I began playing again this season and found myself in firefights that were unusually easy. The first time I thought it was a newbie but as it kept happening I realized where I had seen such lack of competition before- in the bot royale playlist.
I also noticed that the number of players in the queue seem a bit lower lately.
Is EA filling the empty squads with bots now when the population gets low?
honestly if I want to play against bots I would go play a Halo campaign.
Respawn has added NPC's / Bots to the casual playlist, though this should only affect low-tier lobbies.
They mentioned this in a update post back in February:
We’ve slowly been introducing a small and deliberate amount of npc bots, “Apex Bots,” into lower-tier public lobbies. These bots only deploy as opponents and will be a full squad; your squad will not be filled. We want players to have fun playing Apex, and we see this as a potential path to deliver more of that, but we didn’t want to just drop them on you.
Not sure if these bots are identifiable in the same way the bots are named in Bot Royale (With numbers in their name and all that)
Though keep in mind that in some cases, players run bot farms, in which case there are people are running bots themselves to farm XP (Or in some cases, used for boosting), so it's also possible you are encountering such bots if you're playing on a server where there aren't a lot of players online at the moment.
And again Respawn makes it hard / harder to understand what is happening with the game.
Instead of battling above mentioned profile farming cases where players are controlled by scripts to boost up levels to then sell them to hackers / boosters / smurfers they add their own bots and close to 0 info on how to tell the difference between them and illegal bots.
Job well done :)
The Security team has always been working to remove these bots, they've been on it since they started appearing when Mixtape was new.
This has been highlighted in these official articles (Though there may be more):
There definitely are always a lot of those user-ran bots around, though I wouldn't say they're not doing anything.
The scale that these users operate these farms on is actually insane.
Though yeah would love to see something to identify bots a bit better.
Have been looking for footage, I'm assuming they'd have similar names with numbers as in Bot Royale but nothing definitive.
Respawn posts political level bla bla bla since the day I joined in season 7 and probably even before that.
What matters is the end result which we see is going downwards. A few days ago I was praising Respawn for one thing they "managed" to solve = rage hacks (ones that increase your firing rate to crazy level where you melt everyone in 0.1 sec or faster) but oh what do you know yesterday in official Apex Legends LFG discord people complained that as per usual practice in last days / hours of split/season people try to farm ranks and rage hacking was again spotted in multiple servers for at least last 2 hours before split change.
No only Respawn fails to deal with the situation, worse, they add smoke and mirrors to the game to make it even harder for at least 3rd party to identify what is hacks and what is legit.
Same goes with e.g. newest addition of rank display in the beginning of a game: there was outrage regarding matchmaking -> they made it visible -> it proved outrage was based on solid facts -> they "fine-tuned" matchmaking -> people kept complaining (especially about Preds getting lobbies with as low as Platinum players in it and mostly playing vs Diamond players) -> now we have new less transparent system of displaying "highest rank player's rank per team"...
This game is going the same way as Overwatch 1 (potentially 2) and I lean towards going into Marvel Rivals just because people keep saying that game development studio does focus much more on player's experience vs monetization and creating fake hype. At some point that argument will "tip over my scale" and I will give up what currently is my favorite game mode, type of play to totally different one just to avoid this bad player experience that comes with otherwise very addictive game play style / mode.
Respawn has added NPC's / Bots to the casual playlist, though this should only affect low-tier lobbies.
Well I suppose I am of the lower tier............................? *sigh*
It's really interesting to see the bot just stare at you rather than do anything to defend itself or engage. It's so point less to play against them. I would prefer to wait for the lobby to fill or to shrink the initial ring if half the lobby is empty. I don't want to play against bots when i play this game. It isn't fun, just a tiring lap around the track.
A few days ago I was praising Respawn for one thing they "managed" to solve = rage hacks (ones that increase your firing rate to crazy level where you melt everyone in 0.1 sec or faster)
I don't get this. The only way a person can increase their rate of fire is to tell the server that they are firing faster than they should be able, which the server should then adjudicate and nullify, or they are delaying their packets then sending them all to the server where the server then notifies you in a single packet that all those bullets hit you, with the appearance that they were fired way too fast. Either way, the server code is to blame. These present EASY cheat solutions for the server to implement.
I can't post links here but you can easily find examples of this in youtube, just search Apex legends + Rage hacks.
How it is possible I am not sure, lack of IT knowledge and have 0 motivation to dig that info up, all I know that Apex is just like Swiss cheese = full of holes people exploit in various absurd hacks:
And the list goes one to the level where people famously got hacked during LAN or online tournament.
Everything is possible in Apex :D somehow some way and seems like the dev team does not care or are unable to patch things up / keep game under control (lowest level of control) for now 4th season in a row = we went from abnormal number of heavy abusers to high number of abusers which is propagated as "success" but if you compare vs situation 10+ seasons ago we just went from ok to very bad to bad.
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