For those who are currently in the play to earn space, aside from having fun, a lot of people are also trying to earn money. This leads them to find the best strategies to be efficient in their gameplay, or sometimes lead them to find certain exploits that are in the gray area of legality, but are certainly unethical. Today's topic is about WIN TRADING.

What is Win Trading?

Win Trading is done when you queue up and fight someone you know (or an alt account), and let the person you want to boost, win. This usually happens based on an understanding between two parties in order to efficiently climb the ranks or in Splinterlands' case, farm DEC. Some people also refer to these as fixed matches.

In Splinterlands

If you weren't aware, this was a topic of discussion in the Mav chat. @beeyou was the first to bring it up with this message.

If you look at the image, you can see that they intentionally lose the fight and the winner used a full gold foil team, which doesn't even have the right synergy or unit placement. Almost as if they KNEW they would win the match. After BeeYOU's post, other mavs such as @channelmagnetic and @azircon started doing some digging.

Someone sent a list to @davemccoy regarding people who are suspected to be doing this.

Why is it Bad?

Though there are no explicit rules in the game, win trading is heavily frowned upon. It is against the spirit of the game and ruins the competitive integrity of the game. Furthermore, this is an incredibly selfish action that exploits the game.

Does it Violate the Terms of Service?

You can check it out here: Terms of Service, I briefly looked through it and I didn't see any part that says you can't do it.

The Stance of Different Guilds

The people whose names were mentioned above were kicked out of some of the guilds that were owned/managed by Mavs.

Kudos to the guild leaders, such as @reseller and @clove71, for not tolerating this behavior!

Splinterlands' approach

Now if you're wondering about the team of Splinterlands, they've been on the case for this, working silently in the background. @brybro27 and @kira1995 were apparently investigating these kinds of issues.

We can expect that once the investigation is over, the Splinterlands team will give out a proper punishment to the people who have tried to exploit the game.

Win Trading in Axie

If you were unaware, there was an issue recently as well in Axie Infinity.

After investigating, this was their stance. The people involved faced punishment, and this taught everyone a lesson on what not to do.

If you want to read more on it, you can check it out here.

Conclusion

The concern that the Mavs chat voiced out recently showed how much people care for this game. A lot of flak in various social medias talking about this issue are asking the offenders to explain themselves. We are all waiting for the official statement of Splinterlands regarding this and their investigation, as well as plans moving forward. I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who brought this issue to light, as well as all the effort they made to uncover this. You can clearly see the love they have for the game and the community. What do you think? Should the offenders be punished? What punishment would be considered fair for their exploit? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Credits

• Cover photo created using canva.com and the included elements
• Logos and images used are from Splinterlands
• All info present here are also present in the Maverick Chat on the Splinterlands Discord.