#19
  • I find a Rath with a “License to Dive” who constantly blames me for not saving his butt as the only player who had the mercy to play a support and ragequits after that stressful.
  • I find it stressful to start a game with four other people who are quite cheerful in chat at character select and then quit in the middle of the match with a final comment that wouldn’t survive the bad language filter here.
  • I find it stressful when I pick someone just for fun or when I feel like playing them (e.g., I’m amongst the worst El Dragon players imaginable but I find him a fun character and want to play him sometimes :frowning: ) and end up being blamed for throwing the match and being a troll before the match even started.
  • I find it stressful to be the highest command rank on a team, but also a player without much experience in PvP. I can’t carry a team in PvP. I can in PvE sometimes, but those queues are even more empty, thanks to those trolls who only try to waste your time by suiciding until you run out of lifes.
  • I find it stressful sitting in front of my PC for over half an hour to wait for a game, only to end up with someone quitting at map select because they don’t want to play anything other than Incursion even once and getting sent back into queue again (which most of the time means that I can already stop looking for getting into a game at all, because I don’t have much longer than 1 or 2 hours a day for gaming).

I prefer playing my private Bot matches (3v5 to make them a little more interesting), Bots Battle if I want other people to chat with in my games, Story missions or private PvP (if I’m invited to a 10 stack - doesn’t happen that often).

Lobby browser would solve some of those issues, but there’s still some pressure left. Off-meta picks still will anger most other people you run into.

5 Likes
#20

We are still talking about Battleborn, right?
I have had matches that were decided by who got to the shock turret first. This game can be very intense and stressful when it is played at a competitive level, with and against skilled players. Missing a stun or a heal can be a game changer.

4 Likes
#21

omg this is awesome!!! dodging Meltdown garbage is what the best players on PC do ^^.

Hmm, well if you aren’t throwing or trolling then it seems like either you don’t give a crap about your team winning so who cares what they think :smiley: or the other team is full of noobs/your team can carry you which shouldn’t cause people to get mad at you.

#22

I want to play who I want but I don’t want to be that teammate who will make the game much harder from the beginning.

That’s my problem, that’s why I feel like I only can play characters I feel competent enough with and that’s what’s causing this situation to be stress for me. I like the option to take the easy way out sometimes and play a mode where nobody cares at all. :wink:

2 Likes
#23

I used to be very much opposed to the idea of bots battle, and thought that it should be removed from the game. Then after listening to various stories much like your own, I have since very much so drastically changed by view on it. I also work quite a bit, and some days it feels like I work twice as much as I do. Although I do not play bots battle, sometimes I stare at the screen and just don’t want to get started because I am exhausted and the thought of playing against constant 5 mans running banned gear, with kelvin, gali, beatrix, boldur, every single game just makes me sick. Sometimes I just want to play marquis or learn a new character. But as soon as one of these kids kills me or beats me for once in their lives, it is taunts and messages.

I especially feel for the pc player. Waiting all that time to get into a game, only to run into that cancer that gbx is doing absolutely nothing about. I still do not understand why there is not an actual solo queue that cannot be exploited so easily, and why the legendary gear is in the game

1 Like
#24

Making a fair solo queue is hard work and a huge overhaul. And to be completely honest, I’m not a fan of forcing a solo queue in a team based game. A big charm is to play this game with friends and not every group is a mercyless killsquad.

The game already has open lobbies (most people just don’t know that, because it’s a useless toggle and no one can find you).

If we could see those teams with open slots (indicators with ping and skill compared to you) and could have direct matches between teams (at least semi ranked to avoid stomps before they happen), I maybe could see a future for the PvP in this game and a huge increase in match quality. It’s basically an extension of private matches and this could even open the chance to let players choose anything ranging from tournament rules (with some fixed selection of competitive gear) to silly modifiers like Bird Hunt.

I took the time a while ago to write a lengthy proposal how I could imagine such a system to work. This worked for our pickup group football, basketball, etc. games when I was a child, it could work here too.

