People have mentioned in the forum that some Wow servers are dead. Meaning those servers have very low populations. Some have even mentioned that in those servers it has gotten to the point that the few people they do see that appear to be other players with names etc. won’t talk to them. Some appear to ignore them completely. Some do say something like hello, nice day. etc. But besides that won’t engage in conversation.
Some posters even mentioned that at first they thought they had mistaken a NPC (non-player character) for a player due to they lack of response and odd behavior. But then noticed that the character was in fact another Player character. They also mentioned that some of these silent Player characters seemed odd in that they at times appeared as running in place or twirling around. Or just walking around like a patrolling NPC.
So my question is: Is it possible that Blizz is filling in the missing real players with NPC Bots
masquerading as real players to give the impression that there are more players on a server than there actually are?
It IS possible and the reason I say this is, a few years ago I was waiting in Goldshire for a BG to pop and I watched the low level toons having duels and jumping around and having conversations and I went to my BG and didn’t think much of it.
3 weeks later or so, I came out of darkmoon faire to buy mats for the faire profession quests cause there’s a vendor right outside for some of them and I see something in my chat window that seems familiar, so I look in front of goldshire inn and its the same people, having the same duels, having the exact same conversations.
So I did what anyone would do, I went over to see how good their A.I. is and see how they respond to conversation and I was surprised, sometimes my question was ignored and sometimes a key word like “bot” would cause one of them to say a certain sentence, but I have had real 15 year old’s ignore me so it seemed pretty realistic. One thing I did notice, they reply too fast sometimes, the average wow player wont be typing that quickly. Summoning a certain mount or pet might cause a response like “Nice dragon kite, ashes of alar goes good with that”
I see no problem with it, makes the game look fun, and I wish they would fill M+ and raids with bots, because a bot isn’t gonna say “You guys all suck!” and then leave.
World of Warcraft and other MMOs have been utilized for testing AI bots since around 2008. The Department of Defense and other entities have had player based accounts set up to interact, observe and create Large Language Models LLMS gathered from the text based interaction of users.
Once they had a large enough vocabulary and foundational phrase base to create active dialogue, they were launched as pseudo-players to see if the bots could correctly interact with real humans. ChatGPT is just the public commercialized version of programming that has been going on for nearly 2 decades.
So while I don’t think it’s Blizz making their own bots to fill out the games, there are many companies that have put accounts into use to test AI systems for multiple reasons.
You can google all kinds of search terminology to find out more. Military AI norms, use, development are good starting points.
Not possible, comp stomp is Blizzard’s best attempt at bots and it’s pretty bad, it would take a phenomenal leap in technology for a bot to mimic real players, people can make jokes on player behavior, but they’re no where close to real players. The best test of a bots existence would be queue times, if we had bots they would be near instant, and they’re far from that.
Comp stomp is intentionally handicapped - and the bots make doofy choices to blow defensives and spells at all the wrong times. A better comparison might be the BfA Island Expeditions. The NPCs were rather challenging until you were geared enough to overtake them. The NPCs there typically cast their spells in a comprehensive manner and you had to hard focus so that the healers/casters went down first. Particularly that shaman that loved to HEX you into oblivion.
