Re: So many bots...

Enable cross play. Never had issue since..always in 128 player

game less than 1 min USA.

I'm on PC with cross play enabled in game...  I didn't have any problems last week.  I'm in Western Australia, but I don't think that has anything to do with it.

Ive seen my share of AI but was always in off hours like 12am -8am cst. Even then was limited to like 6 per side.

Edit: some matches would start 48 v 48 but fill quickly.

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@LJBattlefield wrote:
@FlatChatthey're playing Battlefield? Go check out V and 4, even 3, servers are active.

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True, I play V and can not feel the big difference after BF2042.
Trying out BF1 this weekend.

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@SirBobdk wrote:

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@LJBattlefield wrote:
@FlatChatthey're playing Battlefield? Go check out V and 4, even 3, servers are active.

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True, I play V and can not feel the big difference after BF2042.
Trying out BF1 this weekend.

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Indeed @LJBattlefield & @SirBobdk !  👍

Try next time you guys start up the BF2042 game and go into the Portal Server Browser.  Try and observe how few servers are really there by now.  And also note then how many real players you actually have on them.  (you can see that as the first number before the slash, which then indicates how many total players the server could actually host if more came on).  It is shockingly few servers we now have live there, just few months after launch.

I looked it up last night around 1am Saturday European Central Time, so also US East Coast should be coming on at that timeslot.

Please note that I am on PlayStation and have disabled crossplay.  PlayStation is the most popular system for BF games, so should be a fair indicator on current state.

There were around 23 European servers live and around 16 in the US on the BF2042 Portal.  And most of them had only 1, 2 or 3 players on them.  Rest was AI bots filling them up.  There were 3-4 servers in both regions with 5-8 players on them.  But none with more.

Then I tried firing up the old BF4, and here I had over hundreds of various servers across Europe and USA to choose from.  1/3 of them maybe with less than 10 players or so, but all the rest were like full or absolute near full with 64 players live.

It is telling that a brand new game like BF2042 is already struggling to keep players interested just 3 months after launch, and then we have BF games like BFV, BF1, BF4 and even BF3 that still keep dedicated fans coming back for more, here many many years after their original launch.

@LJBattlefield  @SirBobdk @CyberDyme 

Yep, agree.  Actually started to reinstall BF4, 1 and V yesterday after posting this thread.  May look at 1 first as I loved the maps...just a shame about 2042...

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@FlatChat wrote:

I'm on PC with cross play enabled in game...  I didn't have any problems last week.  I'm in Western Australia, but I don't think that has anything to do with it.

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That has a lot to do with it.

It's not clear what the criteria for finding a game are but I'm pretty sure that latency is one of them.

There are far fewer people playing than at launch, and you're in a region that is pretty removed from others while also not having a large population.

@filthy_vegans 

I'm in a game, some problem finding one, IF being in Australia is the problem, then I don't know why that would be.  Particularly when I have NO trouble getting in game in BF4, BF1 or BF V.  I have a fast connection.

The major problem is the lack of players in 2042, with lobbies full of bots to compensate.   I'm in a game now, but frankly it's not fun playing against a team that is 80% bots...

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@FlatChat wrote:

@filthy_vegans 

I'm in a game, some problem finding one, IF being in Australia is the problem, then I don't know why that would be.  Particularly when I have NO trouble getting in game in BF4, BF1 or BF V.  I have a fast connection.

The major problem is the lack of players in 2042, with lobbies full of bots to compensate.   I'm in a game now, but frankly it's not fun playing against a team that is 80% bots...

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Hi @FlatChat ,

@filthy_vegans is absolutely right in his observations with regards to your trouble, unfortunately.

That you write that you "have a fast connection" is a frequent misconception many players have on how they connect to a global multiplayer game online.  Your speed on your internet line is typically not the real problem at all, as games like Battlefield typically do not need line speeds higher than around 2-3 Megabit/s downstream to you and like just 700-800 kilobit/s upstream from you to server.  Most connected with a fixed line to the Internet can fulfill those requirements. 

Where your problem is is actually in the latency.  And that is among the top most important aspects in any multiplayer FPS game!  Next to this, we also can look at your jitter of the connection, which is an expression of the variance of your latency over time, as that is also a real 'killer' for the game server.

