If a bot can mimic and play like a real person I wouldn’t have a problem with that.
If a bot is significantly better or worse than a real person at certain rank levels then I have a problem with that.
If Blizzard wants to add competent bots to improve the laddering experience I’m all for that. Especially if those bots are able to competently play off-meta decks. It won’t work at high legend because of points and placements and the like for tournaments but from Bronze to Diamond? Or placing them at rank floors? I honestly don’t think it would be that bad.
My viewpoint is that there definitely are bots, people exaggerate the problem.
I used to see a lot more warrior bots in classic, I definitely wouldn’t say it is 90%, more like 10%. I’ve not seen this zoolock bot that people are talking about, I think that people are confusing actual real people playing zoo warlock for botting. I think this also ties in with people logic that 4/5 people are playing zoolock so it must be bots, all in all it is just a cheap deck and probably the best first deck to make in the entire game (efficiency wise). People will do weird things.
Maybe all of the bots have migrated to wild because it is easier to climb. You probably get more reward by turning a bot on for 1 week and having it hit diamond 5 then you would to have a bot running all month and only hitting silver.
The time when I faced off against the warrior bot in classic in high diamond, my thoughts are that it is very hard to beat this bot in under 20 minutes in which you could concede and have three more games in that time against real people, some people would rather play against people, I mean you have people playing in friend mode even though there are basically no rewards for this mode other than finishing quests. Even so the bot just ran taunts and killspells, if you tried to rush it down you might lose the game in fatigue because you’d lose a lot of minions to a brawl so I think the deck would be capable of hitting platinum in terms of the relative skill level there because regular humans will just play on curve in that rank, I think a lot of children play the game, they are potentially more hazardous than bots in some sense in that they don’t know about the end turn button so they may unintentionally rope.
In one of the chess engines I played the max level computer is designed in such a way that it should never lose, actually I kept undoing my move several times and must have glitched the bot up to do an imperfect move and when I won the game it said I lost as in they didn’t even bother to code in “you win” because they thought it was theoretically impossible perhaps. I was mainly playing against the bot to see the theoretical best lines.
It would be so amusing if “official” Blizzard bots made it to Legend and ended up playing in the tournaments. I am sure an AI bot playing a vomit deck like Pirate Rogue can get Legend on his own very fast.
I dont know about anything outside of the roper hero power spam bots, but if other types exist, they need to lower their difficulty. Especially in duels. I am tired of going 0 wins for over 10 runs in a row on casual. Its really demoralizing. Like, for real. It kinda makes one wanna unalive for a while just to not feel so schit tee. 10 runs in a row, not one win. Not One. Bots, lower that difficulty. if it aint bots, people, stop trying to win. Apparently I did.
If I play outside of duels and bgs its only in wild. I dont have a competitive bone in me due to my aversion to netdecks and how I find it ethically compromising to use them. Also I dont climb above bronze most of the time as I find little cause to play constructed mode outside of the daily or weekly quests that force it. But the moment I reached Gold 10 it was literally the worst time of my life as I saw the same decks over and over and over and didnt get a single win the rest of that season.
**Personally Id like to usurp the word bot and apply it netdeck users. Pretending to be a bot makes you one in my view. having a win condition before the fatigue damage can start also makes you a bot
**The previous statements directly above should be written in comic sans font to convey the heavy amount of sarcasm being applied.
You know, there are often telltale signs… I’ve been reluctant to speak about them publicly (unlike game masters, botters — I mean the developers — are probably reading it and taking it into account), but for instance: they used to always target the Elven Archer into their own face if no enemy minions were present (that one was apparently ‘fixed’ at some point, so I’ll write openly about it), the way they play around certain interactions, a certain rhythm with which they always play their stuff, certain glitches in cheaper bots, never conceding even in obviously hopeless situations, etc.
As for the Influx of bots in Classic happening during the ‘Winter Veil’ event, those were even more primitive and with basic decks to boot.
Higher in legend (say, about top 300 plus-minus), you’d start meeting more actual players.
That said, I report every single one of them as a bot. Even if I’m wrong in maybe 10-20% of the cases, this is probably still more accurate then many an algorithm meant to detect them. For example, if it rains 6 days out of 7 on average, then simply saying it’s going to rain tomorrow is more efficient than million-dollar weather stations and advancded models predicting weather with 80% accuracy.
