Death knight bots in standard are running rampant

80% of death knights on standard ladder are bots granted in standard im only gold but im legend in wild usually and wanted to try standard again and immediately found them in almost all my games against the class. They only run core set cards and hero power almost every turn most of them even coin hero power for no reason or play worgan infiltrator on turn 1. Am I the only one experiencing this ? its also concerning is that these bots rank up cause the consistency of the class they really need to ban these bots i have even been seeing them in wild as of late if anyone knows of any way to avoid these bots let me know cause its just boring.

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When a program has the capability, for instance, to reach rank 8 in wild, I am not sure there’s anywhere on ladder where they’re not being used to great effect. This is up to Blizzard to fix. There’s nothing we can do, except report them, but I’m not convinced that does anything but placate the players making the report. I suspect Blizzard will sit on their hands, until they otherwise have to do something. I hope I am wrong.

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These are BLIZZARD created bots – blame them.

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found another one not even 5 mins after posting this there not blizzard bots they have names like xeerv or whatever

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Not to say Blizzard hasn’t implemented bots when queue times are long, there are certainly bots run by players as well.

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also its only death knight bots all other classes real players death knight its almost always a bot for me

I must say, I have been seeing really weird stuff today, as you describe. I just played against a Blood DK running a really weird list with minions and location and at some point it just kinda… broke? The moment I played my own Construct Quarter it stopped playing and instead just kept highlighting my location, my minions and my hero power, as if it was trying to play with my board instead of theirs. It just kept doing that and roping until it died. I suspect it was a bot that was programmed around playing location and the moment it saw my location, it bugged. This was on legend.

The match before that I played against an aggro druid that was playing kinda normally, but abnormally slow and doing really odd trades. It got very weird because the moment it ran out of steam, it just never gave up. It had nothing to do but draw 1 card and play a minion while waiting to die turn after turn and it did not concede. I even waited and teased it to see if it gave any signs of human behavior, but nothing. Just patiently sat there waiting to die.

I have never seen this stuff in standard, and it is definitely concerning.

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This is rather upsetting to me. This is clear evidence this game, at least in certain modes, is basically so dependent on RNG and there exist strong decks with so low a skill floor that a bot playing for long enough can reach near the top level of play possible.

If bots where sophisticated pieces of tech akin to some that we see for other games like AlphaStar or AlphaZero, I would not read much into this. But I know the bots playing hearthstone are rather dumb/simple rule-based things that always play in a certain order/way, basically emulating a player with a very low skill.

I’ve posted before in other posts that myself, I wasn’t sure what the mix of RNG and skill was in this game. This bot confirms that, at least for certain metas, RNG is dominant, and a half-brain-dead monkey can pilot a sufficiently simple deck to top levels of play with enough time. Very dissapointing. I was not aware of this.

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Consider that the bots are frequently (likely) playing many other bots. If there weren’t so many bots generally, I’m not sure they would get so far in the ranks. But it is incredibly annoying that if they are player accounts, they are reaping the rewards for that.

Probably fine with blizzard since it gives the illusion of a greater and more active playerbase.

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There was another bot thread discussing the fiscal reporting requirements of Blizzard, in which they must accurately report the number of real user accounts. This would seem to disincentivize Blizzard from ever doing anything about botting user accounts. It is also possible that while they are in the midst of this Microsoft thing they do not want to make any dramatic user-base changes and perhaps even legally cannot.

I don’t doubt that there are plenty of bots out there but I also get the sense that some of these decks are so formulaic that it feels like you’re playing a bunch of bots. The decks practically play themselves and the cards do all the work. There is no need to strategize or plan or outmaneuver your opponent

Not to mention, this community will look at any deck that’s up around 60% win rate or higher and ride that wave as long as they can until the devs get off their butts and do something about it. I think 70% of the games I’m playing right now are against frost dk. Gets real stale real fast. If you’re playing anything off-meta right now I salute you

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It actually doesn’t prove anything (though I do agree with you on RNG) however they have AI’s that can learn and beat humans every day (like Chess, Checkers, etc) While it may be to time consuming and expensive to create an AI for Hearthstone that learns and acts human it could be done if someone wanted.

Raise your mmr and you won’t see them as much.

This advice may have one been true — it no longer is. Players of all ranks are having this experience. Bots are capable of playing simple decks, well enough and long enough, to reach some of the highest ranks in the game.

Strange because i don’t even remember the last time i played against a bot. Figured it was because of MMR.

I think a bot reaching higher ranks is possible based on sheer number of games it can play but that does not mean it will have a high MMR in doing so.

So i still think if you want to see less bots just keep beating them until your MMR is high enough not to see them anymore.

I think the premise, that a bot these days is likely to have a low MMR, is questionable. To reiterate, when a deck is so simple as to basically play cards that are lit up, and yet has a disproportionate power level (like Pirate Warrior in its prime or Frost/Unholy now (though slightly more complex than prime Pirate Warrior)), maintaining a fair MMR and rank shouldn’t be very difficult.

I had the same thought all month and i never met a single bot on my monthly legend climb. I just logged in to play a quick game or two and i got two bots back to back. They are ridiculously easy to beat and you can spot the deck as soon as they play a Tar Creeper. I played an Objection and the AI stopped playing anything against me and would keep making a token undead but never attack with it for fear of the secret.

Utterly crazy.

Edit: I went back over my log and the first one was reportable so a player bot but the second one was not listed so a blizzard bot. Looks like everyone likes to bot with DK now.

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Of course, but I guarantee you the AI bot that reached #8 was nothing more than a bunch of hardcoded rules, so the equivalent of a half-dead brain monkey.

You underestimate monkeys with brain damage, sir.