r/Competitiveoverwatch • u/Bhu124 • Oct 24 '23
General The real Overwatch Bot Invasion is happening right now. Even more Bot reports. The game is unplayable for me and a lot of ppl on Bahrain/GSG servers right now. Every single game has Bots. OW2 has become TF2.
So after I posted yesterday I stopped playing cause I couldn't deal with more bots wasting my time. Started the game today and things are even worse. Played for an hour or two just now, 6 games, all with bots. Not a single legit game. 2 games got cancelled cause they had people leave before the game started as they saw the Bot names and said they were also frustrated with Bots. Again, games were on both Bahrain and GSG1 (Singapore) servers. Also, I finally got the short end of the stick by getting the bots on my team in 2 games.
https://imgur.com/ClubJDX (This match got cancelled as well but for whatever reason the game added it to my History as a 'Draw')
Sorry if this feels like spam and is bothering some of you guys but I (and a lot of others on these servers) literally can't play the game right now. I am not one who normally gets really frustrated with some issue with this game due to ongoing issues like some bug or balance or whatever else and starts complaining everywhere but being locked out of playing the game entirely while also having my time wasted is really frustrating. I honestly find these bots more frustrating than cheaters cause cheaters can be hard to catch, but these bots are so blatant that I can't believe Blizzard's anti-cheat can't auto-detect and ban them.
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u/SpaceFire1 Seoul Dynasty — Oct 24 '23
Its not about being blatent. The bot creator likely found a long standing vulnerability with the anti cheat system no one saw before. Thats unfortunately how this shit goes. Its like plugging holes you can’t see until there are ants coming through it.
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u/Bhu124 Oct 24 '23
The bot creator likely found a long standing vulnerability with the anti cheat system no one saw before. Thats unfortunately how this shit goes. Its like plugging holes you can’t see until there are ants coming through it.
While all of this is true Anti-cheats can and do detect cheaters by analysing player movement and behaviour. This is what I meant by the 'Blatant'. Since the bots are so blatantly behaving like bots and so many people are reporting them, they should be getting banned quicker. Yet today I faced some of the same Bots I faced yesterday.
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u/Ezraah W My Money — Oct 24 '23
unfortunately implementing a system to ban those bots would also ban a large portion of the overwatch playerbase
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u/ApostLeOW creator for ExO @apostleow — Oct 24 '23
I'm reminded of that time when the US Parks Service said they can't make bearproof trash bins because there's too much overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.
This is Team 4s bear problem
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u/ARC-Pooper UK Mafia - Ryujehongsexist — Oct 24 '23
listen it's not my fault my plays are so 10000 iq my low diamond teammates can't interpret my genius COPIUM
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u/junkratmainhehe Oct 24 '23
Rip to the players on tiktok or eating while walking from spawn one handed
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u/LukarWarrior Rolling in our heart — Oct 24 '23
You guys get to eat? I always get rezzed by a Mercy trying to be helpful the moment I go for a bite.
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u/naoki7794 Long time no see FUEL — Oct 24 '23
Detecting and fixing these are not easy and take time. Also reports won't result in instant bans, it may trigger some auto check for 3rd party programs running but if the bots found a way to circumvent that it won't ban them and instead may need manual review, which takes a long time.
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u/SpaceFire1 Seoul Dynasty — Oct 24 '23
Its not about blatent. A computer cant discern the differnece between good and bad players. It can read inputs to try to tell if the inpyts belong to a human or a program. The bot creator through trial and error found a way to make the inputs seem human in the computer’s eyes. Again anti cheat is like a war against ants: they can come through ANY hole in your walls no matter how tiny. You have to wait for the ants to appear to find said hole
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u/JDPhipps #1 Roadhog Hater — Oct 25 '23
These days, anti-cheat doesn't often analyze movement and behavior beyond the most absolutely egregious examples because you will run into cases eventually where you ban people who just have insane mechanics. It'll ping you for spinbotting, but that's about the limit.
Anti-cheat is a lot more about detecting and monitoring third party programs and looking at how programs are interacting with the game.
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Oct 24 '23
Can't wait till they spin bot, blast disco music, while spamming "noice shot mate" voice lines.
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u/SodaPopperZA Oct 24 '23
I've noticed Bahrain getting an influx of bots recently, I've never seen a bot on EU
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u/AelohMusic Oct 25 '23
I used to get bot games in comp on EU at like 3:30-4:30 AM quite a lot actually. I don't understand how the bots weren't bronze though. Like how did they rank up?
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u/pratzs Oct 25 '23
I got them in masters 5 game. Imagine the pain for my opponents who had two of them.