2 Likes
#25

Unfortunately a server browser is a PC thing usually, while consoles mostly have restrictive match-making a lot and P2P sometimes (not in this case) which is ironic since they pay $ to play online. This means a server browser (basically putting open lobbies on a list for people to join) probably wouldn’t happen since the devs have done next to nothing exclusively for the PC community except delete a few queues.

2 Likes
#26

My experience in multiplayer games on consoles ended with something like Turok: Rage Wars on the N64 in 4 player split screen. Never felt a motivation to play any online game on a console, so I didn’t know that.

I don’t know why those queue solutions even became industry standard in the first place. They are restrictive, break easily with every anomaly in the playercount and the devs have all the responsibility with moderating their players and solving the mathematically unsolvable problem to create almost perfectly balanced matches without long waits.

The old-school system I grew up with had the simple solution of “you don’t know how to behave? No one plays with you. Bye.” that took care of trolls, etc. and if some people thought they needed to stomp inexperienced players 24/7 the others just left them standing in the court alone and went somewhere else to play a different game.

The “play another game” solution ingame could be just declining a match against them. Right now it is the even more pragmatic solution to not even play PvP and that amplifies any problem with matchmaking more and more …

2 Likes
#27

yeah I hear you, I could go play the game and mode I played the hell out of when I was kid, Ultra Freeze tag in Quake Live right now with 10-20 players in a server and sometimes there is a more experienced server running too and there is ELO based team-balancing, so teams are usually even.

2 Likes
#28

Bots Battle does nothing to prepare newcomers for 5-man premade teams… or experienced players in general. After a long time away from the game, I came back, did a lot of bots battle to get my skills up to snuff, went from level 34 to about 96, and am still on a near permanent losing streak online. I’m playing solo with randoms, true enough, but still.

If anything, bots have to become smarter in order for anyone to gain any training from them.

#29

I disagree. Sure the bots are not as good as players. Did you really expect them to be? Regardless of that I’ve seen noobs vote for surrender and even quit bots battles because they couldn’t handle it. Is it the same as pvp? Of course not. Is it good for practice? Absolutely.
It sounds like you have reached a point where bots are predictable and not pushing you to do better but pvp is a struggle. If that’s the case, I recommend trying private bots with uneven teams or finding people to team up with for pvp. What platform are you on? What characters do you play?

2 Likes
#30

Don’t try to practice playing a support that way.
Unless you a very masochistic. :smiley:

But I agree. I find those sessions fun to play (3v5 is the right amount of unbalance for my taste), it’s nice to have a queue time of zero and it’s a good way to learn to push a game even if your teammates are not cooperating. There’s still quite a bit of a jump in necessary skill compared with the real deal.

No one will master the game by playing these matches. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#31

Of course you will never master anything without actually doing it. It can help prepare for the real deal though. Sometimes you have to support randoms and pocket elite bots😜

3 Likes
#32

Ditto.

On the positive side, I saw a party in one Bots Battle this evening consisting of a level 100 and a level 1; kudos to the level 100 for guiding a new player through the experience.

3 Likes
#33

That’s a good assumption but it’s not always the case… I’ve witnessed such parties and a lot of the time the low level play better than their level 100+ teammates. The newer player might be teaching them.

1 Like
#35

I have decided to have a more active roll instead of just sending tips i now coach a group of new players.

Bot battles dont help, the actually teach bad behaviors from bots, we used bots 1 time to teach our deande how to set up for an ambush, rath how to play speedy l2r2 and our ambra how to heal eficiently.

Even tho bots are a safe area it gives close to none real knowledge of basic rules to play bb.

You dont need to worry about position, bots get out of position chasing kills.
No need to kill minions, bots feed a lot of xp.
No need to build, must of the time you are wining.
No need to care about dying.

Bots are there to have 0 stress (unless you are miko) or to test some helix/gear and how they interact.

