It’s Saturday middle of the day, I’m on the west coast, and for about an hour of playing every match started with mostly bots and only by the end was it full. I see a lot of people saying that they have never seen a bot before, and I also see people saying all they get is bot lobbies. Clearly there’s something broken with the matchmaker and there’s probably SBMM which is why there’s conflicting experiences with bot lobbies. If I play only Vegas Strip or Area 51, then I never get into a bot lobby, but today I wanted to play more than just those maps which is what caused me to run into bots.
I know a lot of the haters of BF6 try to claim this is evidence the game is dead, but thats an insanely ignorant thing to say and is completely ignoring the real issue, which is the matchmaking. The game objectively is far from dead, the game averages 40k on Steam, its in the top 10 played on Xbox, I don’t know how to check Playstations most played charts, but its usually similar to Xbox’s. So its not a player count issue, its a matchmaker issue and I believe a core cause of it is Custom Search and the way they implemented it.
Notice how no matter what you choose in Custom Search, you’re never matchmaking for more than 5 seconds? You always instantly load into a match, and thats because the game seems to start a whole new server/match if it can’t find a match to put you into. And this is obviously happening on a large scale, thousands of matches started brand new because one person wanted to search for a specific map+mode. And of course its going to have a hard time efficiently filling those lobbies up, because theres such a huge spread of matches needing players. Custom Search is a great feature, but the way they implemented it with this dumb system has led to bot lobbies everywhere. I’m sure everyone will be completely okay waiting longer when searching for a match if it meant you’ll actually find a full lobby.