Thanks for your feedback.
There is currently no easy way I know of to get bot difficulty in in a workshop script. It could be possible to find out the difficulty if you monitor the bots’ behaviour in some way, for example their reaction time or effective damage dealt/damage taken (since hard bots actually have better stats), but that wouldn’t be easy to do for all heroes the AI can play and could possibly have a negative impact on performace so I don’t really want to try it for this game mode It would be nice though, to have 3 difficulties built-in like that with different XP/loot rewards for each.
I never even realized that the bots won’t spawn if they aren’t added before the match starts since I always added them before starting, but I can see now why it’s happening: The script only checks for one bot at a time if it will spawn and the first bot to spawn is randomly chosen when the first player in team 2 spawns; so if there are no bots in team 1 when the first player spawns, no bot ever gets chosen to spawn next! I will add a hint to set up bots before the match starts to the description here and on the other websites where the game mode is listed, thank you.
(Also, the bastion bot is currently disabled due to issues with the damage received value so if someone were to add a bastion AI in team 1, that would also break enemy respawn.)
As for people taking the easiest route (easy difficulty bots): I think it’s not hard to cheat in an Overwatch workshop mode if someone wants to and I can’t really stop them from doing that. Personally, I think it’s less fun to make the game mode too easy, but if someone really wants to play with easy bots, I can’t stop them from doing it.
**Edit** (this edit is not a direct response to what you said, since you mentioned "creative coding" which I don't know much about, but rather my thoughts on limitations of the Overwatch workshop, in general):
Also, one quick note about the limitations of Overwatch workshop: Any creative project has some kind of limitations and that is fine. I personally think the Overwatch workshop does leave enough room to come up with some great ideas (I don’t consider any of my workshop modes to be particularly creative, but I have seen some made by other creators that are); the big problem, in my opinion, is not knowing what the limitations are. To use the example that Jeff Kaplan recently gave in a developer update: A sonnet follows certain rules in its composition, or it wouldn’t be classified as a sonnet anymore. These rules did not hinder poets like Shakespeare from expressing all their creativity and talent in such a strictly regulated form of poetry.
Writing the script for a complex project in the Overwatch workshop, however, sometimes feels like putting a lof of work into the composition of a sonnet that - when finally published - is met with rejection from all other artists and critics, deemed unacceptable by the entire literary world, banned from all courts and salons. And you try to refine and rewrite it many, many times, but nothing seems to help: it is never met with approval. Only years later do you find out the reason for its rejection: you weren’t supposed to use the letter a.
To be clear: I am thankful for the Overwatch workshop. I think it was a great addition to the game and I do have a pretty good idea of what its limitations are now, but it took me a while to find them