MORGAN PARK, STAFF WRITER
This week: Got to the part in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker with the triforce charts that everybody says is bad and agrees it’s bad.
Do you ever wish everyone in our hobby were more angry about something that grinds your gears? For me, it’s the state of bots in multiplayer games. A time-honored, genuinely useful feature has been contorted into something insulting and super annoying—a tool of deception meant to make you believe you’re kicking ass.
Developers, in their quest to farm engagement hours at all costs, have gotten comfortable lying to us about bots. Fake bots are the latest import from the nightmare realm of mobile gaming. They’re more prominent in Asia, but some of the most popular games in North America—including Marvel Rivals, PUBG, and Fortnite—routinely shuffle bots with real-sounding names into matches alongside real players.
The idea is to serve up easy kills with the hope that most people won’t notice or care that the masquerading bot didn’t put up much of a fight. Artificially inflated egos are great for companies like NetEase or Epic Games, because if you believe you’re better than you actually are, you’re more likely to keep playing.
It’s dishonest, patronizing, and worst of all, just awful game design.
These games have gotten pretty good at making up usernames for bots that look normal at first blush, but experienced players have gotten even better at seeing through them. In 2021, Reddit user raz-friman analyzed usernames collected from over 10,000 Fortnite matches and revealed dozens of commonly reused bot names like “BadDuck51” and “ChickaBoom6434”.
The average 100-player Fortnite lobby can consist of up to 90% bots, a figure that looks absurd on its face, but to my Fortnite-playing friends, sounds about right. They say they’ll usually encounter just two or three actual human squads in a match. In general, they assume all “players” shooting at them are bots, which means they can safely ignore them while looting. But that complacency will often get them killed when actual players finally appear.
As far as I’m concerned, the minute players have to ask, “Which of these two groups shooting at us is real?” you’ve made a terrible game. And how can you even call Fortnite a battle royale at that point? It’s completely ass-backwards. It’s not as if Epic doesn’t have enough players to fill a lobby with humans.
Pity win
NetEase might be even worse. It was Marvel Rivals’ asinine use of bots that finally convinced me to quit it. Soon after launch, players noticed that losing two matches in a row seemed to serve up a full bot match for their next game. I tested it myself, and it’s true. You only have to lose twice before NetEase starts pissing its pants that you might want to quit and scrambles to keep you around with a matchup that’s impossible to lose.
“This sucks no matter which way you slice it. This is bad for the community, who now have to deal with NetEase misleading them with bogus wins. It’s bad for the competitive integrity of Rivals, whose default mode of play regularly serves invalid matches. It’s even bad for the average player, who might take the wrong lessons out of a bot match they believed was real,” I wrote in January.
The fake bots themselves suck so hard, but it’s the dishonesty that drives me up the wall. NetEase has still never acknowledged its poorly hidden bots, and Epic likes to pretend its matches are legit. They’re selling folks a bill of goods that’s rotten to the core. Let’s call it what it is: a scam.
Since some mega publishers are happy to use bots for evil, I’ll end this gripe by calling out a few games that still do it right. These shooters clearly label bots when they’re present, and only use them for practice modes or to fill the gaps in a server until actual humans arrive: Thanks, Rainbow Six Siege, Halo Infinite, Battlefield 2042, Counter-Strike 2, and Call of Duty.
Those are the games in my orbit, but I’m sure there are plenty more. I’m curious if you’ve encountered embedded bots in your favorite games, how you deal with them, and if they even bother you. Sound off in the comments.