2 Likes
#36

No, public bot matches have a use and can teach you something you desperately need for PvP:

  • Map knowledge: Where are buildables, how can I traverse the terrain, where are short cuts, …
  • Objectives: What’s the gamemode about? Yes, there’s Nova’s intro before a match, but some people need to play it first to get the concepts.
  • Teamwork: Both points before can be done in private matches, this not. Some people are not used to playing with a team. They are the center of their own universe, don’t ping incoming targets, facetank a 1v3+Sentry situation, etc.

I’ve played with people in Bots Battle who wouldn’t understand that you can’t damage the thumpers at the enemy spawn in Meltdown until I told them this secret after their 10th death.
I had to teach people what meaning a ping-marker on an enemy has when there is a Deande crouching on the ground.
I’ve played with people who never played any PvP game before and are intimidated by it and scared of it.
I’ve seen Galileas go 0-15 against Bots.

I always send new people to PvE and Bots Battle and you can train playing the game with those two. Get gear, get mutations, learn a character’s toolkit, find a role and playstyle for you. You can’t train to win games in PvP that way, but that’s the next step on the way to git gud.

Bots don’t need to be a challenge to be a vital part of training. In fighting games like MKX you have even less of a challenge. You spend most of your time:

  • Fighting an enemy with no AI. It just stands next to you and tanks hits. Back in the days this was done by playing single player - split screen. Challenge: None. Importance: Vital. Finding characters, learning their toolkit and combo practice is important. You train it until you have a 10/10 success rate with it.
  • Next step: Play against AI and try to use the stuff you learned in training, fail with it and try to improve your timing or find something different.
  • Someone ruined your combo by blocking? Back to training, but now the enemy bot will be set to block your attacks sometimes and you will experience the big fun of learning framedata and which attack is safe or unsafe.
  • Someone used an annoying attack against you? Back into training, pick that enemy, switch to it, input that sequence and hit save. Switch player again and play against that combo over and over until you can find a way to escape.

You can go into full blown tryhard mode in training, know your character’s moves and combos in and out, you know what happens the first time you go into an online match? You will be annihilated. No matter how much you trained before. But you continue that loop of train combos, train avoiding combos, get crushed until at one day you are one of the players other people will learn a thing or two from. I’m very much still in the get crushed phase of that game.

So, why did I write this? Training doesn’t need to be a challenge. If you play buttonmashing rounds against no-AI enemies in fighting games, it’s no training. If you are killfarming Bots in Battleborn, it’s no training.

Training is what you make out of it.

I’m playing focused training sessions for Incursion in private Bot matches 3v5. Had a thread on reddit about that and one of the responses was something like “if you want to win those easily, let them kill your sentry first and steamroll them afterwards because of their increased spawn times”. I don’t exploit those mechanics in training. I’m shooting for a 100-0. This is training to increase single player performance on my end.

In public bot matches I play teamwork focused characters. Keep my teammates at 0 death as support no matter how dumb they play, train to draw my teammates’ attention towards myself when I’m about to stun others, experiment with synergies between different characters, …

Does this make me a professional player? No. I can play a 40-0 El Dragon against Bots and can go 0-15 against people, but I know why I was wrecked in the latter one (El Dragon on Monuments with Whiskey and Benedict against you is a silly thing to do - it only was a “just for fun 10 stack” and I rebalanced the teams a bit with my choice).

You don’t need a challenge to learn concepts of a game. Coordination and communication can be trained with people against bots.

I’m also happy to have a place for lore challenges, etc. since it’s always been a bummer e.g., to see a Boldur on the team and not be able to pick Thorn because of teamcomp reasons. I don’t care in Bots Battle.

7 Likes
#37

Well said. And this is exactly why an experienced player should be taking a new player into Bots Battle - to show them the map, explain what’s going on, help them understand the objectives and different strategies WITHOUT getting pub-stomped by a bunch of hyper-competitive over-achievers in other versus modes.

4 Likes
#38

@lemonheadjake
Ah, you misunderstand. I mean it’s good practice for the mode, but but it won’t prepare them for good players. I play PS4, mostly support. (Miko, Beatrix, and I’m getting pretty good with Kid Ultra.)

#39

There is no better way to prepare them for it than bots. Idk what you want but I understand what you are saying. I just don’t agree.