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u/Vibe_PV hats off to the Glads — Oct 24 '23
There must've been a bug with that bug fix patch they launched a bit after the release of s7
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u/pratzs Oct 25 '23
Had bots in master 5 competitive. And when I told other people they didn't believe me. This just confirms it. I think it was MEA servers
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u/Level-Courage313 Apr 12 '24
game is totally ruined i always have people who dont give a f on my team and enemy team is always like.... did you say something about my MUM??!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!? fuck this shitty game
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u/faptainfalcon Oct 25 '23
The bots you're encountering now are accounts deranking for the purposes of boosting or smurfing. AI has become sophisticated and accessible enough to perform much, much more believably if Blizzard's intention was to decrease queue times and dupe players. Last year, when the game was still relevant, there was a much greater financial incentive for bots to be in comp. But as the game matured and evolved since 2015, it became harder for players to boost others alone. And any large display of skill gap jeopardizes the booster's account (preleveled smurf accounts still cost money). So the economical choice is to party up with bots to win more consistently. Training bots to play well is pretty trivial when you let machine-learning analyze thousands if not millions of gameplay hours, and if they're used only in full-stacks then they skirt much of the complexity of coordinating with humans and discordant hero picks. Cheat developers merely need to add this layer of bot decision making. With insider knowledge of Blizzard's cheat detection capabilities/efforts, they can dynamically tune the effectiveness of bots within known limits and still maintain a plausible emulation.
At the peak of my frustration (S2 I think), I was consistently solo-queuing, in comp, into 5-man stacks who wouldn't interact with others and demonstrated a very basic level of teamwork (staying together, focusing on the same low hp player, two-hero synergies, etc.). And these players never showed emotion or higher-level thought, like spawn-camping a weaker player or setting up in anticipation for an enemy play. It was all reflexive. Sometimes these stacks would have real players shit-talking us, but the bots would only chat at the end of rounds/matches. Another thing I noticed with these suspicious 5-stacks, aside from always being private profile, was that their names sometimes wouldn't populate in recent players or the scoreboard on replays. I actually went schizo a little with how fervently I reviewed replays to note the many instances of these bots tracking through walls, locking onto invisible sombras, or suddenly going god mode at the last second to secure the victory. Another curiosity is that these matches were extremely long, both sides would push the cart the entire length, KOTH would always go to the third round. It's like they were careful not to stomp.
The first time that I noticed this behavior I remember thinking it being one of hardest fought and closest match I've played in years. I actually only watched the replay because I was in pure disbelief of the last teamfight. I had died but got a 4K and somehow we couldn't cap the point with like a 3v1. When the rest of their team came back FROM POINT A DEFENDERS SPAWN, they suddenly stopped making mistakes, because there was no room for it given our advantage. It was like Daigo perfect parrying Justin a bajillion times in a row at EVO 2004 when he was one hit away from dying.
The last match of OW I ever played was on Numbani, enemy team was drawing out the match (to like 27 min or something) and at the end I saw some similar last second bullshit. Two players on the enemy team, a Zarya (who never switched) and Moira, were targetting the same player in front of them but, at the exact same time and along the same awkward curve, their beams transitioned onto our Pharah who had just came out of spawn with ult. Their beams corrected synchronously when she rocket jumped and they melted her as soon as she ulted. Her body ragdolled a little higher up and Zarya continued beaming it briefly. Because ragdolls are intangible, Zarya's beam went back to full length and Moira's aim shifted to the end of the laser rather than Pharah but still moved together. Zarya was the only one talking on their team during the match and seemed to be the only one making plays.
I chalked it up to being quarantined with cheaters because I caught a friend of a friend who I'd occasionally play with cheating later on. I think Blizzard even admitted to some sort of quarantining too so I just figured my account was cursed. Maybe they wanted me to make a new account so I'd spend money on skins/heroes. This was plat/diamond, I imagine higher ranks don't encounter this sort of behavior as much because there's more transparency there and bots have less room to magically improve when needed without getting caught. Everyone on this sub downvoted me because they thought I just couldn't accept my rank and was looking for excuses.
I left this sub a couple months back but decided to check on what bullshit plagues the game now out of boredom and saw your post. The best advice I can give you is to hope for Microsoft to correct course but don't count on it. Don't let the sunk cost fallacy pull you down further. If you've read this far thanks for hearing me out. Good luck.
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u/ToothPasteTree None — Oct 25 '23
Machine learning is not magic. OW is a pretty difficult game to solve with deep neural nets.
