I think it's likely because not only was it used as a selling point when advertising the game, but the older titles had dedicated portal servers which harboured little communities of players, clans and was manually moderated so cheaters got the boot immediately, When you remove bots and require a set limit to start a game most people don't have the patience to sit in a lobby queue for an hour until it fills with enough players to start the game whereas if it had bot backfill people could play and the bots would be replaced immediately when a player joins.
The whole exp thing though I understand wanting to combat the exp farms but they could have just removed the ability to spawn unarmed bots or place them in a static position so someone could just stand still and mag dump.
I just think EA/Dice could have handled this much better and it's not like the forums don't have an entire encyclopaedia of feedback and suggestions on how to improve things. Instead they have ignored everything and decided to make poor choice after poor choice which had inevitably resulted in a mass exodus of players.
dunno. in recent bf's the only popular servers were cheater ones. I can start naming clan tags that everyone all knows. but I will refrain. I keep seeing on these forums that there were good ones. But I haven't seen that in years. I'm in the north east usa, and bf6 seems to be really popular here. But I think that when you run a good server, the bad admin ones lag you to frustrate you from paying for it. They see you as competition. And the gov't turns a blind eye and the game companies are helpless against them.
