Stadia’s last problem: its PUBG port is invaded by official and bad bots

But what might have been a no-brainer of good news from Stadia has been altered by a design decision that generates frustration and annoyance and is even affecting existing console versions – stupid new bots spawned out of nowhere.

98 problems, and one bot is … all of them

After hearing reports of a surprising influx of bots on Tuesday, I started PUBG using my Stadia Pro account on a laptop to confirm the bad news. I followed the advice of an angry Redditor and jumped into a less popular matchmaking queue to ensure I’d encounter at least a few bots – a “first-person” solo fight queue on the recently reworked Vikendi map.

After waiting about four minutes, I entered a pre-battle lobby with only an apparent human rival (you can tell based on who’s running and throwing snowballs). So the usual PUBG The fight began: you parachute to an island, collect scattered supplies, and run to a shrinking central point.

Things were weird even before I put on my virtual parachute. Each game starts on a plane flying over the battle map and you get visual feedback on who jumps and where. But in my first Stadia test, I only noticed an opponent jumping from my plane, not dozens. Hmm

Apparently, no one took a parachute near my starting area, and with the headphones on, I didn’t hear footsteps or vehicles when I started racking up loot and preparing for an eventual showdown with someone. But who? The first response came in the form of an explosion of bullets from a slightly occluded patch of trees half a kilometer away.

That’s how silly this robot was: the time I needed to triangulate the shot, put the enemy in my sights, shoot, realize that I had not put any bullets in my weapon, reload, aim and confirm that my death had been enough for any human player to knock me down three times. I could see the robot mostly standing in the distance as it pumped over and over in my direction. When I finally looted his body (marked with a username with an underscore, an apparent revelation from an official bot), I confirmed my suspicions: I was shooting an unwieldy SMG with no range and therefore had no chance Realistic precision taking me out of your distance. (He also had a massive inventory of health items, despite spawning and attacking nowhere near lootable buildings.)

His AI-driven decision to fire about eight rounds per second with that pepper spray gun (in a stupid “HEY, OVER HERE, GUYS!” Display) while standing still made me howl: even newbies don’t play PUBG how that.

I went to loot another nearby building, at that moment a robot appeared out of nowhere, with zero audible steps leading to its appearance, and hit me. In a normal PUBG match, this would be the point where I could get a “deathcam” view of my passing or “watch” that the player continued to run around the island. However, I couldn’t select “deathcam”, while “spectate” instead loaded the point of view of the just another human player in my party

Every opponent this player faced had at least one underscore in their username and would appear in all sorts of random ways. Some could be seen running in stuttering patterns on the horizon. Others savagely opened fire, exposing themselves as open targets. Still others zigzagged back in the cloud of poison for no apparent rhyme or reason, and certainly not in careful strategies of “circling a safer path.” At one point, a robot appeared behind the person who was looking at the top of a hill with a ridiculous top angle; The human who was watching didn’t notice this, stood still in a hideout to look at other bots, and was never shot. Meanwhile, two other robots in the distance ran side by side without exchanging a single bullet.

One bot eventually shot this human down, at which point I was able to see the remaining two bots shooting to death, slowly and inaccurately, despite the viewer’s camera at this point showing that each bot had a perfect target on its target.

Caught watching the dry paint

I joined one more match this way, I waited five minutes in a queue and they started me up in a match where I was only human player I watched the “kill feed” in the upper right corner, shrinking as the AI ​​robots killed each other, and each username contained an underscore. I racked up four murders by eliminating bots that magically appeared somehow (again, zero paratroopers followed me to my ridiculous corner of the map). Then, once again, a robot out of nowhere appeared a few yards away and killed me. If I had made any effort in these mostly bot games, I probably would have done better, but almost instantly got bored with this proposition: a whole host of totally unfair stupid bots, that would either give me pointless shooting practice or pop up to around a corner and insta-kill me.

