Are Automated Bots A Deceptive Con? (The Jimquisition)

Late reply but... the song at the end is the theme from the cartoon The Bots Master: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLKYOSiW7U4

I used to play Battlefield 1942 (the first in the series), usually offline. The bots did serve to fill out the roster, but they spent a lot of time making the player grit their teeth as they sprinted to take the planes and immediately crash them, leaving the player stranded on an aircraft carrier while the actual battle took place a virtual mile away. It does bring to mind the oft-forgotten issue that the majority of multiplayer games have gone from allowing players to set up servers for their friends to only allowing games on the company's own servers, coincidentally allowing the companies to turn those servers off and render their games partially or totally unplayable... coincidentally, often just in time for the newest full-priced barely-improved iteration to hit the market. The presence of bots on such servers to my mind raises once again the question of why we allow the companies to do this to us. (...Our local computers are perfectly capable of producing lackluster AI to fight against on their own, that hardly requires cloud computing to accomplish...?)

Kraken

From everything I've seen, it looks like Overwatch 2 is an expansion adding a story mode that they've tacked a 2 on at the end. Any other content outside of the story mode will be made available to original owners. This is all that they've said but I tend to take any word from ActiBlizz with a mountain of salt.

I greatly enjoyed playing against bots in Call of Duty: Ghosts. I would name my team members after My Little Pony characters.

Yinzer

I realize I'm fixating on the wrong part of the video here, but it's really stuck in my craw, especially after that ending: why is there an Overwatch 2? Shouldn't live services not need sequels? My first thought was that this is some blatant cash-grabbing by Blizzard, but in light of Jim's speech at the end there, I'm wondering if this is some horrible new form of engagement. Good video overall. Thank god for Jim.

Not having a Netflix style "skip credits" screen at the end was a wasted opportunity on this one.

Harry Moore

Very good video again. Interesting questions. Also, what was that ending theme song?

Perpetual Noob

My comment is engagement.

kesseldarkfire

Here I thought I was the only one who remembered the BotsMaster. Where DID you get those 3-D shades, anyway?

Asterion Del Toro

<3

I will not forget this episode if only because HOLY HELL someone else remembers Botsmaster! HELL yes! But, good points raised. Now, me, if I ever bothered buying a video game in the modern day I'd probably not mind the bots because I'm not tempted to spend real money ever, and I suck at games so having a dippy enemy I could actually kill would be kinda nice. However, I also get invited to play games by friends and get bored of them inside of half an hour because they're dull repetitive grinds, so either way my engagement with modern games is not high. Now excuse me, I have to go beat Castlevania: Lament of Innocence for the zillionth time...

Trevor Bond

Some mobages use bots as a smokescreen to hide the fact that their playerbase is dwindling, one game I know that does this is Identity V.

Matteo.YB