An alternative theory: Blizzard consistently releases cookie cutter decks that are far more powerful than they should be, relative to their ease of play. As such, rather simple bots can, indeed, make it to diamond, legend, and high legend.
Haven’t read the whole topic thoroughly, sorry if I missed something important, but I suppose I could contribute this report: all the way from D5 to L in Classic (EU) was a giant bot streak — and with basic decks at that. These ‘players’ appeared on the ‘recent’ panel and were reportable… And at least on one occasion I saw that old buggy version, shooting in its face with the Elven Archer (used to be a telltale sign for those Warlock bots).
PS I guess I’ll clarify: all of it meaning that some of those, if not all, looked more like player-run bots than those Bli$$ard bots discussed on a few occasions, but can’t be sure.
Dunno what’s going on: either not enough actual players to play against there or some accounts who have suddenly returned after years of inactivity… and somehow ended up there?
PS In case it wasn’t clear enough: I can’t see those bots actually climbing to those ranks on their own, since even ‘netdecks’ that plebs and bots are playing at lower ranks are better.
(More clarifications added in order to make the post more understandable for those not overly familiar with the subject of bots.)
Nah, i’m still to find a single bot playing homebrew
I have played mostly meta decks all season and this season I have started seeing bots for the first time. It’s clear because they don’t show up as current or last opponent in the list.
I have passively looked at them to see if there is a pattern, and I have seen them after wins, after losses, and during streaks in both directions. It would seem like anytime there’s not a good match in queue you get an ai bot.
It’s an interesting development and I don’t think it bodes well for the game going forward. I would love to see more data on how revenues changes after the reward track was introduced.
Why does hearthstone, with all its growth in players (according to people on this forum) need bots anyway?
I’m at a very low rank, and have run into 2-3 of these. You will see shamans playing rogue cards, too. It’s hard to fathom this isn’t deserving of a hotfix.
Again people keep looking at the same data and saying but there are more active accounts, yet daily logins seemed to have decreased and at a time when the Chinese got kicked off their server so these are also including the loss of a server and players piling onto other servers from China which was the biggest server. Hearthstone is not in growth, waiting for Scrotie to come on and refute this because he is very adamant.
I’d rather play against real players and have the terrible queue timers back or for them to reward friend matches in a real way so you can organize your own matches and dodge their matchmaking system altogether, but for until 50% of the rewards aren’t locked behind ranked mode that will never be the case. Though in that case, I also do think hearthstone is ‘slowly’ dying and I do not regret using my dust super inefficiently at this point because it is better than not using it if no decks look interesting or worth crafting.
It doesn’t. The point of bots is to
- Lower the time spent in queue
- Prevent matchups of two human players of significantly different rank/rating.
What Blizzard has done is drastically overestimate the negativity of these experiences and underestimate the negativity of playing against bots. They’ve introduced a cure worse than the disease.
Well, it was in growth.
See, the thing is that I like to have pretty good evidence when I refute people. I had two pieces, essentially.
The first was actual humans opening the app. This data feeds back to activeplayer dot io. This data shows steady growth. But humans can open the app to play Battlegrounds instead of Ranked so this data isn’t great for arguing about Ranked specifically.
The second piece of data was the number of people who make Legend every month. This relates directly to Ranked, which is good. But it kinda assumes that the percentage of players who make Legend is a steady percentage of the total number of Ranked players, which is a fair assumption if there isn’t a massive increase in bots giving players free wins in Diamond. It’s a really, really bad assumption if there are.
So up until the Rise of the BlizzBot, I think it’s safe to say that we were tracking a very slow growth, but nevertheless a growth, in Ranked players. But then Blizzard pulled a Blizzard and my old tricks won’t work anymore. I can’t provide reliable numbers on whether the number of Ranked players is growing or shrinking or staying the same anymore. I’m in the dark now.