I haven’t played standard at all this month because I was so done with the meta over there, so instead I’ve been playing wild.
Normally I don’t rank up in wild and just play bad control decks, so I’ve never been higher than like silver or something. But I don’t have DK leveled up to 60 so I set out to play it until I maxed the level.
I’ve been playing plagues in wild most of my play time this month, and I’m basically seeing a human maybe every ten games. I’m not upset about that so much as I am concerned about the game going forward.
My last five games in a row were all bots and all of them playing a different class. The decks are essentially the same core cards with a couple substitutions for class cards (the mage bot has two copies of blizzard, the warlock carries hellfire, etc.).
I’ve seen exactly one human opponent, the first game I played this afternoon, in my last maybe twenty games.
It was better last time I was playing standard, but it’s really bad in wild right now.
Edit: And the humans I do see - is there some rule that requires you to run Renathal in your deck in wild? Every single person has it and I hate it. I want that card removed from the game permanently or made a separate mode. It’s such a bullcrap card.
are these official Blizzard bots (usually found at lower ranks) or at higher ranks?
which decks are they playing, is it pirate rogue, perhaps whatever the flavor of the month for aggro curve it is now?
I do recall playing wild seriously once about 1.5 years ago, and while I was able to get very good results, one thing that struck me then was I was seeing pirate rogue bots as high as top 300, sometimes 200.
The other day I ranked from Gold 10 to Diamond 10 in wild and approximately 90% of my matches were against the same exact bots (some had different classes however) using Raid Leader, Stormwind Champion, a Pirate/Murloc “package”, Dire Wolf Alpha, etc. They would only go Face unless a Taunt was in the way. They would not concede under any circumstance (like being obviously 100% lost). Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the free wins as I’m still working on 1000 win portraits. But it was also extremely sad and boring and made me wonder what I’m even doing playing if this is the experience. Idk how difficult it is to flag names as bots, but they all had names like psjgjtpdnai or the same but in chinese (?) symbols. It’s like every month they make a point to say “we banned this many hundreds of thousands of bots” but then 90% of matches are against bots…so which is it? And why is it so difficult? It shouldn’t be. In fact, I’ve offered many simple and elegant solutions to this problem.
[Hearthstone] Blizzard Bots have been removed from the Standard ranked ladder. They are now limited to Apprentice (and new/lower-ranked Battlegrounds games), where they will continue to serve their role in smoothing out matchmaking for newer players.
I am not lying. What I said is 100% true. Saw them many times. In Plat. They even played like Blizzard bots–not completely stupid. You can keep calling me a liar, but you are 100% wrong.
It was the end of last month. I am not lying. You make no sense. If it was before the patch went live, how was I lying? SuperCuddles experienced the same thing. Clearly Blizzard is lying or they failed.
Just figured I’d chip in here since I was literally about to make a post about these bots. I dont usually come here to the forums unless Blizzard is really messing something up like shutting down duels.
I can confirm that there is a fairly strong bot presence all the way from the bottom to the top, tending to thicken around each rank 5 checkpoint. The bots are slow, stupid, and extremely unfun to play against, mostly because its the same deck making the same plays over and over and over.
And when I say from top to bottom, I mean it. Most of them I feel hover between Platinum to Silver. Bronze is actually relatively light, the bots usually grind their way out of there fairly quickly. Diamond 5 has just as many as any other. In low legend, its uncommon to see them but not unheard of.
Suggestion to Blizz staff: I know the bots are here so you can keep queue times low. Can you guys implement an option where I can opt out of these matches? I’m literally to the point now to where if I see one I just concede. I came here to play this game against other people. Fighting bots is the most unfulilling thing ever; there are great single player campaigns for that.
Yeah. In Plat, I think 1/3 of my matches were against bots. Getting to Diamond didn’t feel like an accomplishment last season. Thankfully I won some matches there before the season ended.
THANK YOU for saying what I have been saying too. There needs to be a separate queue called “Real Player Queue” or something, where it takes a minimum amount of time before finding you a match, but in return you can rest assured that match will be against a real player (and even better, probably one closer in Rank/more fair match, as it took more time in actually finding an actual match). The bots would NEVER use this queue because why would they purposefully wait 60+ seconds for a match they will almost certainly lose when they can (as they currently do) wait 5 seconds for a match they may win or may lose but it doesn’t really matter because for them it’s about most matches/xp/gold/whatever per hour (the chance of actually winning is just a bonus). This way real/actual players can play against other real/actual players, and the bots can continue playing in the current/regular queue we have now (probably against other bots). I understand this is a “stupid solution” but it is a far smarter/better solution than the one we currently have/experience in the game, despite Blizz telling us every month how they “actually did something about it this time” yet that never being the case.
Why does it matter if it’s a blizzard bot or a bot closely imitating a blizzard bot? Team 5 is still doing a poor job from keeping them out of their game.