I get that they shouldn’t be allowed to carry a game by themselves and I can the decision not to let them carry books to motivate multiplayer. But I’ve noticed them being progressively nerfed each patch, where on launch Bardin bot with a crossbow would kill every special before you even heard it, to now where they seem to have very restrictive weapon usage. This seems ok at first, but it seems that the bots are still programmed to prioritize specials, even though they are now have very restrictive use of ranged weapons against them.
The problems arise when I recently started playing some games with a friend to get him into the game, without having to deal with public lobbies kicking him for being low level or not playing meta characters, I usually play with a pair of bots on my team. The bots desire to melee special units, regardless of distance from the player, seems to actively sabotage the player experience. I have seen the bots run out to melee a blightstormer, only to get sucked into the storm so far away from us that they teleported back into my friend and prematurely detonated his bomb, killing him. I have seen them actively run away from us, to chase down a globadier (to melee it) only to run headfirst into a chaos patrol. They did this almost every run (regardless of how far away from the patrol we were), for almost 5 runs straight.
Please take another look at bot behavior, I would rather they not target specials at all (unless someone gets grabbed), than having them run into the distance, agroing everything in their path, trying to melee them. If not, maybe give them some sort of leash mechanic that prevents them from running too far away from the player characters.
The problem is that these behaviours have been purposefully inflicted on the bots by the developers in order to ‘encourage’ players to play with other players and not bots. In fact, you can see this as evident in a lot of design choices in the game. (Not being able to specify as being a host when creating a game, no banning of other players from your games)
In VT1, players had developed a mod to enable a whole slew of corrective bot enhancing behaviours and it more or less became a “must have” for anyone wanting to play the game. The fact that not a single one of these improvements had been incorporated into VT2 is pretty telling.
But the fact is that the bots during this game’s own release were better than they are now. I’m specifically talking about the behavior where they are forced to prioritize special units but now they are no longer allowed to used their ranged weapons like they were on launch, so you get these absurd situations of bots running halfway across the map to melee a globadier in the middle of a stormvermin patrol or to slowly walk after someone who has been packmastered ignoring the rest of the hoard. It’s clear they still are forced to deal with specials but they do it in such a dumb way that they might as well not at all.
Again, its in an attempt to make you fed up with the bots and play with players. Its all deliberate, I doubt they accidentally made these changes to the bot AI. If you play with a bot, they want you to suffer for it until you give up and join someone elses game or until someone joins your game.
I understand that, but the thing is, people have been complaining about the stupid AI since VT1 and Fatshark has only made them worse. I don’t think we are going to see change on this issue until modders release a QoL mod. Just trying to let you down softly here.
Yes it is what its here for. And i am sure they are seeing what your saying. But what Denim is Saying is also probably true.
Think about it like this. if you have to choose between playing the game with random people who didnt even know the absolute basics of the game. Dying left and right and forcing you to slow down and either teach them how to play, Solo the level, or just loose or quit (still a loss tho).
Or would you rather solo this multiplayer game with halfway decent bots that are smart enough to do what your real life teammates are suppose to do and carry there weight?
It would be sadly a good chunk of people who dont have friends to stop playing with randoms altogether. Thats probably why this issue wont be fixed for a while, if at all.
Instead of being fed up with the bots and playing with players instead what about being fed up with the game and not purchasing DLC.
Stop deliberately gimping the bots. Some of us want to do single player runs. The last straw will be when you place the improved bot mod on the “unnofficial” mod list.
I have also noticed this, since I play legend mostly with bots when my group isn’t online since 90% of the people I see in quickplay are below bot level. Ever since 1.042 or so the bots refuse to use their ranged weapons and priortizes meleeing everything, including gas-rats that are about to explode and specials disabling your teammates. It is infuriating that they change the bots behavior like this.