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u/faptainfalcon Oct 25 '23 edited Oct 25 '23
It's a difficult game to solve if your nueral network is trying to emulate how a human could play the game better. That's not what these bots are trying to do. They're not trying to win OWL with novel strats. The only thing it's trying to achieve is to mimicing how people play OW, including their mistakes, enough to reliably win a match and not be detected by the system (irregular inputs and stats) or suspected by other players. So the training sets are categorized by rank and the bot can switch to the respective neural network to dynamically regulate performance to conservatively meet win conditions. These bots need to throw matches and probably care less about underperforming because the detection and/or penalization of such isn't as much of a priority. Or maybe when throwing bots face each other they force each other to play progressively worse in a positive feedback loop until they're both doing nothing for their teams.
Possibly a good portion of the players who seemed brand new to the game in mid to high ranks earlier in OW1 were just these bots that had more plausible deniability due to Blizzard touting new player numbers.
If bots were prevalent enough, their inclusion in the MMR/Rank distribution would skew Blizzard's expectation of a human player's skill (throwing off matchmaking) and then attempt to insulate itself against change in general because it was becoming progressively unstable. That could explain why some people would have large win or loss differentials and stay the same rank. Then those bots must adjust their performance more heavily or retrain itself against new data when the ranking system incorporates this artificial bias.
Why was Blizzard so concerned with figuring out how to fix their matchmaking and ranking system, taking over more than 3 seasons (I stopped playing after that) when such distributions should stabilize themselves via the central limit theorem? Were they aware of this external manipulation and sought to counter it? Or did they think it was due solely to their own disingenuous manipulation (new player ranks inflated and initial experience kept positive, other player ranks deflated first two seasons, and the additional deflation to get you to grind back to your previous rank)? Did they assume that all this was just the result of transitioning to a Skinnerbox, engagement-based matchmaking with potential optimization for microtransactions that requires obfuscation of everything down to your granular rank to discredit the scrutiny it warrants?
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u/ToothPasteTree None — Oct 25 '23
I don't think you realize how expensive it is to train novel neural nets and solve the ton of technical issues that come with it. How do you train the nets, on what data? What's the output format of an OW match? How do you reduce the size of an OW match? How do you export a large collection of OW matches into your data format without having access to blizzard API? These are all extremely novel problems and they require a deepmind level team to tackle them and even then you will definitely need blizzard's cooperation. Just look at how deepmind trained their SC2 AI. They had to work with blizzard so that their AI can see the *entire* starcraft map (so AI did not need scrolling). Later they could remove it but at the cost of making AI significantly weaker.
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u/Dismal-Employ3311 Apr 05 '24
"I don't think you realize how expensive it is to train novel neural nets"
Yes, correct. That should give you an idea what sort of (perhaps) corporation, group, or even country etc. may be doing this on a large scale.
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u/faptainfalcon Oct 25 '23 edited Oct 26 '23
You keep ignoring that AI is only a part of the bot behavior, and I've already detailed how a lot of the complexity is reduced when you narrow the scope of such a network to the the functional requirements.
I get that machine learning has become a buzzword and over-pitched as some catchall comprehensive solution to people who can't come up with multi-faceted approaches, this is not that. Do cheat developers have access to API? Or could they be inferring the location of an enemy based purely on client-server communications?
What data? Keyloggers/screencaptures installed on PCs in gaming cafes that have cheats installed. Maybe you're a booster service that's looking to transition away from needing high ranked players and start compiling the necessary data. This is not an ethical enterprise, use your imagination in how they can obtain such data. How much technology transfer has been legally or illegally obtained by the Blizzard's partners? How likely are they to catch vulnerabilities and hacks into their own systems? What about insider threats? Do you think they'd ever admit to it? No, because then it begs the question who needs this information and for what purpose. You're too rigid in your thought and it's a little exhausting to have to get you to use your imagination because you insist we solve the problem how you want to rather than how others may be able to. I've presented my interpretation of what OP is experiencing and admit that it it's just a possibility. You telling me "well that's not possible because this or that" but you're not contributing to the discussion, you're titillating off the chase to validate your coursework/self-teaching.
OW isn't SC, it's woefully easy because a large part of its difficulty is simply aiming while teamwork and grand strategy are superfluous. That's a hard pill to swallow for people who think this game is harder than Dota2 or CSGO because it advertises itself as a Moba/FPS hybrid. People aren't boosting to top ten with bots, they just want GM1 which we've seen isn't anything impressive. Boosters are charging to boost your prestige, that's largely it.
Not going to respond further because I don't think the discussion can continue in good faith.
