At the risk of being totally repetitive, they don’t have to. You could scale them with player performance like I suggested. I think that’s one of the best ways to approach the problem.
In an ideal world I would expect bots to give you a couple freebies. Maybe they save you from a disabler once or twice very quickly, but get a little slower the more you get grabbed. Maybe they snipe a couple on their own but have a chance to miss them if they’re not tagged. Maybe their accuracy isn’t perfect.
They could block about as well as the player is blocking that round, too. Scaling their reflexes and simulated awareness with what the player demonstrates.
They should always revive when they can since getting player downed is a game ender.
And this is essentially where one of the problems lies. If we make them too good, the scenario you shared will be a reality and everyone will just play that which gives them the best rate of success. I don’t think this is something fixable in a singular patch. If I were Fatshark, I would fix the bad decisions bots constantly make and work from there.
On Legend+? I want bots to essentially hold progress but not make it regress. This includes, holding but not destroying hordes. Getting downed but not because they refuse to block a single Storm Vermin Overhead. I want to think of Bots as lower level players that you take into a higher difficulty and that will play around you but will still need help from you the “best” player.
And about bots being better than players, that’s valid to be afraid of bots being better but like I said. All I want from bots is a baseline functionality. Any player SHOULD be able to know how to block, so should a bot.
Yeah, but lets be real here. Fatshark is not going to change the whole bot system. What they would do is fixing bugs and buffing/nerfing them, so lets focus on that.
Well, like you said, thats not something done in one patch. I dont even know how they could do it. Bots always blocking during a horde but not attacking as much to destroy the horde? Should they only be able to snipe one of the 4 spawning specials? And what about the different jobs and equipment of a bot?
I mean, you equip your Waystalker bot for a reason, i would assume mainly to kill specials and the bot only killing one special then wouldnt make much sense, nor would the bot even be worthwhile to use. But if you let the bot kill more specials, it becomes a failsafe. Thats what i mean with “bots either suck or outperform other players”. Its an incredibly fine line of balance that i doubt will ever be reached by Fatshark, because they also would need people to constantly work on bots and who knows if they can spare them, considering how much time they need for V2 updates to begin with.
I started typing up a full response but decided it was a waste of my time since you didn’t really address any of my actual points in your reply anyway. You just went on a long tangent about some extremely hypothetical and questionable issues you have with solo players.
So let me hone in on the main point here to keep things productive. Why do you care? How does it affect you? Why are you fighting this battle? Further down you ask someone what they actually want from bots on Legend + yet OP layed out a detailed list of the problematic behaviours bots have that they would like fixed. So how about you actually tell us which suggestions you don’t think are appropriate rather than rambling about everything you think is wrong with solo players.
To be honest you just come across as weirdly elitist. There is clearly a specific way you think the game should be played (exclusively with other people) and you don’t seem to accept that your view isn’t universal. It’s a game, the more different ways people are allowed to have fun with it the better.
To put a big disclaimer on this. I am not a solo player exclusively by any means though I do enjoy doing bot Cata runs as a challenge. It frequently; however, crosses the line from challenge to just annoying when a run gets ruined by especially stupid bot behaviour (separating from me for no reason, jumping off cliffs, aggroing patrols across the map etc.) Bots will not be close to as good as real players as long as their DPS is kept very low as it is now. Most people just want them to revive more reliably and survive decently with a full survivability setup, which is something they are extremely inconsistent about currently for a long list of reasons already stated in this thread.
What points did you make in your comment that i didnt address?
In the first paragraph you didnt make any points but just said that the skill gap between normal and true solo is massive and that bots would be pointless if you are already at that skill. This actually strenghtens my point of just needing more skill to finish legend + with bots.
In the second paragraph you talk about how important single-player is, or else the playerbase would significantly diminish. I addressed that point by assuming that the vast majority of V2 players is not playing single-player mode. Then you talk about the incredible replayability of V1 to this day because of a bot mod and i addressed that with the fact that V1 was already dead when V2 released. So obviously that bot mod didnt do much except for an extremely low amount of players. Then you talk about yourself and that isnt worth addressing, because you are just one player.
In the third paragraph you make only one point and that is the implied question to what i would lose by having more competent bots and even that i addressed when talking about single-players eventually coming to coop again and being terrible teammates, because they never learned how to actually play in team with other players.