The latency is what makes you potentially completely blocked from accessing a given server, as aka PC players of previous Battlefield games typically would dictate a latency of max 100milli seconds as max limit for access to their hosted servers.  Now EA have not been transparent on their servers, network infrastructure or internal cutoff points to merge players together, but there are bound to be some, as technically the servers simply drop a gievn client (a player) if the latency goes above certain timeout limits for response times.  Aka it doesn't matter "how fast" your line speed is (aka 100 MB/s) if your time to send that to the server is above 800 milli seconds, due to the travel distance for the signal to go from your location to the server location.

Best case possible of your Australian latency to various cities going through optic fibre all the way can be found here:

https://wondernetwork.com/pings/Sydney

So now try and look at your potential latencies to BF servers hosted in aka:  Japan, Singapore, Europe, USA...

And due to the practical layout of the Internet and all the nodes that you typically will need to go through to reach a European based BF server, your latency from ANZ to our servers in aka Rotterdam are typically around 600-800 milli seconds.   

@CyberDyme 

In the BF1 and BFV server browsers I can find plenty of games I can join straight away in my regions ( Oceania, Asia and Antartica) given seat availability. The ping for me is usually around 50 with no discernible latency.

There are usually about a dozen or more in Australia, and plenty (dozens) in Indonesia and Japan (the latter having higher latency for me, though Indonesia is pretty good ping wise).

As I said, the issue is with 2042.  Potentially the availability of players in general, and their availability in my regions for low latency games. 

Perhaps the uptake/player base of 2042 in my regions isn't what it was with the other BF releases  - I suspect that is the case.  That and larger populations and 2042 player base in countries like the US would seem to support that.  Some comparative statistics (BF V to BF 2042 by region) would be interesting.

But that's not the subject of this thread.  It's about games being full of bots, though the issues may indeed be connected.

@frekwalda1   That is interesting and also seems to support the idea about certain regions (e.g USA) having a higher 2042 player base than others when compared to e.g. BFV. 

Maybe those regions haven't been as willing to jump into 2042...

#1.  How do you know which players are bots?

#2.  Cross play is enabled and 90% of the console players play worse than who I think are bots

@xXPllasmaXx 

You can also see [AI] appended to the bot name when the bot is spotted in sights or by other means.  I usually play as Caspar, so spotting bots (and others) with the drone is easy. You can see the AI name in this grab from the somewhat amusing video by jackfrags on the short lived zombie paratroopers from hell mode:

The only good thing about bots is that they don't do revenge kills...

Oh, and they don't sneak up on you and cut your throat.  

One of the more interesting things from that video, is that you can see the damage radius for fragmentation grenades in BF2042. E.g. where the zombies move back to form a circle around the grenade. In real life (being ex Australian Army), the damage radius would be much greater for a frag (e.g. for M67 or F1)  - 15 metres (and up to 230 metres).  The zombies have moved less than 5 metres which is the kill radius of a M67 or F1. 

@k1u73   It may depend on when and where you are playing as to the number of bots in a game (if any). I'm level 95 and have seen them for a while now.

Bots pop games in the absence of human players. 

My understanding is that if you are playing in a region that has a relatively large 2042 player base, then chances are you may not see any. 

Elsewhere the story will be different. 

I played over the weekend (from Australia), both days in Breakthrough 128 players, and when I managed to get into a game (9 to 5), the teams were at least 80% bots on each side.  I can easily see this as Caspar with a drone, I just scan the whole team.  This changed however so that later in the day (after 5)  there were no bots - all human players.  It may be due to US players coming on line at that time, I'm not sure.

@FlatChat I'm in WA too, Xbox X player and have massive problems (cross-play on). After about 9pm Perth time, I'm waiting for players to kick off a game (I'm waiting right now and have been for half an hour - hence on the forums digesting the hate from the BF community). When I do get in a game it's populated by around 70% AI. I just don't understand why when they have no problems filling up a game with bots they don't just kick it off with a few players and replace bots as players join? (actually, there is so much I don't understand about this game)

@Squiddles5312   Good to see a fellow Groper on the forum (keep 'em guessing...lol).