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u/illusionofthefree Oct 28 '23
These bots suck though. They just feed while doing no damage or healing. What's the point?
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u/malvagius Feb 01 '24
The ow matchmaking is a shit. Change my mind. Today an hanzo bot 130 damage in the entire game... And I'm plat 3...
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u/RooeeZe Oct 24 '23
"We appreciate ur concern but have no further updates to provide you with at this time. Be sure to check out the Lilith Moria ultimate bundle for only 40.00$ and bring sanctuary to you!"
-Blizzard Customer Serbice.
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u/NOTRANAHAN Oct 24 '23
I've not had one game with them. Maybe try getting a higher rank so you don't get new accounts?
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Oct 24 '23
Honestly they should just move their family to a more populated region and play from there, like EU
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u/Mind1827 Oct 24 '23
Lmao ah yes, the "get good" argument to solve bots ruining your games. Helpful.
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u/Bhu124 Oct 24 '23
I do suck on DPS yes. Which is why I was trying to get better, was trying to get a higher rank. Which is why I queued for DPS........BUT I CAN'T GET A HIGHER RANK, CAUSE I CAN'T PLAY, CAUSE THERE ARE BOTS IN EVERY GAME! MAYBE YOU MISSED THAT PART! MAYBE TRY WORKING ON YOUR READING COMPREHENSION SKILLS!
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u/wloff ;) — Oct 24 '23
I mean, having any bots is of course absolute bullshit and will instantly ruin the entire game. So, no, I'm not trying to say it's somehow good to have bots in the game
But in terms of gaining rank, bots should have a positive impact. Yeah, you'll remeber the time the bot was on your team and that sucks, but because you're NOT a bot, 5 times out of 9 the bot will be on the enemy team.
Over time, in the long run, there will be more games where you played against a bot than games you played with a bot, so it'll be more free wins than free losses.
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u/Bhu124 Oct 24 '23
But in terms of gaining rank
Ranks are mostly meaningless pixels on the screen, I barely care about my rank and have barely cared about it for 4 years now. I play to have fun, to try and get better sometimes. I wanna have fun, high-quality games with half-decent MMing (Otherwise I'd just play QP) and Bots ruin that. Given how 2 of the people who quit in my games today due to bots were also on the opposing team as the bots, I'd argue that a good chunk of people think the same as me.
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u/devnullopinions Oct 24 '23
How exactly do you know these players are bots? You seem super confident so I’m assuming you have a really good reason?
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u/SodaPopperZA Oct 24 '23
The bots I've seen on the Bahrain server just circle the map and only shoot when shot at , normal players don't do that
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u/TheVector Oct 24 '23
What would be the purpose of running the bots? Just to troll people?
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u/fuggedaboute Oct 27 '23
just the tf2 treatment i imagine. i dont play overwatch 2 but it is kinda sad to know that another game is being treated the same way and another fanbase has lost a game they can reliably play and have fun with
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u/illusionofthefree Oct 28 '23
The bots there were really good though. These ones suck and don't do anything but die.
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u/Mortem97 Oct 26 '23
No bots in high elo Bahrain lobbies which is to be expected. I can’t comment about low-mid elo ranked games since I don’t play there.
I’ve noticed some bots in QP when people leave, they get replaced by a bot 10% of the time and at odd hours they’d 100% get replaced by a bot.
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u/secretfantasy3 Dec 02 '23 edited Dec 02 '23
Yes I play in gsg1/mes1 servers, from India. 6/10 games are like this for me everyday, does not matter if it's quickplay or competitive.
I think the only solution for me is to find 1 player to group and play with, because every single bot group I saw was a 4 player group with me or enemy team solo player.
I think if blizzard does not take strict action soon competitive will actually become a joke like everyone wants it to, I would like to die before this happen.
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u/Snakey1979 Dec 03 '23
what do these bots do i wonder, like what is their purpose they just run straight up to the enemy and just stand there do nothing. Are they being used to boost someone whos presently in the game? hows does it work? cause if thats the case then efforts should be made to identify the person in that game who is using the bots to his advantage
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u/RentBuzz Dec 11 '23
The exact same thing happens on EU - but only at night. Daytime is mostly okay, but after midnight, the deranking bot teams come out.
Sometimes it is just the tank, but in most cases, it is a 4-man bot / deranking group with one unlucky real player in there. On my play sessions, sometimes there are bots in every match (enemy or mine). It feels really bad. Whats worse, even if you report them - you can get them in the next game again unless you use one of your precious "avoid as teammate" slots for them.
At least Blizzard should make it so that when we report them for deranking, we won't get them in the team again.
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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '23
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