And now you have the audacity to insult me, apparently because you didnt pay attention when text comprehension was the topic in school. So maybe read the comment again and you will realize that i have answered your questions already.
Yes good job on correctly comprehending this point. I do think they are pointless if you need to be true solo level skilled to play with them. You are yet to explain why this should be the case. If I want to true solo I’ll true solo thank you.
Ironic you insult my reading comprehension further down when you completely misread my point here. Let me try again. I never argued that bots keep the game alive, I argued that when the player base inevitable drops down to almost nothing, decent bots would make the game stay enjoyable even when there are no lobbies to be had. People coming late to this game could have a great experience with it even if there’s aren’t many other people playing it left.
Yes I read it the first time but it’s a garbled mess of awkward assumptions about solo players. Lots of people in QP are bad, very very few of them are bad because they’re used to playing with bots. It’s just a silly non-argument, and is what I was referring with:
There’s no evidence to suggest any of your problems with solo players are real or represent more than 0.1% of the player base. You don’t have a horse in this race but seemingly nobody agrees with you anyway so whatever I guess. At some point if you’re gonna keep arguing here, you ought to at least respond to some of OP’s original points/suggestions.
It should be the case because legend + is the highest difficulty in the game and you should not be able to finish legend runs with bots as easy as i would with a whole team. You should have to constantly carry your bots and if you are already on that skill-level, then you wont need bots in the first place.
Indeed, i misread your point because i actually thought it had meaning, but it turns out you want better bots so people coming into the game when its completely dead would still have a good time. What a ridiculous point to begin with. In that regard, you wont need any bot buffs until Fatshark finally stops supporting V2 and offers a better version for players to migrate too.
Yeah, lots of people in QP are bad and i dont need more coming from single-player.
The problems are obvious, you guys just dont want to see them. Thats why you guys get so much support from the casual community. I already responded to OP’s post with the statament that bugs should obviously be fixed but we are talking now about how good bots should be and i am against viable bots on legend + . Either you start playing with other people, or you have to increase your own skill to get through legend + with bots.
Nobody has argued otherwise. This is not binary, it’s a scale. As I already pointed out bot DPS is terrible, which is enough to keep them worse than real players. None of the suggestions in this thread would make them as good as real players so again I’m left wondering what exactly your issue is.
Nice deflection from your poor reading comprehension. That wasn’t really my main point anyway, but yes I do think the longevity of a game is important, and yes I would like V2 to be enjoyable as far into the future as possible. Ridicule all you like. We both know FS isn’t going to do anything about bots after they’re done releasing content, so no this isn’t something that can just be fixed after the player count is already non existent.
You’ve simply not presented an even vaguely convincing argument against improved bots.
Again nobody has said you shouldn’t need to be better to play with bots, but needing to be true solo good is just dumb. I’m done responding, we’re not gonna find a middle ground on this anyway.
i think bots being suicidal idiots is bad for the game, and I am definitely not a bad player or someone who struggles in legend.
bots should be viable everywhere, and should be able to handle basic things like rezzing players or not walking off cliffs. even for people who primarily play with others in pub games, bots need to be able to function as a standin while you wait for other players, which could potentially be a full map. no-one is demanding they become gods that never go down and handle every threat easily, simply that they don’t do stupid stuff like stand behind a wall and eat overheads with their ranged weapon out because a ratling was firing nearby.
Bots are better in Vermintide 1 because the bot mods are better. See DifferentBots mod for V1. Note its features and update release dates. It has more features and has more active development than V2 bot mods (sanctioned or otherwise). It also has a ‘bot performance reduction’ functionality, so if you think the bots are too strong you can actually gimp them in various ways.
The most often mentioned bot complaint in V2 (and V1) that I’ve noticed is: bots chasing after specials with melee weapons, causing them to facetank long-ranged specials’ attacks, trigger patrols, and ignore revives even if the player is right next to them. The V1 bot mod can be set to not allow bots to chase after long-ranged specials, working around those issues.
Another bot complaint I hear about in V2 (also a V1 bug) is bots getting stuck (if not also facetanking) when a rating gunner is firing, as lamented here. The V1 bot mod can be set to ignore ratling fire, so they wouldn’t be stuck.
