Hello, I have played your game for years, but took a couple year hiatus from ranked matches until the newest expansion. I am currently in silver division, and I have yet to play against an actual human player. Every single opponent has a jumbled letter name like “gxsdgnyfds” and plays the same deck of starter cards. These bots take nearly the full time to play each and every turn, and never attack minions other than taunt. This gameplay is extremely atrocious. The Reddit forums claim that this will fix itself once my MMR is raised after winning enough ranked matches, but I have played some 30+ games and they are ALL bots, and all just terribly boring. I like the new expansion, I like the new cards and art, but these bots are genuinely going to make me quit at this rate. Any help with this?
I’d say that they’re technically correct, but also kinda in denial at the same time. Like let’s imagine that 10,000 bots are unleashed upon Bronze 10. Well, most of these bots will play against each other, so after 1 set of games you have 5,000 bots in Bronze 9. As these bots climb, the chance that they run into actual human players and lose rank increases, but it increases slowly. And given enough time and enough bots, there’s no rank that they wouldn’t climb to, by playing 24/7. They don’t get unlimited time though, the end of each month is a reset, but the bots are found at higher and higher ranks the later into a month we get… and today’s the 28th. It’s near maximum bad right now.
That said, it is relatively easy for skilled players near the start of the month to climb past them. I mean, bots do start climbing on the first of the month as soon as the reset happens, so unless your sleep and/or work schedules are weird they’re going to be up to at least Gold, maybe Platinum by the time you start playing on the first. You pretty much need to get to Diamond near the beginning of a month to get past them. I don’t know about this time of month, I’m already Legend.
TL;DR: I recommend taking a break until the first then trying to climb.
I was curious, so i changed my client region to Americas, crafted a whizbang and start laddering. I had like 2 or 3 stars bonus, and yeah, that crazy the number of bots playing only core cards like Murloc Tidehunter or Worgen Infiltrator.
A few human with what i believe be loaner decks, but even conservatively, i faced a good 80% of bots (probably more)
I don’t know if i can compare with my region, since i have a 10 star bonus on EU, but i barely see any bot at all in EU, if at all.
Those game against bots are easy but not fun, not fun at all. They always played out the same, you just remove their threat and they run out of ressource in the mid game.
I assume those bot account are F2P, blizzard does not gain any $$$ from them, and they are poisoning the ladder, turning away potential costumer. I don’t understand why blizzard doesn’t take a more aggressive stance against botting.
The problem, frankly, is that Blizzard is stupid. Not that they’re lazy, just that they’re inept. Blizzard is banning more and more accounts every day to fight botting. The problem is that this doesn’t matter, because they don’t understand the bot life cycle. Bots farm gold by gaining XP in Ranked, then they use that gold to draft an insane Arena deck (if it’s not insane they immediately Retire the Arena deck then try again), then the account is sold on the black market, then the buyer plays one Arena run with a crazy OP deck, then the account is discarded and never used again. All of this happens fairly quickly and although Blizzard is trying very hard, because they’re just too slow they’re mostly deleting accounts that have already been discarded, and that does absolutely nothing to stop botting.