what is WG doing to control the bots

[murdock762]

What if anything is being done to control bots from ruining PVP?  I have witnessed some extremely questionable play lately.

Gearing - NO camo NO flags of any kind. Spawns right in the middle of fleet and goes in a strait line up the channel in two brothers and gets killed.

Tirpitz - collides into another teammate.  Then the tirpitz and my ship collide.  Then tirpitz gets beached on an island all in the first 4 mins of the battle.

Gneisenau - sits at spawn without moving.  Several minutes into the battle is discovered and is fired upon.  Begins to shot back but never moves and is quickly killed.

And why can I no longer report players as being suspected bots in-game?

Maybe it is time to take a hard look again at repair bills and in-game credits earned.  If a player is averaging, over many games, 25% or less of the baseline performance of their ship WG should make it too costly for them to keep playing in mid and high tier battles.  Or maybe a minimum performance threshold must be reached before any XP is awarded at tiers 4/5 and above.  

 

 

[CylonRed]

Problem is there is no real way to prove any particular ship is a 'bot' and certainly can't really code for it.  Flagging them as potential bots will do what exactly?  Again - no real way to prove any ship is a bot and many people reported people as a bot purely because they were not playing 'right' - no other reason just they didn't make the 'right' decision and therefore 'had' to be a bot..

[Slntreaper]

I mean, those all sound like really bad players, not bots.

[Stauffenberg44]

We're getting battles like this daily--bot or just utterly inept? Probably the latter. The Hood was not afk:

 

[aethervox]

Well, WG does control the Bots in PvE. Personally, I don't play Kindergarten (err PvE) mode.

I don't think there are 'Bots' in PvP (tho I could be wrong). However, there are plenty of stupid players in PvP.

Maybe they 'masquerade' as Bots?

[Kapitan_Wuff]

In all my battles I have seen ship I suspect of being a bot only a handful of times. 

[erebus3226]

I've seen a fair number of ships I think may or may not be bots, but frankly I have no way to prove if they're bots or tater tots and there's no real way for WG to tell the difference sadly. Wargaming probably removed the report feature for bots simply because they were getting so many reports against bad players who everyone thought were bots and couldn't handle the volume.

[SgtBeltfed]

Since launch, I've seen what was probably one bot. (it drove in a circle and fired randomly the whole game, and didn't react to anything, including ships shooting at it)

I've seen a lot of players that are considerably less skilled than the bots in PvE (You probably have to actually work hard at being that bad, but some people have weird goals in life)

[Stampz]

I've had 5 games this weekend with AFKers on my team.  Out of those 5 games, 2 of them had 2 AFKs.  Those games triggered me as they were quite winnable.

[Geek_Girl]

Errrr that Tirpitz you talked about was me. Hard to play with a cat lying on your keyboard:/

[Soylent_Red_Is_Tomato]

1 hour ago, Stauffenberg44 said:

We're getting battles like this daily--bot or just utterly inept? Probably the latter. The Hood was not afk:

53 minutes ago, Stampz said:

I've had 5 games this weekend with AFKers on my team.  Out of those 5 games, 2 of them had 2 AFKs.  Those games triggered me as they were quite winnable.

I don't recall ever seeing so many AFKs on green prior to the past month, yet almost never see them on the red team with the same frequency; as is, I might see one, maybe two, battles a session with an AFK red.

This is no ''tin foil hat'' thing either, it is happening, repeatedly, and has gotten to the point of being beyond ordinary levels of absurdity; being in a div oddly seems to increase the chance of getting a green AFK.

 

As for the former, I'm quite disgusted with it too; with each of the tier V-VI-VII UK BBs I have now had at least one 2-3K (!) damage match, and I'm lucky anymore if I go even one day without a sub-10K battle in any ship.

Kicker is, I'm doing nothing at all different in those craptastic matches; it just happens and is apparently totally unavoidable once whatever in the game or MM decides to favor the chances of that outcome.

[Sovereigndawg]

 

@murdock762 Not that I particularly advocate this idea but, When some one clicks battle they could have you do a, type what you see thingy ( I don't know what they are called ) you know, the ones that have weird letters? before it lets you into battle. I guess you would call it the no bot box or the is this a real person box. It would be really easy for the devs I am sure, but would the players go for it.

[Kuckoo]

6 minutes ago, Sovereigndawg said:

Not that I particularly advocate this idea but, When some one clicks battle they could have you do a type what you see thingy ( I don't know what they are called ) you know, the ones that have weird letters? before it lets you into battle.

