Maybe they wanted to experiment a bit,to see what the bot was capable of and how it performs against stronger opponents. Maybe it was just something that they did code wrong or some ghost in the machine. There could be many reasons.
I’m aware he could see the Image And dismiss it as if some rank 8 legend player downloaded a bot opened up the program and then took the image to try to fool everybody. However , that requires a little bit of conspiracy thinking. He would also have to conclude that a person capable of Reaching legend 8 would even download a bot and then Open up the program and Take a screenshot Which would dismiss his legend 8 rank skill in order to do what? Make it look like bots are good? Also risk his account? I’m not saying he won’t take that stance, But it seems like a very unreasonable stance to take. Not to mention, if he gets that far in his research, he would also see that there are forums with people using the bot discussing ranks they get to.
To advertise the bot is the first motive that comes to mind.
Maybe not even a specific bot,just to advertise a bot is capable of this and then people will search and find the bot themselves if they are interested.
It doesnt really matter. The screenshot,unfortunatly,doesnt proof anything.
Or maybe this is just a very elaborate play from blizzard to make a fool out of all of us. So that such discussions will not happen in future. And in few days blizz will come with statement:ha ha joke is on you. Its possible i dunno.
1 Like
Either way,when it comes to the subject of this thread:
How do we know we aren’t playing against bots
I think they should be labelled as beeing an AI. On chesswebsites you can indicate that you are also willing to play against AI,s. And if you play against an AI the AI will identify itself as beeing an AI.
Blizzard should implement this.
Give players an option where they can say “i do or i dont want to play against ai opponents”.
And if players are willing to play against ai opponents,then the ai opponent should identify itself as beeing an ai.
That to me seems essential for the future development of AI. And for the acceptance of AI by the general public. Full disclosure.
Not what blizzard is doing now,some statement hidden in the patchnotes. Not giving players the option to opt out and not identifying the ai ingame.
That is very misleading and it will upset even the most dedicated fans,as you can see in this discussion already.
3 Likes
That’s probably because they use advanced AI hosted on their servers. As for the user-run bots, let me present another old example, which I came across while looking for the previous one (with Trump vs a bot), this time it’s a video with one Kripparian trying to analyse their working:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbf_zqXgGkk
I think I’ve still seen some instances of them glitching and timing-out like that recently, i.e. someone running an old bot or such.
That’d be one for you, I guess.
Do you really think or do you only think that you think? 
Well, official bots were offered initially (I think this practice might have been discontinued), and allegedly you’d be matched against them if you were waiting in queue for more than a minute, or so I’ve heard. These would labelled as ‘Your Opponent’, without any attempt to disguise them as actual players — and they were quite open about the feature.
Bots with impossible ratings dominating the leaderboards, though, is a different matter.
True, but as for the shame part, I would add: unless they openly declare it, like it used to be with Mercenaries — or nowadays with lower ranks.
So have I, but I believe I had the option to actually report it as a bot.
My personal theory is that they might use advanced AI to evaluate a player’s performance (just like a chess engine can compute ‘accuracy’), then adjust random effects and especially card draw to help more… intellectually challenged players, so that the game is more appealing for the masses, meaning that a 60-70-IQ person can win against a ‘pro’ player and feel happy about it — that way you can make it much more popular than something that would require brainwork and skill.
I can almost foresee this theory’s being attacked with various arguments, including those about psychological biases (well, not really… few on this forum are capable of handling such topics), but you’d have to explain me what’s the probability of not drawing at least one copy of four necessary cards after cycling through half or three-quarters of your deck… five times in a row every day you play, while those you report as bots — or just simple netdeckers — virtually always get a perfect opening hand, curve and top-decks, to convince me otherwise. That’s a slightly different matter, though, although related to AI employed by Blizzard.
I’ve pointed out many times that patch notes are notoriously… lacklustre, so they might not help you. I think the bots in question might have been discontinued, as said earlier, but it was a while ago and I don’t remember the details.
Not really. By the way, you forgot also the ‘ridiculous’ threads, which probably overshadow the ‘rigged’ ones in popularity.
Judging by these and some others, I get a feeling sometimes that I’m in a facility with giggling or raving… alternatively gifted and talented persons, with some exceptions, of course.
Can’t say about it definitively, but it’s possible, speaking of which…
If you look at something like Zephrys, it’s quite obvious how exactly such rigging is technically possible. To describe it without being too technical, ‘If you play too well, wish for a perfect card in your deck and put it to the bottom’ or ‘Wish for a perfect counter to your deck, then match you against it’, for example — wouldn’t be that impossible or even hard to implement.
Only in theory. A chess grandmaster or even master would probably tell you how hopeless and frustrating it feels playing against an engine, so they usually don’t.
You probably wouldn’t wanna be the average guy facing a boxing champion on the ring — that’s how ‘fun’ it would be for you, being beaten up like a punch bag without a chance do to anything.
I’ve been thinking whether this could be possible due to some connectivity issues or such, but in these cases you’d see ‘Your Opponent’ on the game screen, while their name and battletag would be visible on the side panel. I can’t readily think of an alternative explanation…
PS Sorry if I missed something important and noteworthy.
(Two posts merged, some updates and edits made)
If you play Zephrys, it’s obvious how badly such rigging would fail.
There aren’t that many details it the available blog posts.
AI opponents was available (and rather frequent) when Mercs first launched:
In current Mercenaries, if your queue time runs longer than 1-1.5 minutes, and both your internal and external ratings are below certain thresholds (the external rating threshold is 7000), you will be given an A.I. opponent. That threshold means that more casual players will always have a quick queue, but the most committed players can still compete with each other for top leaderboard spots.