Besides, calling an actual ‘player’ with this deck a bot is a compliment, compared to what they truly are, in my opinion.
I think calling these players ‘children’ is a grave affront to actual children, who should generally be much smarter than this (not with ‘Modern Educayshun’ and all that ‘political correctness’, though; what’s more, there are even people actually proud of their illiteracy etc, who sincerely believe their ‘opinion’ about anything is as good as anyone else’s — for example, a nuclear engineer should, in their view, shut up and not believe themselves smarter or better when it comes to a discourse about nuclear power ) — and much nicer persons too. I’ve faced some clown who’d rope intentionally, emoting profusely while at it (all of it with a net-deck, by the way), for example. Admittedly, this is probably more common at lower ranks, where I landed after having quit HS back then.
I don’t know what you played, but proper chess engines (even traditional ones, without all those advances in AI like AlphaZero) became much stronger than even the best player in the world many years ago — and they’ve improved drastically since.
One more thing: some people tend to think bots are something primitive, like spamming the hero power and doing nothing else. For example:
In facts, bots were much more advanced even years ago and capable of beating even decent players (not that it says anything — in this game, a bucket of sewage with pig eyes and some decrepit hardware can win against the so-called world champion in a single game — and even in a series the difference betwen them would not be that great, skill doesn’t matter that much, unlike the aforementioned chess, for instance), see, for example, this old one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tav_ttqyv9Q
Bots in Mercenaries have already been mentioned, I believe.
That’s what all those clueless sods with cheating software like so-called ‘deck trackers’ (which in fact do much more than that, I believe, and include actual hacks) and such probably don’t realise — that they’re nothing more than lab rats to supply data to someone else’s project. In fact, some are already paying for it.
What’s the expression, ‘I see what you did there’? Another person discovering America, just like Columbus… through their window?
PS One more thing: all that is yet another reason to play Mercenaries, PvE in particular, if you ask me.
That wont be an easy take to sell i think. I would not play this game if i knew i would play against bots. Playing against a real person is a big part of the fun,its the competitive aspect which is lacking against bot players.
These bots will only speed up the downfall of the game. Why would anyone pay lots of money to get cards to then play against a bot. Not a single upvote for any of the posters who said that playing against bots is fine for them as long as its fun.
Yeah, that’s exactly it. I am not playing Hearthstone to play PvE content. I want PvP. I want to know if I can outthink my human opponent, not some bot.
I have no fun beating a program or losing to a program unless I voluntarily want to challenge myself against that program (like the adventures in Hearthstone).
I heard someone state that Blizzard uses bots in Classic because there aren’t enough players.
I also know they have bots (PvE content), so I know what those bots would look like (they act fast and immediately know if lethal exists, almost no “thinking” at all).
I also heard they admitted to using bots in Mercenaries because of the lack of players and other players backing this claim.
So with all that information, I think it’s highly likely they do, but I’m not 100% sold on the idea. If I was forced to make a bet, I’d wager they do in weak player invested modes like Classic. I don’t think they do in Wild or Standard, there seems to be enough players in those modes…but who knows for certain?
Now that you asked, I’m going to do a little test. Since I know what bots look like in PvE, I’m wondering if those bots ever “cursor hover” over minions, etc. If they don’t, then that’s a tell-tale sign that they use bots if you come across another player that never highlights anything.
EDIT: Can confirm - Blizzard AI never hovers or highlights minions, the actions just happen. So if you face someone where there is zero highlighting being done, it’s probably safe to assume that’s a personal bot that’s bypassing the need to highlight or it’s a Blizzard bot.
I do respect your opinions. I also believe Scrots. As annoying and wiki-smart as he tries to be, I don’t think he is dumb so this is a tough one. I can’t say I ever saw a bot enough times that I could say, “there are bots” other than what any game would have. I am sure I have seen some games where I was like, “ok that is suspect” but you get it. I generally just believe its a player no matter how bad that player may be.
So, if you care, yes some of us do read this stuff and listen to it. I am learning. I may be a jerk, possibly the biggest jerk but I do listen. This bot stuff is new to me.
Another person discovering America, just like Columbus… through their window?