We all know HOTS is a dead game. It probably costs Blizz more than it makes, but it would look very bad to just close it while there is still an active player community.
So perhaps this never-ending flood of illegal bots in PvE games is meant to put people off, stop playing the game, and give Blizz a reason to close it down?
Otherwise, it seems there is no reason to bot in a dead game. And all the bots have premium accounts. What is there to gain? Can’t sell the account. Don’t have any gains with levels. There simply is no goal at all.
What bots do I mean? I get 1 to 3 every single game, that match the following (almost always all conditions):
Have premium
The name is in CamelCase and pretentious like BlackGhost or EvilMonkey or whatever.
The portrait is always the same, standard one
Their level is usually not higher than 20
Ingame they’re easy to spot because they go down the lane, melee mobs, and die. Sometimes even running into cannons and staying in. Never running back from a fight. Horrible AI, way worse than the official game AI.
The result is: games take 2-3 times longer with a higher loss ration cause 2 players and 3 suicidal bots can rarely win against AI.
If they were Illegal then there wouldn’t be so many and it would be removed quickly despite the games less popular appearance
they are bots most of the time however a few of them are actually people who do the usual niceties and say GG at the end
so it’s a 50/50 chance that some dckwod just want everyone to suffer or they are a bot
There are exceptions to the rule, but in a scenario such as this, it’s often prudent to not confuse what is often the result of wilful neglect, with deliberate malicious intent.
I, too, have noticed more disruptive players in my games, in particular ARAM games as unlike QM which has a new player queue (in theory), there is no matchmaking in ARAM. This means you’re more likely to encounter smurf accounts which have been made to avoid suspensions or other account actions. Then there are also obvious throwaway smurf accounts made with the singular intent to troll matches.
As the player base shrinks, particularly if you’re a solo player, these troll accounts seem more prevalent as there are simply fewer players to match. For example, the lower active player pool often forces the matchmaker in QM to give up and match a level 1 account with nine other players who have accounts in the four digits.
When and if Blizzard wants this game dead, they will pull the plug without needing to resort to the kind of subterfuge you’re suggesting here.
There’s absolutely no way that these are real players. They never react to any group pings. They never reply or say anything. And they have exactly the same characteristics that I mentioned every time. Yes, they are illegal (breach of TOS).
If they are not introduced by Blizz for some reason, then what could be their goal?
None, contemplating what may be the reason for the existence of those bots.
Bots always have an economic reason i.e. to make someone real money. In WoW, they are there to farm gold, so that this gold can be later sold for real money to players. Therefore, there is an actual reason for their existence in WoW.
What is the economic reason for the existence of so many bots in HOTS? You can’t “farm gold”, you can’t sell anything you farm to others, and selling accounts is very improbable as well.
Note: real AI sometimes does join the games when there are too few players and then the AI names are like “Jaina” etc. and they play as well as the opponent AI. So there’s no reason to introduce them to balance the game due to the low population.
The name generator in the battle.net client automatically creates names like GhostMage, BattlePants or GrumpyTurtle. New players are extremely likely to just accept the first name the client suggests to them.
New players (as you said, nexus portrait and low level) don’t understand the game. Many are likely to feed. To play bad. To just sit and look at talents for minutes. Many are probably small children who barely understand how to cast abilities.
AI mode is the most likely place where you will meet these people. There is no bot conspiracy.
If you want to get away from them, select “AI teammates only” or play a human mode with matchmaking like QM or SL where these player types drop to the lowest ranks (and you thus wont see them unless you play like them).
Wasn’t aware of the auto-name generator, but that could just as well be used to generate bot accounts.
Your explanation does sound somewhat plausible but I will believe it only when one of these actually replies to the text that is sent on the chat, which is, like, in the middle of the screen and hard to ignore :P.
I’ve been matched with low level accounts where the player was genuinely new, so they were making all sorts of mistakes. Many times a player would say in chat “X player is a bot”, only to have X player type back to them.
The problem with throwaway accounts/smurfs is many players now assume (maybe correctly) that the majority of low level accounts are just alt accounts and not a truly new player.