At this time, we have only one A.I. difficulty level, so we adjust the A.I. opponent’s difficulty by adjusting the A.I.’s Party’s levels to accommodate your internal rating. If you bring a Party with a really wide range of levels and you get paired against an A.I. opponent, the A.I.’s team will mirror your team’s level (instead of picking some sort of average level), and then adjusting the A.I.’s Party’s level based on your rating. Your post-match rating updates will also be affected by whether you played against A.I.
Source:
Sometime over the following few weeks, they made some changes that reduced the chance of meeting AI opponents, but did not eliminate it:
We saw your feedback on queue times and AI, and we made some adjustments to matchmaking parameters so that players, on average, would have shorter queue times and face fewer AI opponents.
Source:
I don’t really remember them doing much else since then, but I also don’t really pay much attention to Mercs PvP, so I could have missed something.
My impression, though, is that they’ve pretty much ignored it, except for introducing new mercs, plus one or two balance changes to merc abilities.
How much do you understand about the limitations of Zephyrs?
As said, that’s not surprising — I’ve commented on their poor documentation many times [1-3].
Yeah, I remember. I got into PvP a bit later, and I don’t think you would meet bots (that is, the aforementioned AI opponents; botters, though, are a different matter) then, even on low ratings.
[1] 24.0 Patch Notes - #23 by SparkyElf-2852
[2] 25.0 Patch Notes - #27 by SparkyElf-2852
[3] 25.0.3 Patch Notes - #26 by SparkyElf-2852
So Schyla I was just thinking something.
I understand that the following idea might not detect a statistically insignificant number of bots. So this wouldn’t prove zero bots. But assuming there are a statistically significant number of bots at Legend, as in enough that running into one was not a rare occurrence, then wouldn’t that come out in the winrate data?
I mean, I’d like to believe that a bot at top 2000 Legend wouldn’t have as high of a winrate as a human at top 2000 Legend, right? And clearly a BlizzBot like your “SwankyOrk” wouldn’t be running Hearthstone Deck Tracker. So shouldn’t this be something that HSR or VS would notice? Like a significant difference between Tracker-user winrate and opponent winrate, even at the highest ranks?
1 Like
Hsreplay is working for Blizzard, easy to spot on their website in ABOUT US.
For sure they wouldnt show swankyorc or anything related to him.
Trusting hsreplay on data is like trusting blizzard. One and the same.
I start to believe that hsreplay and else are just coverups for their rigged matchmaking so that people can revering to those numbers as hard facts.
Get yaself a decktracker go on hsreplay and see your intuition is falls blablabla…thats called gasllighting.
There posters in here remind me of fireworkers, as soon there pops up a critical topic they send in to confuse ermmm to put out the flames.
Legit since i would do the same to protect my multi million dollar buisness.
So trust your gut and your observations, dont get gaslighted by certain people around here. They just blizzard masks.
2 Likes
Why would their winrates be different when they sit at the same rank?
And why wouldnt a blizzbot be running deck tracker? Not saying they are but i dont see a reason why they wouldnt.
Your first step towards enlightenment is understanding that you can’t have more winners than losers in a 2 player PvP game.
1 Like
Didnt know Hsreplay was owned by blizz, but if they were the probability of them being used as data collection for matchmaking is logical… (less so for cover ups)
But of course censorship and public data manipulation to a certain extent is a given.
I guess we are granting blizz free access to all our decks and plays for their match making pleasure. 
1 Like
I dont think they owned by them but they produce for them neverless they associated as you can see on their website.
I don’t think the number of bots is “significant”, and even if they were, how would they show up on hsreplay? It tracks decks, not players. How could a deck win rate reflect that it’s being significantly played by bots?
The bots don’t have some major losing record, they beat people at legend. A deck like pirate rogue is just so mindlessly good on its own.
Also, yesterday as I was looking into more info on how common they were, I found an interview with blizzard where they straight up admitted there were bots in legend years ago and it was a concern.
It seems that bots have existed in this game since the game was released.
Just got done fooling around on ladder, an I can attest some more information. Blizzard’s A.I. bots will queue up no matter rank as long as your MMR is low enough. I fought 5 A.I.'s roughly 30mins ago, 3 of which we’re back to back.
They follow the same pattern of zero highlights on cards, an they won’t be showing rank, nor on your recent/current opponent list either. Also they have different names than SwankyOrc too.
Just some more fuel for people to take notice an spot them. If they we’re meant to be for beginner ranks an silver/gold. If you tank enough MMR in standard you too can find them. It’s easiest to spot if you’re legend cause the zero rank in rank mode is the dead giveaway. But one can just open your friends list an see them not there during the match all the same.
2 Likes
Reddit is filled with these types of videos of botting evidence
These are the kinds of things I do to the bots. Next turn, I just don’t attack and watch as the bot goes crazy trying to fix itself lol
2 Likes
Isn’t that the intended behaviour, according to those patch notes (24.4) already cited here?
As far as I understand, internal MMR is more about so-called win rate than ranking [1], so if you keep playing silly decks and losing, you might qualify for that criterion.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvtkPgBJDJg
Reminded me of this old one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jenlSf2E8o
(although someone there posted it too, I believe)
‘Taunt needs nerf’.
Oh, and I think I might’ve encountered this particular… playah 
, and I don’t care what some people on this forum seem to believe about ‘naming and shaming’, since it doesn’t appear to be actually documented anywhere.
It’s common that BG has bots as fillers, but i just played a game recently with pretty sure more than 4 players, and i was fighting a bot that was at 4th place, the rest were dead.
I’ve lost to zero health bots many times, haha huge slap in the face.
Reality check that i suck.
but these bots to get to 4th? Someone tell me how the bg bots work?