Evidence mounts that Marvel Rivals stealthily places losing players in bot matches, and I know because I'm the loser
Evidence mounts that Marvel Rivals stealthily places losing players in bot matches, and I know because I'm the loser
I wasn't going to play a hero shooter anyway, but fuck this. I just want to go back to arena shooters, server browsers and no stat tracking.
I feel like if any genre changes shooters forever, it was Battle Royales. They exploded in popularity after Fortnite and then when the market was oversaturated, AAA devs switched to "the next big thing" which happened to be hero shooters. But I really can't blame a game or genre for that.
I think the boardrooms at AAA studios changed the game forever by forcing devs to chase that "next big thing" over originality.
I'll just stick to my single player, retro revival titles.
I certainly never went to lan parties for the company anyway.
Team fortress 2 is still going good even if the only updates are from the community in terms of maps.
Arena Shooters have tried and tried to recapture the magic but it's just long gone
Xonotic would like a word, it never left and it has an ever growing number of fans.
High level gameplay in Xonotic can be seen as nothing other than an a slow and steady evolution of arena shooter design and Xonotic is nothing less than pure flow state when you play.
A friend of mine linked me to one called Straftat that seems fun. It’s built around small maps and 1v1 fights.
I mained Q3Arena and UT for a few years, then lost the thread as other amazing fps solo games came along.
Now I’ve been mainly playing Destiny2 for a few years, and as the game dies I have discovered that the PvP gameplay has that old magic of a fast fluid arena shooter still going on under all the class complexity and gacha-grind system.
Cool thing is, while D2 is expensive and microtransaction-filled, you can instead just play pvp utterly freely and the grind for gear is unnecessary if you like casual arena shooters. Also D2 has really great gunfeel and graphics, it’s Bungie, that’s about the only thing they do perfectly.
They also seem to be following CCP censorship rules. Yay.
Edit: What are the downvotes for, its objectively correct.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/marvel-rivals-chinese-censorship-controversy
They haven't gone away. Plenty of Quake 3 Arena servers still up and running. If not Quake 3 Arena, then Xonotic is still pretty active with more modern visuals and pretty good graphics.
I was always more a ut2k4 guy. I need to spend a weekend tracking down and installing the linux binary for that game. But even then the most active servers just play the same few maps. I could play some FaceClassic, but not for hours on end.
I'm also working on fixing an old gamepad I use to use for these games. Unlike ones that use cherry based switches, this one just uses those small, tactile switches with crazy small travel distance.
Try splitgate its basically just old school halo local multiplayer. The portals addition is great
Edit: had the name wrong
I think you mean Splitgate https://store.steampowered.com/app/677620/Splitgate/
has the second one come out?
oldUnreal is a thing.
Being punished for leaving bot matches is the only issue I'd have with this.
The article says that you do indeed get punished for leaving.
If there are other human players in the match, leaving sucks for them, so in that regards I get it.
If all the other players are bots... who cares? Penalizing for hurting bot-feelings is silly.
It’s nothing to do with W/L it’s because it fucks your team mates (and essentially everyone else, who now are devoid of a proper match) in RL. One of the many reasons I never stuck by RL was other players. People would so frequently just trash talk you when you’re learning and then fuck off out of the match, leaving you to get rolled by two players. These players would frequently be worse too. At least if you get rolled with a full team, you’ll probably learn something.
RL and games with low team player counts I 100% understand it for. It’s a punishment for selfish players. In a match with bots less so but I guess if you’re doing bad enough to be matched with bots they probably want to to stay and learn to play.
Marvel Snap serves up poorly hidden bot matches and penalizes you for leaving as well. For example, they "reset" the ranked ladder every month, but retain their hidden mmr, and people with a really high mmr are MORE likely to face bots, because the system is designed to align your rank with their MMR, but if you leave the match, you forfeit what is essentially an ante used to determine your rank. But everyone gets some bots, and the amount varies based on several things, basically all of them manipulative to the player and their rank system.
You don't know if it's a bot match as far as I understood
there are ways to tell.
namely steam rolling the opponents. or the enemy team not showing up in your recently played with list.
