I'm in Bot Hell

holdenhamlet

Arena PVP in B&S is the best thing I've ever played in a video game.  Or was... until the bots came.  

A couple weeks ago they introduced fairly meaningful rewards to PVP, and soon the bots came.

The NA server Arena is swarming with bots.  Most of them are Destoyer bots (they are destroyers because destroyers are the easiest to farm and level with, if you're a bot- they just spin and kill everything).

At first they were good for me as an Assassin.  Assassin is pretty complicated, and by using the bots as a kind of advanced training dummy, I learned all my class skills.  I've watched videos and read guides.  I can do the full combo.

But now that I'm at around ~1750, I'm starting to face real people.  I beat some of them, but I fear it's usually because they don't know how to play against an assassin.  The ones that do seem to beat me fairly handily because I have no idea what the fuck they are capable of.  I've watched videos and I've read guides on matchups, but there is no substitute for real-life experience.

What's been happening is the past couple of days I've lost to a person, I go on tilt and lose to a bot, and then I have to fight 3 bots before I can fight a real person again (and probably lose to them).

I don't mind losing to a person because I can usually learn something. I need to lose to learn. But I'm stuck right on the cusp of the bot-zone so any time I do lose, I'm forced to fight a few bots to get back to the real people.

9/10 of my matches since the update have been against bots.  I have never in my life seen something like this in a video game.  I love the gameplay to death but if it keeps up like this, I may have to quit.

I have two hopes remaining:

1. NcSoft does something about the bots.  Not sure if this is very likely since bots existed in Korea and apparently are still there.  I'm not sure they were nearly as plentiful as on NA though.

2. I get good enough to the point where I sail way past the ranking a bot could achieve.  This is doable I feel but the pace I'm learning and improving at is so slow, thanks mostly to playing bots all the fucking time.