Bots in Frontlines - Do something.

[Zanmato]

I've reported the same bots for a few weeks now, and nothing has happened.
It is getting worse, and worse. It has gotten so bad that I now write this.
Just now I was in a 72 player game where ALL of my team were bots. Some that I hadn't encountered before, but that showed the same obvious bot behavior as those I regularly encounter.

So why not just kick them with the vote-kick system?
When your team consists of 4 or more bots, that becomes impossible. Also, having to wait 5 minutes just to initiate a vote is not good. Furthermore, having to wait 4 HOURS to vote again after a successful vote-kick is no help either, especially when you encounter that same bot AGAIN the next match.
I understand that it can take time to get to bots, and that it is not a GM's job to do, but there has to be some kind of action to counter this. It shouldn't have to take WEEKS, or MONTHS to get rid of just one bot.

I suggest getting a few PvP Judges that can hop in to PvP to kick/temporarily ban botters and cheaters now and then because it most DEFINITELY is needed now. I can't speak for the EU data centers, but Aether data center is in dire need of counter measures.
I may as well volunteer to do such as I do Frontlines a whole lot.

[saucyshortcake]

We've tried, SE doesn't care. You'll see bots running high end pve/pvp tiles and mounts without a care in the world, because they know there's absolutely no chance they'll get actioned for it. More and more regular players are realizing this and just grabbing the bot too, because it's easier than actually playing. You know it's a sad day when The Hand of Mercy on your team is a bot, running on the exact same script as The Legend standing next to him.

And don't bother trying to name them here, or on some other platform like reddit. They'll censor you for having the audacity to try to point out this problem, you dirty name-shamer.

[Harka12]

This will kill the PvP, just question of time when. I come to play this MMO because im bored of WoW, but i guess SE care less about this then wow developers...

[saucyshortcake]

This will kill the PvP, just question of time when. I come to play this MMO because im bored of WoW, but i guess SE care less about this then wow developers...

To be fair, I think the bots are the only thing keeping it going. Frontlines probably wouldn't even pop without all the bots queueing it.

[Korihu]

To be fair, I think the bots are the only thing keeping it going. Frontlines probably wouldn't even pop without all the bots queueing it.

Honestly, in the state it is now? Yeah. Before, Frontlines still remained active, before you could even get EXP in the mode. Before GARO was a thing. Before freelancing was a thing (it just made queues long for certain GCs).

Frontlines has largely dropped in population of actual people because of two main reasons:

1. The huge influx of bots, which is the fault of EXP being added as a reward.
2. 4.0's PvP update has made Frontlines pretty terrible.

All of my old friends, and myself included, we used to do frontlines aaalll the time. Because we genuinely enjoyed it. Now there's little to enjoy when the mode is racked by bots and the PvP changes makes the large scale gameplay awful.


It's a common misconception that Frontlines was dead before. Frontlines was active before, only queues were slow on some GCs because of the lack of freelancing. EXP made it less active. 4.0 PvP changes killed it.

[Zojha]

It's a common misconception that Frontlines was dead before.

That depends on how you define "dead" and "active".

During off hours, it didn't pop at all. As you approached primetime, it slowly started to pick up, where you'd randomly get either instant queues or hour long queues depending on whether people happened to be there or not, typically with the same players each match. To me, that qualifies as "dead".
For somewhat objective numbers, one can refer to the lodestone rankings, weekly and monthly respectively. It goes all the way back to 2016 and gives you a rough idea of activity - Someone on the JP forums actually made a graph of it (Page 521 of their FL thread IIRC). The difference between Data Centers is quite staggering.

As for bots, others already noticed: They're here for rewards and changing those is the easiest way to combat them if SE doesn't change their policy on external evidence.

After looking at the lodestone however, I have my doubts that simply making things "win reliant" would change much. Bots still manage over 16% winrate easily, which is only half of what you can expect in a regular 3 team setup and a decent enough payout considering it's entirely free for the bot user.
Contribution is a nice idea, but flawed in practice. Joining in progress isn't even much of an issue, you can simply ease the requirement proportionally to the time on the clock, cut it in half flat or whatever.
The main issue is that there's simply no good metric. You can do lots of damage/kills/assists/healing and deaths while senselessly zerging around, ignoring objectives. Even bots can get some decent stats with that strategy and might end up being programmed to all cluster together and do just that. You can also have horrible numbers in everything because your team didn't have healers and got steamrolled. And if you then keep out of fights and focus on objectives instead, chances are your contribution isn't gonna be high enough. That's an issue especially in Seal Rock, where you can't use damage to ice as contribution factor.

Removing the rewards flat is more practical. But then you sure as heck are going to lose regular players as well, because rewards are the main thing keeping this PvP going. Which makes the only realistic option a ban of the bot users. Stay tuned for the Q&A with it's like 1000 likes on botting posts in the thread. Chances are however, banning all the bot users would affect their bottom line too much and they'll instead try to disable the bots via convoluted means that don't do anything but inconvenience normal users.

[Enlial]

That depends on how you define "dead" and "active".

Most things in this world depend on "how you define them." All of them, I think, actually. But by any reasonable standards, Wolve's den, before it got scraped, was dead. Frontlines, before it got bot infested, was not. Pretty clear difference.

[Gor]

This will kill the PvP, just question of time when. I come to play this MMO because im bored of WoW, but i guess SE care less about this then wow developers...

pvp was killed long time ago. it's been dyin a slow death since 2015

[Kisama]

pvp was killed long time ago. it's been dyin a slow death since 2015

Not entirely inaccurate, but patch 3.5 revitalized pvp. The Garo event, as well as frontline freelancer ensured that queues were fast clear up to 4.0, at least on Aether.

If frontline freelancer was an option from the start, queues probably would have been fine all along and this idea that pvp was dead wouldn't exist.

Is frontline moved to total premade domination and I should trying to find pvp linkshell?

You really shouldn't queue solo. If there is a premade group in the match, they are very likely going to win. The average playerbase is mindbogglingly bad at this game, so a group of decent players will overwhelmingly dominate most matches.

[lanevn]

You really shouldn't queue solo. If there is a premade group in the match, they are very likely going to win. The average playerbase is mindbogglingly bad at this game, so a group of decent players will overwhelmingly dominate most matches.

Thanks. But how to seek pvp teams. Any more effective ways than friend-to-friend asking? Or first rule of pvp linkshell is: you do not talk about pvp linkshell?