I imagine the team has come to the following conclusions regarding bots.
It is impossible to find a balance between them carrying the player, and them being useless, due to the nature of shooters, and the way the missions are setup for co-op gameplay.
There is no way to keep them from killing the player when a poxburster pops out close to the group.
The amount of variables and considerations and things the bots would have to be able to do, to pick a player up, during a heated firefight, reinforce my first conclusion.
Will they have unlimited ammo? or rely on player providing? picking up? will this take ammo from the player? And if you give it unlimited ammo, how will you keep players from exploiting this, and lettings bots carry them thru everything.
Will they have unlimited life? or remain as is, and if so how will the bots decide who gets to use the medicae? If it has unlimited/selfregen then how do you keep players from exploiting this.
Instead Id like to suggest you consider the following, and scrap bots entirely:
solo single player mission formats: Serves a dual purpose, provide a solo activity and a place to hone your individual skills. It also allows for more story/cinematic missions.
Duos: Allows players to hone skills in pairs, and teaches them how to fight using the buddy pair system. Can use the current mission format, just adjust it a bit to work for 2 players.
Current 4 player mission format: Remains untouched but is reserved for 4 player coop.
Bots in Vermintide where probably challenging to get to a point where they worked, but I imagine the list of variables they had to consider was significantly shorter.
It was also a lot easier for a bot to sacrifice himself to avoid damaging the team there, and have the bots pick each other up, since there werent 100000 bullets flying around.
With everything going on here, it seems highly unlikely that you can adapt the current 4 player missions to work with bots, without changing them to be something completely different.
TLDR:
“I do not know how to solve the issue. This means that it is impossible to solve.
So here is a suggestion to make the game worse.”
Please stop it with the troll posts.
Happens so rarely that it is pretty much irrelevant.
And the way to prevent this, would be to have bots keep a certain distance to bursters.
Bad bots can rescue you sometimes.
If there are no bots, you die 100%.
Make it work like in Vermintide:
Bots have limited ammo and only pick up ammo, when a player tells them to.
Adding this feature to Darktide should be very easy.
Keep as is, but let players tell the bot to use a medicae station.
This. All of this. Effectively commanding bots is a skill…that you can develop (in vermintide) and when/if you play with bots quite often which will hopefully be possible soon with private/solo games. Introducing bots as a viable option for those who want to use them and learn them would NOT be that hard. Most people i see who complain about bots on the vermintide front (where they can be more easily tested and played with) simply dont know how to use them however if they are used properly you can use them far far more efficiently then a group of real players. I’ve seen good teams of a player with bots do cata. There is no reason AT ALL to remove them. A simple script to make bots respond to pings and some work with a radial command wheel is perfectly fine
There are some suggestions and other games mange to do it quite well. Solo mode was promised for december as well btw - so no, bots shouldn’t go but rather be improved to a point where they are fun to interact with im preparation for the promised and advertised solo mode.
Some ideas:
pick up stuff the player highlights
only heal when players highlight the medicae one at a time starting withe the lowest health ones
introduce a call for help funktion once downed - bots pick you up only then
bots concentrate attacks on highlighted targets
bots drop ammo crates/medipack once the player asks for ammo/healing
bots are comprised of all classes and capable of using all ultras and weapons
For the upcoming solo mode:
bots can steer the players unused spare characters