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What’s up, NBA Top Shot community!
In recent weeks, we’ve taken steps to improve the pack drop process, to help ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to participate. In our State of NBA Top Shot blog from earlier in the month, we took our first public stance against bots.
In the last two weeks, real evidence has emerged that bots have come to Top Shot. It’s become clear that bots have created an uneven playing field for our collectors, especially with regards to pack drops.
These are a few dozen people who commit offences that harm the entire community. We ask you all to support our common goal with a long term mindset, and do not take a path of exploitation of fellow community members for short term gains. This is unacceptable to us, and fundamentally goes against our Code of Conduct. Going forward, we are strictly disciplining any accounts that participate in nefarious activities with bot accounts (including but not limited to using scripts directly or purchasing packs/accounts from people who used scripts to acquire packs).
We tempered our position at the time, disallowing bot use only during pack drops. When it came to the Marketplace, however, we hadn’t yet formed our stance:
Part of the beauty of blockchain and the future of a decentralized ecosystem is that automated tools and smart contracts can actually prove to be helpful. Blockchain is literally designed around the idea of programmable exchange of value, so we don’t want to go against that long term vision when it comes to our Marketplace. In the interim, however, we plan to protect our website against botting to help enforce a strong collector experience -- with attention focused toward pack drops in particular.
Our goal is a world in which people will be able to utilize apps and software on top of a completely decentralized NBA Top Shot Marketplace - a world in which technologies can take full advantage of the Flow(™) blockchain to interact with Moments and listings programmatically through various smart contracts. In this future version of NBA Top Shot, collectors will have features that will allow them to enjoy the Marketplace hand-in-hand with automated software, and the ecosystem will improve as both uses complement one another. We have several ideas that we’re excited about on this front, and we can’t wait to share them with you soon.
However, in order to get to that future, we need to preserve our community’s health and the collector experience in the present. To do so, we have decided that we are banning all bot usage on NBA Top Shot, effective immediately. We have updated both our Code of Conduct and our Terms of Use to reflect this change.
Bot usage of any kind (including in the Marketplace) is strictly prohibited, and the use of bots will result in severe disciplinary action. To anyone who has used a bot in the Marketplace to date, we recommend you stop using them immediately to avoid having your account flagged by our systems.