 

Captcha.

 

Don't believe botting is the epidemic some will have you believe, only to make the remaining 99% have to go through that every time they press [BATTLE].  Some people just have a rigidity of thought on how others should play, and if that standard isn't met they think something is wrong.

[erebus3226]

Captcha seems to have a habit of glitching out also, in my experience. I could be wrong.

[Sovereigndawg]

1 minute ago, Kuckoo said:

 

Captcha.

 

Don't believe botting is the epidemic some will have you believe, only to make the remaining 99% have to go through that every time they press [BATTLE].  Some people just have a rigidity of thought on how others should play, and if that standard isn't met they think something is wrong.

I agree it's a lot to ask and I really don't think it is as bad as people think. But if WG really wanted to make sure there were no bots that would be the easiest best way for them to do it. I know I wouldn't like to do that every time. If WG thinks there is a big enough bot problem, which I don't tend to see, it would tax the players a little bit however I would do it if I had to.

[Rilak]

or you gvet that lazy SOB  that is doing homework or house work or even job work,  is in the game sitting and when he hears explosions of being hit he looks up  or returns to PC to fire a few shots and play for 2-3 minutes until dead....

[CylonRed]

9 hours ago, erebus3226 said:

Captcha seems to have a habit of glitching out also, in my experience. I could be wrong.

I hate captcha - it never seems to take the first answer and the instructions at time are very unclear.  I can see the threads now about AFKrs that complain they could not complete the captcha in time.

[Raptor_alcor]

16 hours ago, aethervox said:

 I don't play Kindergarten (err PvE) mode.

 

Right, I'm going to take the bait and simply say this: We are all part of the same community, grow up and stop being a child about other people having preferences in gameplay. 

[erebus3226]

19 hours ago, aethervox said:

Well, WG does control the Bots in PvE. Personally, I don't play Kindergarten (err PvE) mode.

I don't think there are 'Bots' in PvP (tho I could be wrong). However, there are plenty of stupid players in PvP.

Maybe they 'masquerade' as Bots?

 

3 hours ago, Raptor_alcor said:

Right, I'm going to take the bait and simply say this: We are all part of the same community, grow up and stop being a child about other people having preferences in gameplay. 

I don't agree with the tone of the reply here, but I agree with the spirit of it: PVE has its uses, sometimes for testing out new ship classes. I don't personally use it that way but I know people who do, just to find out some rough strengths and weaknesses for a boat that they can take into live games once they think they have a meta figured out. You are right about it being Kindergarten in that you can use it to learn, but not in that it is childish to use PVE.

And yes there are bad players in PVP. But there's no percentage in masquerading as bots, they simply don't care. Why should they? The game rewards failure. Not as much as it rewards success, but it rewards failure. Simply hitting the W key and then backing out guarantees you experience points. Do that often enough and you'll advance. There's no incentive to get better except for a player wanting to get better, but as long as there is no statistically viable way for wargaming to discern from playstyles who is a bot and who just isn't good at the game, it would be wrong for Wargaming to assign bot labels to people. Hate the player, not the game.

[Kizarvexis]

2 hours ago, erebus3226 said:

 

I don't agree with the tone of the reply here, but I agree with the spirit of it: PVE has its uses, sometimes for testing out new ship classes. I don't personally use it that way but I know people who do, just to find out some rough strengths and weaknesses for a boat that they can take into live games once they think they have a meta figured out. You are right about it being Kindergarten in that you can use it to learn, but not in that it is childish to use PVE.

And yes there are bad players in PVP. But there's no percentage in masquerading as bots, they simply don't care. Why should they? The game rewards failure. Not as much as it rewards success, but it rewards failure. Simply hitting the W key and then backing out guarantees you experience points. Do that often enough and you'll advance. There's no incentive to get better except for a player wanting to get better, but as long as there is no statistically viable way for wargaming to discern from playstyles who is a bot and who just isn't good at the game, it would be wrong for Wargaming to assign bot labels to people. Hate the player, not the game.

I play PvE because of the grief you can get in PvP for not measuring up. If I'm an idiot in a game and that island rams me :) , there is not the same consequence in PvE as in PvP. I'm still working on better initial shots and getting more cits. I'll have 100+k games and 10k games in PvE. Until I get more consistent, I'll stick with the much more friendly PvE even though the grind is a lot slower.