That’s an old post from 2017 (before Vermintide 2 was even announced) and is specifically about Vermintide 1. It is hardly relevant to V2. It is countered by the fact that Fatshark themselves introduced a bot improvements patch for V2 and that the V2 Bot Improvements mod by Grimalackt (who is also the author of the V1 bot mod discussed in the comment you linked) was actually sanctioned by Fatshark.
Do you have any credentials to back up a claim about implementation effort, or team prioritization? No offense intended but I often encounter people on the internet who have no knowledge of a codebase and make claims about difficulty just because they can’t themselves imagine how to write it. In those cases I think it’s inappropriate to gatekeep the conversation.
This is a feedback forum, after all, not a ticketing system.
I mean, hell, lots of talented modders and developers out there too. I think the discussion would benefit by looking at this on different axes than just buff/nerf, especially considering the contention around that topic.
Certainly any dumb bot behaviors that no human would ever consider would be great to address, and if that makes them too strong they can be tuned further. I think we’re all okay with bad bots to some extent we just don’t want bots that literally throw the match or sabotage the team with erratic and inconsistent behaviours.
That’s what I’m saying. Stop using useless bots that can’t handle even champion difficulty.
Bot doesn’t choose it’s own careers. You do that for them. I don’t see any reason to use Waystalker bot. Even more: no reason to use Elf bot at all. She should be the least priority bot.
Fair points, issue is I never said that literally EVERYTHING is on players.
I stated countless times at this point that bots can be really dumb. At no point I’m saying “bots are perfect, you’re the only issue”.
Point is: players themselves are far from perfect. A lot of the stuff people saying about as being impossible or really-really hard with bots is not even remotely close to being impossible.
A lot of the stuff that bots “do” can be prevented if you think ahead.
Bots aggroing patrols can be prevented if you know where to expect the patrol and where to dodge it. Also Legend patrols are a strength potion + bomb type of deal. And in majority of cases it can be killed in the duration of IB’s career skill.
Bots running off cliffs can be prevented with better positioning. Don’t stand near ledges when in a tough situation.
Bots getting 1v3 by specials can be countered by killing said specials. Even on Cata it takes a lot of time for bots to die from a single special.
The only thing you can’t do anything about is bots dying with ranged weapons out. Though, this never happened to my bots for the past mounts. There are weapons that bots don’t use well. Know them and don’t give them to bots.
The only thing that can’t be really played around is bots not saving you in the downed state.
If you don’t count just generally playing better, because dying on Legend with constant Merc’s resistances and THP gain from Unchained and during IB’s career is a tough challenge. But I get the idea. It can happen. Even this can be played around by giving bots 30% faster revive speed. It makes the difference between the bot picking you up and not canceling revive at the last milisecond.
All of this will not guarantee that the bots will not break. It will minimize the possible wipe situations due to their AI getting dumb.
So if it wasn’t clear enough at this point: Yes, bots can be dumb. They can struggle. It’s in your interest to pick the most efficient careers, give them the best talents, weapons, properties, traits and to play around them in the best way possible.
I never said there’s a way to make them perfect.
But if you’re not struggling on the difficulties yourself - you will have a high winrate with bots. And, no, bots getting overheads is not YOU struggling. But if you’re losing with bots on Legend because they act stupid from time to time - you depend on them too much. You shouldn’t. Hope that’s understandable enough. I’m tired of people ignoring my points.
I think you’re making valid points but they’re kind of side stepping the topic issue. Like, I think we’ve established that as a player you can build / equip your team in such a way that bots struggle less, and you can play in such a way that mitigates some of the bots quirks, but the fundamental issues remain:
Unless you are a very research oriented / sweaty power player like myself (and many of us here) reading the fatshark forums for bot strategy guides and builds it’s incredibly difficult and time consuming to figure this stuff out.
You have to swap loadouts and careers for up to 3 characters whenever you swap from playing with players to playing with bots (or vice versa) which is a huge PITA if you go back and forth a lot.
Players with only one character leveled / outfitted are SOL.
“Casual” players will probably never ever figure any of this out and will be resigned to only be able to succeed when playing with living humans or doing boring difficulties with bots.
The game tells you nothing about this whole bot meta. If Fatshark intends the bots to perform at a certain level they are definitely failing based on whether or not the player knows all these minutia. You can fail or succeed based on how well you know the bot algorithms and quirks, which isn’t great game design.
