There should be a bot else people will abandon games too quickly. What should change is how they play as the bots are not up to par. The team with a player down should also be given a call-vote after 3.5 minutes if they would like to end the match gracefully (not forfeit) if they’re getting steam rolled as backfill player has not been found.
Problems that need addressing:
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bots instantly backslap you at the start of a round before the transition from 3rd to 1st person (team goes into opening engagement 3v5 due to egregious spawn bug)
- Bots need their ‘don’t be bad’ dials to be turned up, added suvrivability and dmg avoidance for attrition based game variants (they just feed kills to the enemy team)
- Bot AI is broken with objectives, they should not be allowed to pick up the oddball/flag/etc (one of a dozen examples, on catalyst they will take the flag and then throw it off the bridge so it resets only for them to rinse & repeat in a loop).
- the ai is not challenging or ‘good’, I always suspect someone is playing ‘like a bot’ until i see the name in the feed. even the ‘spartan’ setting in custom games is easly trounced on. there should be a super saiyan or Spartan+ setting. Spartan+ can only be unlocked via completing Legendary or something but just anything to actually make them better than the name suggests, a “bot”.
If I’m undermanned by 25%, no bots. 50% or more, definitely bots. At that point just give the enemy team easier AI kills so they don’t murder actual players a thousand times before they inevitably win. Games will just end faster without making real players feel as bad. Quitting may be less common.
The difficulty of the bots added to the undermanned team should be based on the average skill level of the team with more players.
This doesn’t account for the many changes that need to happen to the bots themselves. Bots are new to Halo, so it will take some time to get them right.
Absolutely not, otherwise you would incentivice the losing team to bully away their weakest player(s), so that they are replaced with stronger bots. Bots should never be stronger then the player that left.
I play a lot of SWAT and would definitely prefer if they kept the bots out of it (which seems to be the case), but I just finished a round where everyone had quit except one person.
I didn’t realize it until the last few kills when I couldn’t find anyone.
SWAT/tactical slayer indeed doesn’t have bots in it.
In Ranked, I would like the option to forfeit the match with no quitting penalty if your team is missing players. The first quitters from a full game should receive a massive ranking penalty. Forfeiting late in the match when you have been behind for a while (even if you lost team members) should still incur a loss penalty (this would prevent gaming the system by having one person quit when the match appears to be going poorly, with the other team members benefitting from a “free” forfeit).
It’s extremely frustrating that bad actors get to quit, and those of us who want to abide by the rules are punished by having to play out an un-fun, uneven match.
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