Is this problem? Think it make sense and way to learn more mechanics of game.
I'm conflicted with this. But it's a problem because the game is not clear about it and you can't choose, the game just put 4 people + 2 bots against 6 bots.
I "tried" to get a bot match yesterday after getting 2 loses in a row, playing with things that I normally don't play and not caring too much with the objective. Took 5 loses in a row to get 1 bot match.
For a person to get a lot of bot matches they need a lot of loses, at that point the person is probably better playing against bot to improve a little bit. But I think the game should suggest to the player to do that instead of forcing and hiding that they are playing against bots.
Obfuscation. Corporate figures telling or giving people the option will hurt their feelings so they'll stop playing. A player who quits is no longer a tier two type with the potential to spend money, so they'll only do this if it becomes a PR nightmare that affects their bottom line.
It feels like assuming a lot of positive intent to guess that the match against bots is so that people can learn rather than trying to feed them a dopamine hit so they don't get discouraged and fuck off, but maybe I'm a cynic.
Exactly, with Ch5 Fortnite vastly increased bots. Until that was confirmed I was confused as to how I got so much better within a week of the chapter starting. I averaged 2-4 kills in ch4 and in ch5s01 I averaged 10+. I stopped playing BR because of this. Bot heavy lobbies aren’t fun.
If I sign up for a match expecting to play against players and get matched with bots I would be upset.
Like most games have options like vs bots or vs players. I think it's a bit ridiculous to not have even that basic control over your game experience. Regardless if you just get crushed.
I think I would actually try the game out if you could purposefully select to play against bots.
Then try it, because you can do exactly that.
It’s a problem if you think you’re learning techniques for killing humans but in reality you’re learning tricks to kill AI. There is already a bot match option if people want to learn with no pressure.
It gives people a false sense of being good even if that day was simply not their day. Bot match alone is fine, and it's relaxing in a way, but hiding the fact that they're not fighting against real players is manipulative.
What people are missing in the comments is that you can choose to play a bot match if that's what you want. But you CAN'T sign up to play against people and guarantee that that's what you'll be doing. And they are not transparent about it.
That and also penalizing you for disconnecting from Bot matches is wild
If you queue competitve you're guaranteed human players. And no Crossplay. Not the best solution, but yea...
Except when you have players that conciously don't want to play competetive. Playing a single match that doesn't have any impact on any stats / doesn't judge you is different than playing a competetive match that is twice as long, and has tryhards that will flame you for playing your favourite character, when it's not 100% optimal. Also, some people get into the competetive side of games way too deep, up to a detriment. Notebooks with pages of ranking points gained or lost, getting frustrated on losses, even resenting the friends you play with for their skill in a game. Shotcallers that get too deep into it, etc. When you have 3hrs to game a week, you don't want it to be filled with any of that, you want to play like 15 games / rounds and be done with it.
But why? What's the motive behind not just queuing low ranking players with each other?
So, that's how ranked play works and only has humans. Problem is, ranked is awful right now. Even in the lowest ranks matches tend to be hopelessly lopsided. I'm not clear on why but it may be streamers and whatnot creating new accounts to stomp on low ranked people.
It's in quick match where they are inserting bots, and there aren't ranks to use.
Well its obviously player retention, but it could be that if they did put them with other low ranks, they mostly would have a bad time and most would quit. Another thought is that the exceptionally low ranked group is very small, and there isn't actually enough of them to allow quick enough queue times without filling out games with bots.
It's rather common Knowledge that NetEase does this exact thing in Narala: Bladepoint, so yeah, not surprising, at all.
I also vaguely remember this being a thing in Pokemon: Unite, not sure if that's also a NetEase game.
Pokémon Unite does it sometimes after lose streaks. But not always! It's common in casual modes but much less common in ranked.
I'm having way more bot games in unite than I ever did (picked up the game again this week after a year off).
Last time I played Fortnite it was also like this. It was bots + other weak players like you. It felt quite okay, early in the match you got some easy bot kills and later you had some challenge dealing with actual players of your skill level.