I’ve got like 300 hours in this game now and I just learned today that kerillian is supposedly a bad bot pick. I have no idea why, and I have no idea how we know that, but I guess that’s a thing. She’s a great player pick so that’s unintuitive. I can’t even touch optimizing talent picks on bots, that seems like a nightmare. It takes me like 20 minutes to just figure out a talent combo I like for ME.
Maybe what the game needs is just to eliminate bot customization altogether. Just hard code the optimal bot builds into the game and give all the players a consistent experience.
You have previously posted an absolutely amazing screenshot with the mod settings for V1. The same is dire necessary for V2, especially the following settings would be important to me:
Bots Should Not Chase Globadiers and Blightstormers.
Bots Should Not Chase Rattlings and Warpflamethrowers.
Bots Should Ignore Rattling Fire.
Bots Should Not Sticking to the Monsters and Bosses.
Allow Bots to shoot at monsters and bosses. (as before. Vital on Skittergate!)
Don’t allow Bots to pick up any items and ammo without a direct order by Social Wheel.
(Especially ammo! Bots run to the ammo box after each shot, and if they cannot reach the ammo box, they are paralyzed.
Already these simple settings based on disabling the harmful script will give -100% to Chaos, + 200% to Tactics and + 100% to Survival!
It would also be very desirable to get manual control on bot’s Health Potions and Medkits. It would help a lot in the Chaos Wastes.
Plus, need to fix bugs in the game in general.
Today I published in Steam two bug reports with screenshots about how the packmaster drags away to inaccessible places on the map and the ironbreaker bot with the shield does not revive.
Obviously, the above Guide doesn’t resolve most of what is discussed here, but at least a few people have chimed in that are having more generic issues when using bots.
The bot problem is certainly multi faceted, with Chaos Wastes adding several new issues for bots in both loadouts and general map navigation (getting stuck or falling off cliffs).
It may be better to get this thread back on track of:
Bots getting stuck way too often because their AI decides a path that doesn’t work and will never reevaluate it even if they aren’t moving.
Bots will run into Gunner/Flamers until they die.
Bots will chase after distant specials (often with the exclusive intent of hitting it in melee often running so far that they will teleport back to the player, only to start running off again).
Bots will stand on you without making any attempt to revive you.
Bots do not prioritise reviving the player over chasing after a special that’s not even visible to them.
Do you think any of these could be spun as bugs? Get some reproduction steps and report them over on the bug forum? That might help with the overall visibility of the issues and maybe would make fatshark more likely to prioritize them (not sure how closely they monitor these long conversations)
I know stuck bots have at least been reported, though I’m not sure if it’s a pathing issue (bot logic) or like a navigation mesh issue (map issue).
These kinds of things deviate enough from what most would consider appropriate intended behavior that they could well just be bugs.
bots generally interact worse with beastmen, taking a lot of damage from the horde of beastmen.
bots don’t understand Ungors Archers at all! Never react to their shooting.
Sienna Unchained, receiving damage from arrows, does not understand this and explodes.
Sienna Unchained stands and ventilates in a clouds of gas, then dies.
Bots can defeat a patrol of Chaos Warriors, but one Chaos Warrior will kill all three bots easily, sometimes they just don’t see the Chaos Warrior, they don’t attack, they just move away.
Bots stand motionless paralyzed if they haven’t 1 ammo, and there is inaccessible ammo box nearby.
100% chance of bots being captured by Lifeleech.
Bots generally don’t understand Lifeleech, and what to do about it.
Bots no longer understand some of the attacks of monsters. For example, they are good at dodging vertical attacks of a rat ogors, but they run up and are immediately thrown back by other attacks.
Waystalker bot is bad on higher difficulties mainly because its a career that is focussed on range damage. On higher difficulties the bots rarely use range weapons.
Handmaiden is bad because its a dodge based career. The bot will get hit sooner or later and then gets as much damage as every other squishy career.
Shade bot is focussed on backstab damage and properly timed usage of the ultimate is mandatory, which both doesn’t work at all with bots.
There are more reasons why the elf bots are inferior.
Tanky bots are always better, except if the bot brings lots of utility for the group (Mercenary, WHC).
WHC is a pretty squishy bot but has lots of things the group profits from (tagging enemies for +20% damage , crit buffs), so i prefer him over the tankier zealot, for example.
The elf bots have very low utility for the group (waystalker heal doesn’t justify picking her over another bot imo) and are squishy.