Evidence mounts that Marvel Rivals stealthily places losing players in bot matches, and I know because I'm the loser

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.

https://youtu.be/YbQXnlLVlLw

https://xonotic.org/

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.

There's a super tiny but somewhat active Quake 3 VR community. It's awesome.

You can still rocket jump in Destiny2 arena pvp, well grenade, but same feel. Fun way to be Death from Above if you are a more punchy character than the floaty kind.

What? No zombies or lgbtq relationships?

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.

I think you mean Splitgate https://store.steampowered.com/app/677620/Splitgate/

has the second one come out?

there are ways to tell.

namely steam rolling the opponents. or the enemy team not showing up in your recently played with list.

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.

Ive only been punished for leaving ranked matches lately, I dont think they do anything if you leave casual matches. Ive done it multiple times lately, I use them as practice sometimes or if I night need to leave suddenly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Statistically, people are more upset when they get crushed by other humans.

Then try it, because you can do exactly that.

It never happens in ranked in Rivals.

I'm having way more bot games in unite than I ever did (picked up the game again this week after a year off).

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.

Last time I really played a lot of Fortnite, I played with someone who was really good, and we'd get #1 in roughly half our matches. Even after 20+ games, it felt like we still got lobbies half full of bots

True tbh

This isn't true. I've been put against Diamonds and GMs and I'm gold 3. You can look at people's rank in the history tab even for enemy teams.

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'