Declined Servers And Bots

[Sun Tzu]

Hi everyone! Thanks for all of your hard work you have put into this community and game!

I have a question regarding this server: 104.153.105.95:27016

Could it possibly be without the automatic-turn-to-bot thing? I LOVE highpass soooo damn much but I generally have to avoid this server, even if its the only Highpass server, just because sometimes AFK people turn into bots and too many bots (it gets gross sometimes) can be pretty un-fun.

This is partly because the bots are bizzarre creatures. They will walk straight at you lookin backwards then 180 shotgun you in the face. They will track the SHIT out of your movements with their melee weapons, regardless of how much you are juking around them.

They just do the most increidble things, stuff you cant even expect a normal player to pull off. And BECAUSE bots are so far different than normal players "getting good" at playing a skial server with auto-bot feature becomes almost like a sepparate game / side chore.

Is this guy a bot? Because if he is I have to act accordingly, or he'll autoaim the SHIT out of me.

Idk what do you guys think? Has there been any consideration done to things like : Maximum number of bots per team capped to 2 or MAYBE 3.. or making bots less god-tier and more like mediocre players. Idk if you can even mess with the bots but they are just really gross right now.

 

[RMSniper]

This post of mine from a couple days ago should explain everything to you. Feel free to ask more questions if you don't get it:

(...) As for why you're switched when afk, we use afk bots to seed servers. When a server gets full, an afk player who has reached the maximum amount of time they can go afk (I believe it's 2-3 minutes) will be kicked and moved to an emptier server to seed it. The only way to avoid this is to donate, as it will extend your maximum amount of time afk threefold, I believe (so around 6-9 minutes). A second option would be for you to leave the server when you're going to get your water or whatever you're doing and come back when you're done.

You cannot disable the afk kick/move to server function. Donate to increase your afk time, go to spec, or leave the server and come back when you're done doing whatever you are doing.

One final note: This will only occur when the server is full; otherwise, you should never be kicked for being afk in a non-full server, even if the server constantly stays at 19/20.

 

[mike-kirby]

This post of mine from a couple days ago should explain everything to you. Feel free to ask more questions if you don't get it:

I don't think this is about going afk and becoming a bot/joining a different server, but rather about the bots themselves.
I believe there has been multiple post by the owner saying that the bots were acting like this because it would be too easy otherwise. This makes them more useful teammates.

 

[RMSniper]

I don't think this is about going afk and becoming a bot/joining a different server, but rather about the bots themselves.
I believe there has been multiple post by the owner saying that the bots were acting like this because it would be too easy otherwise. This makes them more useful teammates.

I read the post just fine. He also appears to have an issue with the fact the whole server is filled with bots, which my posts explains the "why" there. There have been numerous other threads requesting afk bots to somehow be less "good," but those never pass. I figured that was obvious already, which was why I discussed why the afk bots exist.

 

[Sun Tzu]

I read the post just fine. He also appears to have an issue with the fact the whole server is filled with bots, which my posts explains the "why" there. There have been numerous other threads requesting afk bots to somehow be less "good," but those never pass. I figured that was obvious already, which was why I disc used why the afk bots exist.

is there any way for the bots to be tweaked in any way, shape, or form? possibly even forcing them to play medic or a diff class for class balance?

When you have AFK people from random classes with random loadouts all the time, sometimes 1 bot can be much much more effective than a different one.

Idk I would just love to play on your servers, and OP-as-shit bots ruin it for me. They arent even like 'good player' good, they just have some stupid autoaim horseshit for their melees and fast projectile weapons (esp rocket / pipe / loch).

Also, your post says you always fill servers with afks?

Can you not limit the bots to like 3 or something? Even at a 1v1 with 3 bots per team thats still a decent amount of players, then when you get 12v12 its 15v15 with bots, which isnt that bad.

Or maybe you could even color or differentiate the bots somehow visually? I really have no idea, just trying to problem solve. If the highpass server was touched a bit I feel like I would play on it like ALL the time, and probably donate, too!

That being said, I always avoid bot servers at all costs because of how wonky the gameplay is in them.

 

[Bottiger]

The bots are really bad. If you are getting outplayed by one, you are doing something really wrong.

An average player has a rating of 1500, a bot has a rating of 900.

Could they act more naturally? Sure, but we just don't have the resources to spend 50 programming hours to fix something that very few people have an issue with. There is no option for us to just change a bot's skill level by changing a 10 to a 1 for example.

People hate bots, but they hate an empty server even more, they just don't say anything when the server is empty and just leave. This is something we've learned in the almost 8 years we've been hosting tf2.

 

[Sun Tzu]

The bots are really bad. If you are getting outplayed by one, you are doing something really wrong.

An average player has a rating of 1500, a bot has a rating of 900.

Could they act more naturally? Sure, but we just don't have the resources to spend 50 programming hours to fix something that very few people have an issue with. There is no option for us to just change a bot's skill level by changing a 10 to a 1 for example.

People hate bots, but they hate an empty server even more, they just don't say anything when the server is empty and just leave. This is something we've learned in the almost 8 years we've been hosting tf2.

In your example, some people leave your server for a reason without saying anything. This was me saying anything. Im sure more than just me have this issue, too.

Im actually pretty good at TF2, constantly pulling the top spots. The issue I have with bots is, their aiming skill is so disconnected from a normal person's skill, especially when they have certain weapons, the game is much harder to play. You have to fight bots different than you fight human players, which makes the game much less fun to play.

Sounds to me like this isnt an issue worth fixing or looking into.

Honestly I dont think it would be very hard to limit the bots per team to 3, and have a workaround fix in doing so. As said before, at low player counts you will have a higher % of bots on the team, but when you hit 12vs12 with 3 extra bots per team its really not that bad because 80% of the players on each team will be humans. Currently its closer to 20% humans about all the time.

 

[Bottiger]

What you are failing to understand is that removing bots will result in more people leaving.

When someone goes out to the middle of the map and only see 2-3 people there, they are just going to quit, and everyone else left will see that and leave until the server drains out completely.

If there are at least a few bots to kill, most people will stay a little longer and this results in a higher chance that more people will join.

If the server is only 20% humans all the time then it is probably time to change the map on that server. Removing or severely reducing bots will only make the issue worse, it has never brought a server back to life.