- Despite attracting millions of users every day, Battlefield 6 lobbies are still getting padded out by bots across all regions.
- This has drawn criticism from fans, causing Battlefield 6's lead producer to explain how bots are added to matches.
- According to the dev, bots are added to lobbies if it takes longer than three minutes to meet the required number of players to start a match – to help cut down on long waiting times.
Battlefield 6 has a bot problem, and no, we’re not talking about the custom servers that plagued Portal for a while.
The game is a smash hit by every metric, garnering millions of active users every day, but you’re still more than likely to encounter bot lobbies across different regional servers and game modes. Depending on who you ask, this might be a minor inconvenience or a major problem, although the discourse has gotten loud enough that the game’s devs are starting to take notice.
Battlefield’s lead producer, David Sirland, recently took to X to explain exactly why bots are padding out in-game lobbies, and while his breakdown is certainly informative, players are far from pleased.
Battlefield 6 Lead Producer Explains the Reasons Behind Bot Lobbies
In a comprehensive thread posted on X, Sirland started off by stating that bots enter Battlefield 6 lobbies if it takes longer than three minutes to accumulate players during the pre-round stage. At this point, bots fill the server to the necessary limit to start the game, an example being 24 soldiers per side for Conquest.
The match commences once these conditions are met, and as real players join the server, bots are accordingly filtered out. Once the 24-player requirement is met by real users, the server is entirely devoid of bots, with the remaining slots being left for other players to pick up as the match progresses.
This is pretty standard stuff, and it aligns with how most multiplayer games function. As for the rationale behind it, Sirland explained that the alternative would be exhaustive waiting times, especially in the case of a specific game mode on a low-population server. He encouraged players to stick it out for a minute or two, and allow lobbies to fill up instead of exiting matchmaking to give the wheel another spin.
Again, this is all quite standard. But the reason behind the community’s displeasure is tied to the absence of a server browser, which happens to be the ideal solution to this problem. The tool allowed players to manually select a server after picking the playlist, meaning users could simply switch to a different server if their local matchmaking was taking too long. Combine this with the bloated playlist offering currently live in BF6, and you can see why players are a bit annoyed.
The issue has become a common topic of discourse across various Battlefield communities on social media, and it’ll be interesting to see how Dice plans on tackling it.