So I asked myself: is this the normal bot population I should expect, especially in a game that supports crossplay? I returned to livid “PUBG on consoles “community on Reddit where I learned something that Stadia PUBG build does not communicate: you cannot join XB1 and PS4 instances unless you connect a gamepad. It is a reasonable limit in a world where mouse and keyboard players enjoy a supposed pairing advantage. But why did I have to search through angry Reddit posts to know that instead of receiving an orderly and official notice within PUBG or the Stadia loading screens before the game? Shouldn’t Stadia be eager to hide any evidence that its user base is sparse?

With a connected gamepad, I jumped into a more popular “third-person” server queue, where my session started almost instantly and was populated by approximately 20 other members of the lobby throwing snowballs. I waited a second to parachute, started to fall free and looked around: I could see five skydivers and parachutists in my general vicinity. After eight minutes of solitary looting and car driving, I saw an opponent standing almost still among some trees. Without a sniper rifle, I had to settle for a semi-automatic scope rifle and pump a few rounds for this opponent, who didn’t bother running behind trees or covering himself up after taking a couple of bullets. Target down. The username had an underscore.

I lived for another five minutes, killing two apparent human users on the way (I was actually trying this time) before dying as the 11th player out of 99. I watched my killer from that moment on, and his next murder, the Player n. ° 10 was a robot that stood completely still inside a small hut, looking away from both the open door and the open window that exposed it. I classified a place under a bot that was caught watching the dry paint. Cold.

“Positive or negative effects”

the PUBGThe on-console community was warned about this change on Friday in an official letter from the developer. As PUBG Corp’s Joon H. Choi wrote:

We have seen our players’ overall skill level grow significantly in the last 3 years. While PUBG veterans continue to hone their skills and improve, we are seeing more often than not that many new players are eliminated early with no kills, and many times with no damage done. You have been telling us for a while that the widening skill gap is creating an increasingly challenging environment for some of our players and we are now ready to discuss our plan to assist you. In an effort to provide more ways for players to hone their skills and fully enjoy what PUBG has to offer, we have decided to introduce bots with Update 7.1. Bots can have positive or negative effects on a game depending on how well it is programmed.

Really.

The letter goes out of its way to describe how much “attention” the developers devoted to the shooting and movement of the bots, which my experience summarily contested. It contains zero recognition of how or why these bots are generated from scratch. What about the crucial visual and audio feedback to PUBG Which player do you employ on your initial crash? What about the fact that human gamers have to get on noisy vehicles to have so much mobility on the map and thus contribute to the average audio and visual landscape PUBG party, which is now reduced by a population of bots?

PUBG He started life as a creation of Brendan Greene, a modder who got rid of the hyper-realistic tastes of WEAPON III. Even with quality of life updates and easy-to-use tweaks over the years, PUBG yin has always been slow and realistic for Apex Legends and FortniteYang. The game is not working Fortnite numbers necessarily, possibly because the game still requires a $ 30 retail purchase to enter, unlike other battle royale games that offer a free entry point. However, it still engages players by sticking to their “git gud” mentality. On Steam alone, it reached over 500,000 concurrent players today, today’s high for a paid Steam game.

As of press time, we cannot find conclusive evidence that this bot update reaches the PC version; Other media have hinted at the possibility, but none have cited a statement from PUBG Corp. But the horrible experience we’ve had with these bots, repeated by other angry users, doesn’t seem to be coming to fruition. PUBG Powers that are. In a Wednesday update on Reddit, PUBG Corp doubled its bot usage in overall console pairing, saying to fans, “We obviously don’t want bots to invade matches, but we have to be careful not to rush a change. quickly without getting it. ” more data during rush hour this afternoon. “The developers practically begged their fans to” please keep playing “to contribute to their data search effort.

Multiple questions in the Reddit thread asking why PUBG Corp didn’t test bots in a trial version of the game’s server, available on both XB1 and PS4, remain unanswered at press time. While PUBG Corp has assured fans that they can expect bot-free pairings on the console’s “ranked” levels, they are currently closed, with a vague estimate of their “May” relaunch. PUBG Corp could undo all of these bot-related changes in a follow-up update, but for now, the company surely doesn’t seem to be understanding what has made a difference. PUBG Enough to keep it popular for so many years.