Bots/Portal and Gamemodes
This is going to be a rather long post were I just leave some thoughts on the game after playing for a couple hundred of hours!
Starting with Bots: Personally I think Bots were a mistake. They've been used for XP/Challenge/Unlock farming ever since they've been re-introduced in 2042 (after checking i found out the old era games had bots, thanks for pointing that out) which also leads to Portal being a whole lot of wasted potential.
I don't believe we need Bots! Especially not in Portal. I'd say adding bots was one of the worst things that could have happened to the game.
Portal: Portal could be a good way to incorporate the players/creators who's creativity could deliver us some great extra content in form of new maps. From recreating legendary maps throughout the gaming industry to completely self made ones.
However! Due to the nature of how we enter a match nobody really bothers looking through the server browser to see if there's actually some active servers instead we click on the mode we wanna play and that's it.
A solution? First of all remove Bots. If you give players the tools to farm bots they will do it.
Having a serverbrowser like we do in BF6 right now is kinda like having the keys to a giant empty warehouse. There's lots of space for great things but no one is taking advantage of it.
If the browser would work like it used to in past games where you would search through the available servers (official and player made) to find the maps and modes you like and get rid of the "pick and click matchmaking" there would be a lot more interaction between players. Cheaters would be banned, toxic players kicked etc.
Last point: Gamemodes
What else can we say about Gamemodes other than: WE DON'T NEED MORE!
What we need is a healthy amount of modes that work well on the existing and upcoming maps. There were to many modes in the game even from the beginning. By adding more the only thing that will happen is that the player base will be more and more devided and the devs have more work to do to make each mode work well on each map.
The best thing would be to remove some of the existing modes and stop adding more because like i said it splits the community and you just put on more workload. Not to mention that probably nobody is complaining about to few modes.
Who needs to go?
In my opinion you should get rid of: King of the Hill (KOTH), Domination (maybe), Squad-Deathmatch, Team-Deathmatch and Strikepoint (haven't even played it once).
Since the modes above are quite similar (small, infantry focused) it would make more sense to keep one of those instead of having 5.
That would leave us with: Breakthrough, Conquest, Domination (maybe), Escalation and Rush.
That way you can focus on optimization of the existing modes and maps and the player base will be closer together.
This of course isn't the ultimate solution but I feel like something like this needs to happen.
