks. It's no fun losing over and over again, especially to bots or accounts that have just spent their way to the top of the leader board in a few days when it has taken me months. I wonder how many of the top 100 have built their decks entirely from the market without purchasing a single pack?

I'll be waiting with interest to see what changes are introduced next season to try to stop the scammers and greedy bastards from ruining SteemMonsters for everyone. I might even have been able to buy a few more packs by them from the payouts from my SteemMonster posts.

See you on the battlefield.