As for waiting for people to reply in chat, keep in mind many players have their chat disabled. I don’t doubt there are the occasional bots in VS AI, but I reject that Blizzard would create bots just to make players leave Hots.
The simplest answer is most likely the correct one in this instance, these are new players and not bots.
If Blizzard wanted to kill Hots they would do it themselves. I doubt there would be an outcry in the media or a significant enough of a backlash in the player base to cause them any reason to pause.
What you’re putting off as “no reason” isn’t that people don’t have a ‘reason’ for their actions, you just didn’t reason what it would be.
If you’re playing “PVE” games, then you’re playing against AI, and not the ‘pvp’ examples other posters are using. You are also describing new accounts, player that get “Boost” from leveling up an account and acting like that’s part of the ‘conspiracy’ instead of the progression of leveling up a new accountt.
Players that frequently reroll accounts, or are forced to change their name, default to randomized blizzard-generated names.
Since the end-game player experience is based on in-game experience, AI games will get more experience if the player feeds deaths to the ai. They might not even be ‘botting’ they’re just intentionally feeding so the enemy side gets more experience.
If they’re on a new account and trying to level it up, then they’re probably going to use that account for ranked and want the free-rotation hero slots unlocked. What they do in ranked is probably another matter as some players do play to intentionally feed (troll) others get sanctioned and may not type anything in game because they’re afraid of the reporting system (previous account got banned) or they’re the sort looking to plunge accounts into bronze 5 to “donate” to streamers that play bronze-to-master challenges.
I’ve taken the time to observe about 10 of those bots now (I get them in every match).
They all run in the center lane, attack mobs not using any abilities, run into towers, and die. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.
Last ones were level 45.
There’s no way that at this moment in game you can be that bad and that the behaviour is exactly the same, every single time.
So sure have your theories that it’s just “bad players”, or observe a bit like me. Of course, there is no way to have proof for that but I still say: these are bots.
So by your logic my statement that, “If Blizzard wanted to kill Hots they would do it themselves”, somehow reflects positively on Blizzard?
Black and white for you. I’m saying that Blizzard is a profit driven organisation who 99% of the time cares only for the bottom line and the customer is an afterthought.
How is that shilling for Blizzard?
P.S. Have we met before, you sound awfully familiar?
I have seen replays from a B5 player how his games mostly is and you will be surpriced how bad players are.
Players that run into towers nearly dying or die to minion waves or afk in base. Also some of them never take talents before lvl 10 or he just afk one lane whole game and dont repond to pings or chat.
When a company needs to shut down their servers. They shut down their servers.
Given how very few people even know HotS exists, it would not “look bad” for them to shut it down. Almost no one would notice.
It would be illogical to make players angry with bots, in order to avoid making them angry by shutting the game down.
Since creating and introducing the bots, and keeping the game going longer would cost them even more money, why would they do this if the aim is to save money?
There are people still buying things in the shop, but there is no work being done on the game and no updates. So HotS does not cost more money than it makes. As of now, it costs nothing.
What is a premium account?
That is what most players do.
A lot of players, like myself, have chat turned off, so they won’t reply to you because they can’t see what you type.
If it IS a bot, the goal would be to level a new account to gain gold to buy more heroes.
More importantly, if anything I’m noticing a minor decrease in queue times.
Some people might run bots as proof of concept, to do something while a profitable project comes along.
It is also possible that some people are trying to teach AI to play the game, or at least experiment with it. It may sounds silly but sometimes it clicks together, one day you fail to produce a sentence, next day you have ChatGPT.
VS AI might be the most fair grounds for a rich tech kid to experiment.
I might be wrong but I find it almost takes effort to not win in VS AI, so having a fiddler or two just evens the field. That said, it would be ideal for those botters to group up and play on their own.
The lovely side effects of account sanctions. The reason of my 4-star vote whenever it comes up!
It’s a major inconvenience, though, to earn gold in VS AI, innit? 10 gold per win. I’d rather just complete the daily quest in QM. Especially on new accounts, should be easy.
