@My guess is the plan here is to get people to outcry for regular bots on verified experiences to return period. Then they will reintroduce this but with 0 progression/XP and say "we listened you guys wanted bots back on verified modes so here you go" and act like they're doing the community a favor and expect them to shut up about full XP. It would be a classic EA move that they have done multiple times in the past with the sports titles.
Yes, I think so too — it’s a possibility.
For this reason, those who absolutely want the restoration of the “bot backfill” should avoid saying, “please, EA, even without XP progression!” If the developers were to act as you say, at that point it would become a real mockery — if not a huge lack of respect and consideration from a company toward a large part of its user base.
The funny thing is that official lobbies have Bot Backfill.. and you get XP from it. Played a match and had half the players as bots on BOTH TEAMS. By the end of the match the lobby was filled w sweats but the small amount of kills I got counted for XP.
This tells me that the bot change was just about control. Its clearly not an issue to award XP with bot kills, as I got the xp post patch. Its just control.
I think it was an entrapment strategy. Get people invested in the game, lure them in with Portal and the promise of customization. Then slowly take it away. They didn't want to even give us a server browser. Some of their social media mouthpieces seemed to not even understand why people wanted a server browser and were asking as soon as 3 months from release why this was important. So they gave us server browser, but in portal only, then severely neutered portal 2 weeks after release, which just happens to be a cutoff period for a lot of digital platforms for returns. They're also counting on people being too invested in the game and the progress they've made by then to put it down and try to get a refund. So the players that are invested then go back to regular multiplayer servers, and EA doesn't have to worry about people playing exactly the matches they want via a server browser. As you said, they now control it again.
what im doing is not spending any more money on the game until Portal is restored. I was looking forward to buying that Battlepass too.
