If you’ve started playing Battlefield 6 and you’re outside the US, chances are you might have seen a bot or two join one of your matches. What’s odd here is, it happens at a specific time of the day, and so far, DICE hasn’t even acknowledged that there is an issue.
While Battlefield 6 features bots in Battlefield Portal, the bots I’m referring to are the ones that populate a standard multiplayer match. The thing is, the game has no problem with player counts at all, which makes this issue a lot more baffling.
This further drives home the fact that the game needs an improved server browser, given a lot of gamers bought BF6 to play with other people and not against bots.
Battlefield 6’s Bot Issue Is Getting Out of Hand
Every day, starting at around 5 pm ET/2 pm PT/5 am HKT, the game’s player base suddenly vanishes (in areas outside the US). It’s as if everyone decided to log off at the exact same time…every friggin’ day! You know there is something kooky going on: when you enter a match with 6-10 people waiting for it to start, the game suddenly runs out of people to match them up against, so the server gets populated with bots.
HOWEVER, quitting out of this said match and then picking to start another will yield the same thing, but with different people. In short, some people are never getting matched with others and are instead forced to play against bots. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to play a 32v32 match where 20 players on each team are bots.
If you’ve played in a bot lobby, it’s a rather boring match-up, on top of never being placed in a squad to spawn on any of them. Sure, they can be a little challenging to deal with, but compared to real players, they don’t hold a candle to the unpredictability, and the flow a match goes through. The bots are going to do stuff that doesn’t make any sense, and although I’ve encountered players that probably play worse than some of these bots, I’d take them over a full room of bots because of the aforementioned reasons.
This issue is happening not just in Asia, but even in EU as well. Former DICE developer Jaqub Ajmal, who’s now with Sharkmob Games working on Exoborne, also confirmed that with crossplay off, he’s getting lobbies full of bots. To be fair, even though there are many who have been vocal about playing with crossplay off, the reality of things is that number is probably a lot lower than most believe. So bot rooms in that case makes sense, given that you are cutting the player pool drastically since most probably won’t touch the option.
But with it enabled, surely, out of the millions of people who bought the game, there are more than 64 of them on consoles that can fill a match, right?
This wasn’t an issue in the previous beta test (even with crossplay off), where matchmaking now feels like every 5-8 games being bots (which I leave) before being placed into a lobby of full players. We’ve seen this complaint from other players who are in regions not part of the North America and EU servers, who too are encountering matches filled with bots.
I know that sort of is the common thing with specific regions with past Battlefield games, which is why so many have been pushy about a server browser with regional options. But the game isn’t even a month old, and it’s functioning like something that has lost it’s playerbase in some of these regions.
The crazy part is the fact that I can jump out before a match starts, look for another one, and then find another room with maybe 5-6 real players that ends up getting filled with bots again and never another human player, leave it, and then again, 5-6 different players, and rinse and repeat until it throwsa me into a full game. The matchmaking is clearly broken if it’s breaking players like that a part rather than matchmaking them together. There are enough players to fill the rooms, the system is just refusing to.
If you’re playing in the US, then this likely isn’t an issue for you at all as the lobbies always feel like they’re being filled, and not only that, but also as a new match rather than in the middle of one. The latter can still happen, and has for our other staff who lives there. They’ve already clocked in hundreds of matches since launch, and they honestly can’t remember a single time they encountered a bot lobby beyond those offered in the Portal Experiences.
Finding a Fix for the Battlefield 6 Bot Issue
So much so, we even partied up just so I could get into his lobbies. But even with them being the party leader, the game still prioritized my lobbies, and they witnessed room after room that were filled with nothing but bots. We eventually found a way to “fix” that: we needed another player stateside, and yeah, despite my ping being nearly 250ms, every room we played in was a new lobby with real players.
Will this get fixed in Season 1? Given DICE has already released the Season 1 patch notes and didn’t mention it at all, then the chances are super slim. Not to mention the devs haven’t even acknowledged that there is an issue.
Perhaps the devs will look to tackle the issues with the Season 1 skins first? But based on what’s been mentioned out there, the issue is known; it’s just that the devs have nothing to share about it, or they don’t care enough to talk about it publicly — which is why we’re giving it some visibility now.
Getting Matched With Bots Is Giving the Wrong Impression to Players
If you’re a casual gamer who bought Battlefield 6 and saw bots populating a lot of your matches, it’s understandable if they assumed bots are taking the place of humans since there are not enough players.
However, that doesn’t inspire confidence in the game, and let’s face it, most gamers do not want to play what they think is a dying game. I want to clarify: Battlefield 6 is in no way dying, but those who are encountering bots repeatedly might be thinking of that. If so, what’s stopping them from telling their friends that there’s not enough players in a standard BF6 match to fill every slot?
It’s a bad look, and one that EA should probably take a look at
At the end of the day, the bots in matches are a cause for concern. It’s up to EA and the Battlefield Studios to see if it’s something they can solve. If they decide not to act on it, then they have no one to blame but themselves if the player base sees a significant drop outside of the US.
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