Actually I was playing from 8PM to 9PM (my bedtime...5AM rise) last night (31/1).  I got into a few 128 Breakthrough games pretty well straight away, and there didn't seem to be any bots.  I know there were players from Oz from the chat.  But on other nights, there were clearly players in the US which I could also tell from the chat. 

The times that I find lots of bots in 2042 are weekdays, at least in the mornings until early afternoon, which is kind of surprising, as I would have thought that is when there would be more players online in Oz.  Certainly that is my experience playing BFV when the server browser showed Oz games full at those times (not so much early morning), leaving only Indonesian servers (more of them and lower ping, in Perth anyway due to geographic proximity).  The Indo servers were actually pretty good, plenty of them and fast, no lag and heaps of players (mainly Indonesian) who were usually pretty good solo, but lack team play skills (no reviving at all).  A cultural difference I think.  I know many Oz players who preferred the Indo servers, despite the  team play and language/communication issue in chat.  They just wanted to PLAY HARD.

Apart from the really poor sterile maps, I really miss the server browser so that I know where and who I'm playing.  That was a BIG mistake for DICE/EA not to include it in 2042.

I certainly agree that we shouldn't be waiting for games (sometimes I have to quit and go back to the lobby and try again several times) and that the fillers (idiotic characters and their lines, animations etc) in between games are HUGE TIME WASTERS.  People just don't have time to sit there waiting to get into a quick game...very frustrating.

So having the ability to jump into a game, even if just full of bots would be far better than sitting there waiting and not knowing whether you will get into a game at all.  I imagine that no more than 50% of my time in 2042 is actually playing the game.  That is a pretty poor state of play. In BF V and 1, I could always find a game, if not in Oz, then in Indonesia.

On a side note:  As much as I enjoy posting here on EA Answers, I find it extremely frustrating that this is all in vain in regard to making the game better.  I have yet to hear any devs on this forum. It's as though we are offering up all this rich dialog and feedback that the devs could use, but alas there is not the slightest hint that is the case.  Hello?

@FlatChat (lol@sandgropers - they probably think we have a fetish for dirt!)

Yeah, omitting server browsers is one of the more questionable "Legacy Features" the EA Dice team decided upon! I'm not going to repeat the sentement of so many comments throughout the forums that I read whilst waiting over an hour to try and get into a game last night (9:30pm to 10:45pm, Breakthrough, crossplay enabled and my wife calling me * for persisting so long to try and play a game). I tried everything including reseting my router, restarting my Xbox Series X and as a last resort I thought I'd play a Portal game just so I could have a game before I went to bed and despite the server saying there were 38/64 players in a Rush game, the same thing happened - "waiting for other players" with a full squad.

This leads me to believe that despite the fact that players have abandoned the game like rats off a sinking ship, this is probably yet another serious bug in the networking code that yep, frustrates more players to uninstalling and moving on.

I shut down my system last night and said to my wife, "Yep, Battlefield is dead" 😢

@Squiddles5312 @FlatChat Perthian here too, I'm normally stuck working late and don't get to game until 11pm and I've had the same problems since the start of December.

At this stage it means the only time I am able to find a server with enough players is on weekends, that is if I don't want to wait for 30 minutes to play a game before giving up.

The worst part about BF2042 is the reception to the game has been so bad its actually reduced the player numbers for all Battlefield games in Aus xbox wise.

Previously BFV which I was never much of a fan of (but played since it had the most populated servers), generally sat behind Sea of Thieves or Destiny in terms of players - usually top 10 to 15 games on the xbox most played games list. It had been this way for the last 8 years with BF4, BF1 and then BFV all hovering around this spot.

Last year at around 11pm there would generally be 4 or 5 populated servers running BFV (2 or 3 in strategic conquest, 2 or 3 in tactical conquest).

There were also still enough players to find populated servers for BF4 on weekends and a lot of the time on weekdays.

Since BF2042 came out, players moved from BFV to BF2042, but after leaving BF2042 only a fraction has returned to BFV, most have left to other games.

Now both games barely make top 50 most played, and its hard to get into a populated game of BFV past 9pm, but still easier getting into a game than it is with BF2042.

So not only is BF2042 disappointing for many, its killed off the other games in the series in less populated regions.