Hell I'm okay with that. I don't play with any of you people anyway
Cool. Then stick to the vs AI matches. Don't join a PvP gamemode to expect to play against bots.
Makes sense why the game feels soo easy, And i like it this way.
I prefer this over SBMM but at what point does it just become dead gaming theory?
True tbh
That's unsurprising, I don't bother with multiplayer games at all because always getting stomped so bad you don't even learn how to fucking play isn't worth the time. One assumes they have to come up with some sort of strategy to keep players like me on a pvp only game.
This has been me for a while now.
Rocket league is the only online competitive game worth it anymore for me at least. I stopped for a few years and saw people complain on forums about bots and toxicity but when I came back it was exactly how I left it, and that was before epic bought it.
I do miss the abusive loot chests since I was an adult and like gambling on them but I understand why they needed to go.
One assumes they have to come up with some sort of strategy to keep players like me on a pvp only game.
And that strategy was to allow you to play against bots on purpose and with your knowledge. It has been around for as long as bots have been.
One assumes part of the goal there was to give players the dopamine boost of thinking they're beating someone. Not saying it's not an underhanded tactic but I can see and understand the motive and, as far as shitty things in the online gaming world go, this one's probably the most benign.
play stupid games win stupid prizes
Quite literally in this case
I'm fine with this. There are some braindead or brand new players out there who should 100% be confined to the kiddie pool until they learn the basic mechanics.
Yeah except it doesn't work like that. If you get 2 losses in a row or even 2 losses separated by a win, it'll dump you in the kiddie pool, doesn't matter how much playtime you have. If I get SVP and it still puts me into a bot match, that's bad design.
It seems to be a way to grant the player an easy win so you don't tilt and quit. But the ruse was way too easy to see through.
Fun fact, that braindead player has just as much right to play the game and have fun as you do. Your gameplay superiority in fact does not entitle you to more of the game.
i swear pokémon duel would do the opposite of this. you’d get on a win streak and then suddenly a player with a very generic name and the EXACT counters to your deck fucken SWEEPS your ass with seemingly psychic precision. you could even trick it by switching to a deck with no synergy and just playing like a psycho whenever you got ~5 wins in a row.
i miss that game so much. taken before it’s time o7
Pokemon TCGP feels the same honestly, I get two wins then suddenly it's a Mewtwo Gardevoir combo. I also can't tell if people who pay for premium are more likely to get better cards because they get more chances or if the server sees that they pay for premium and reward them, but I run into so many people that have multiple Mewtwo Ex cards and I can't even manage to find one in all the packs I've opened.
the goal of this ... is to lie to us—to insult our intelligence by trying to pass off an obviously phony product as legitimate
Standard mobile practice from a mobile publisher
I just want a chill class shooter with good movement tech and larger team player numbers
Not a competitive 6v6 hero shooter where everybody moves the same, except for that one ability on cooldown right now
It's really fucked up when you think about it since qp matches are any skill against any skill. So if you get a diamond ranked dps on the opposite team and your team is mostly bronze you're screwed. Then you only have to lose one more match to get put into the bot matches. That seems super unfair.
QP still puts you with similar skill level players. It just doesn't show you the algorithm like competitive. You won't be put with a diamond if you are bronze and vice-versa.
This feels like a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
The problem is that every game has a losing team, and the players are supposed to feel bad no matter how well they performed. "Defeat" or "Loss" messages, sad music, sinking stats, public match record showing off your failure; there's punishment baked into this model of game.
Trying to keep players by throwing them easy wins is an insult. You're the game developer that created this "winner/loser" model to begin with. Now you're trying to make me feel better with this bullshit? You're the one that caused the pain to begin with.
I figured it was to get some practice rather than a morale boost.
Like the article says, it does mess with stars but it is only for Quick Play rather than ranked though.
It's absolutely a cheap way to give you an easy win. If I get SVP but lose in overtime, it's absolutely an insult to throw me into a bot match for 'practice'
Good. Take the hint.
I heard Sue Storm's ass is great and modeled after a model with a great ass