You're literally talking about Bronze players who make max 50 DEC a day which is equivalent to $0.39 at current prices and call it 'free money'. That's still a 1 month ROI for most players.
If anything, the team should've banned bots the moment player numbers started multiplying instead of reducing rewards for Bronze.
I personally play in Gold, but I understand the new player frustration as they won't even be able to withdraw their Credits to 'cash out' since there's no way to utilize Credits except purchasing cards/potions/etc.
"1 month ROI" implies doubling 12 times in a year even with only compounding once per month which is like 4096x or potential 400000% return per year without ever buying a single card from another player. If that doesn't count as "free money" then I don't know what does.
Also, people shouldn't be looking for "ROI" on their $10 spellbook... that's the entire problem.
Again, I agree, even with that insane 'ROI', the scale of that gain is minuscule even if it is 'free money'.
Why do you think so many new players joined up in the first place? For some, even a 39 cent gain per day is better than nothing, which is what those honest players are getting now.
I think the problem is that you can have more than 1 bot, and drain resources = the number of bots that you run. If there was a way to ban bots, then I agree, keep the rewards as they are as you're only giving them to real humans. But with bots encouraged (not banning them means that you encourage them imho), and some people possibly having 100's of them, suddenly this "exploit" compounds and requires attention before the bots/owners suck all the liquidity out of the game. There is a reason dec rewards are so small right now; everyone is drinking out of the same pool, and some of us are taking more than we're giving (because they're not actually giving anything).
On an above post someone was saying it wasn't a big deal to let a bronze player earn $0.50/d... but what if there were a few bot owners who we'll say are running 100x accounts a day? That's $50/d -> $18250/y sucked out of the economy at a cost of only 10x100 = $1000 that never needs to renew or pay a membership fee etc. These accounts can all then transfer the DEC from the bots to an account that earns SPS and further pull from all the reward pools. Without a way to disincentivize bots, why wouldn't you just drop 1K and earn 18? Why not 10K and earn 180? 100K and become a millionaire in a year and still earn returns forever after?
Playing the game should be how you earn rewards, not just running a script that just sucks $ out of the economy. This was a good short term solution, but still just allows account consolidations of the bronze bots into fewer silverbots who will still mine rewards. It will be interesting to see if this will actually cause a larger or smaller resource drain since they'll theoretically be receiving the larger rewards associated with the silver rank. In the end, it probably just raised the cost of "bot entry" from $10, to whatever will earn the minimum power to enter silver. This will then raise the price of cards as the bots will be buying whatever has the best power to $ ratio increasing the floor on everything. This was a good start though, and seeing the new data will at least give them more resources to decide if there needs to be another step taken or not.
My 0.02 not having read comments past yours lol.