Given that it has a single persistent world, I would expect the one best player to take over the entire game. I wonder how they counteract that.
The best botting experiences I've had were in a tournament format. Initially you square off against opponents who you can teach your bot to beat using only very simple heuristics. Then you progress to opponents who require increasingly more sophisticated algorithms. It wouldn't be fun for novices to immediately face the best bot anyone has produced.
I backed the kickstarter and played with the early parts of the game for a while. It is pretty good! But it's hampered by mediocre development tools. I never figured out a good way to write code for it, even after they added github support and lots of nice features. With github, you'd have to commit everything you wanted to test, and getting screeps to notice the new commit was a hassle that I never mastered. No nice debugging tools either. They improved a lot since I started, though, so I'm not sure what the current state is like. I would love a recommendation of how to play this in a sane manner.
But the game itself is very cool and you can do a lot without too much work. Definitely worth checking out.
The code update stuff frustrated me too, so I wrote GoScreeps (https://github.com/andyleap/goscreeps). Handles uploading code changes, and will also do an initial download for you. Changes can be pushed by merely saving the file in your editor, as the tool sits and watches for file save events.
The best botting experiences I've had were in a tournament format. Initially you square off against opponents who you can teach your bot to beat using only very simple heuristics. Then you progress to opponents who require increasingly more sophisticated algorithms. It wouldn't be fun for novices to immediately face the best bot anyone has produced.