As many of you know Kabam has been battling with auto-clickers/bots for some time now. These programs/bots enabled certain players to constantly and relentlessly attack Smaug faster and longer than humanly possible, giving these players thousands of tokens or massive Goblin kills, and the benefits that come with that.

Of course this was seen by both Kabam and the majority of players as being unfair, so action was decided upon. But the problem proved tricky and a neat solution difficult, although the suggestions on the forums and other places were plentiful. Last week, we were presented with the not that great (to put it mildly) limit on attacking campaign, where after a certain number of attacks players had to wait a cool-down period to be able to attack again. Reactions weren’t that positive understandably, and the changes would also break tournaments such as GK and BK, and possibly even CHS. So from the start this would be temporary.

Today we received an email from Kabam about a more permanent change to Tokens and Smaug. Tokens drops will be limited in the Smaug campaign map, so the old way of getting them is gone. Instead, Tokens will be added to the Calendar, Moon Rune and Goblin Caverns/mines. Also Kabam stated that the daily amount of obtainable tokens would be the same as before, but seeing as it was dependent on effort instead of availability, I have yet to see how this plays out.

Although I agree the botting needed to be stopped, I’m not too happy with these changes at all. Again, non-spending casual players are going to be hot hardest. The Calendar will likely contain limited amounts of Tokens. The Moon Rune is too irregular in timing to provide a constant income of Tokens. Mines will most likely be dominated by the bigg buff players.

And I have seen better suggestions put forward as well. One of those was to have a random element put into Smauging, like a randomly location-changing button in the process. These kind of solutions would eliminate most if not all of the auto-clickers as well it seems to me, while maintaining a nearly identical experience for normal players.

I never was a huge Smauger. I was happy to have the time to farm 30 Tokens a day, and that already helped a lot in keeping up to date with all the new features. I just hope I am being overly negative here and things will be better than what I expect them to be, but I also want to know what you think of the new Token changes, so of course, a poll (multiple answers possible):