Ideas
Here is a statement by PC Gamer:
I trust them cause they have always been great about news articles about gaming, they have been around for a long time.
Here is another:
https://www.thegamer.com/battlefield-6-bot-farming-lobbies-nerfed/
I too, have been thinking about asking for a refund, since I bought both the Steam and PS5 versions
Thanks but neither of those was an official statement, but merely current observations by 3rd parties...which is interesting to see nonetheless, however, they also state this:
"While some panicked responses online are claiming all Portal servers are being denied XP legitimacy after today's update, that's not the case so far. The majority of servers I'm seeing (NA West) still have full XP enabled, including a Hardcore Breakthrough playlist, a Conquest server with modified health and speed, and my Closed Weapons server that's mostly bots.
We're seeing BF Studios attempt to thread a tricky needle here. The goal of letting players progress normally in modified Portal matches remains intact, but servers it considers to be exploiting XP are being flagged seemingly by hand."
So it seems as long as you keep your server running default game modes and not creating some overly bot-centric cheat house where its easy to just line up bots and get endless xp per hour, that they're still going to let you play in Portal with bots for full progression as planned...and if this is true then its great news.