'The most successful Battlefield title in franchise history' has been reduced to this less than a year after launch:

Played like 6 games tonight, in the midst of a triple double XP weekend...and every last one was either almost entirely bots, with poor player balance (lots of 1v5 2v6, etc.), with the highlight of the night being the above.

Game just continues to get worse and worse. Yet DICE continues to twiddle their thumbs and acts like there's nothing they can really do about it.

It's honestly incredible how mishandled this game has been almost every step of the way since launch, and they've done it all to themselves.

Can't wait for someone to tell me about how this is all in my head / doesn't ever happen to them though.

Oh, and before someone asks, this is with crossplay enabled, on PC, playing normal Breakthrough (Conquest and Escalation have been almost as bad lately though), with a 2gbit fiber connection in North America. There's no excuse for this crap.

Well, what can I say? We'll just have to wait for the server browser

From what the lead producer said, it seems they had to fight a bit to get the green light to launch it this year, so apparently someone “higher up” was against it from the very beginning

Stuff like this usually points towards a singular matchmaking issue, where bots populate only one team and even that only within limits.

That said, BT is more prone to cascading effects, because of its asymmetric design. People will leave in droves, when they see they are defending, people leave in droves when they see they are losing and they will leave in droves when they see bots, especially so, when on their side. At a certain point matchmaking will also not populate servers at all anymore. Even your team is missing a significant part of the players.

Personally, on CQ, I have rarely ever seen bots beyond the first couple of minutes or in the last couple of minutes of a really lopsided game. I have had maybe two rounds, where bots continued to be a relevant part of any team past like minute three of round start.

There are big matchmaking issues, I would argue that the insistence of creating new servers instead of populating running games, the input parameter for matchmaking and the custom filter and possible separate playlists, play a huge role. Playercount must be rather secondary, because 2042, the direct predecessor had little issue with matchmaking in the core modes, despite the doubled scale with a fraction of the playerbase. Like in a similar timeframe the average worldwide population on Steam would be 2k players. Whereas BF6 still has 20x that number.

"server browser" will do nothing for anyone without persistent servers.

I think the reason for this is that Breakthrough lacks popularity. Conquest appears to remain the preferred mode among players, including my buddies and me, who play together every evening for at least four or five hours. We seldom experience server population delays or encounter bots in this mode, although there are rare instances where bots may fill the server during the first few minutes of a match, but this doesn’t happen often.

It’s.. both

Well, it does not happen to me but I don’t play early and late except the weekends, while living in EU.. and I don’t play BT, only CQ.

From the post body...

>(Conquest and Escalation have been almost as bad lately though)

Not to mention Breakthrough being one of their self professed most popular modes, one of the handful that was never disabled or removed during their nonsense the last month, and the one they chose to add a casual variant of. Not to mention this is clearly not just a popularity issue. Look at the complete and total lack of team balance on display in my image. It's almost 100% players vs bots. Not a single real player on the enemy team from the start of the match till the end. Fully PvE.

These problems also persist for my buddies in Germany and Australia, without much rhyme or reason, at all times of the day.

This game has systemic matchmaking and balance issues, and has since at least a month after launch. No amount of anecdotes, excuses or rationalizations is going to change that reality. And yes, I've never experienced anything like this in previous BF titles, many of which I still play from time to time (BF1 being a notable recent example).

I would take this with more than a grain of salt. Sirland, which I think this quote comes from, has been one of the "higher ups" for decades at this point and hence has was in charge of and/or present in many design choices.

That said, a server browser can only work if it can feed from matchmaking. If it can not do that, it is either dead on arrival, because it will only be used by a small fraction. Or it is used relevantly and hence takes people away from matchmaking, which in turn makes that situation worse.

We have had very much working matchmaking in 2042 with a fraction of the playerbase. Games were found and populated decently quick. So any matchmaking issues are tied to their parameters and these need to be addressed.

Damn, only took the Dice Defense Squad™ \~30 minutes to find this post and downvote it into the negatives.

Do y'all get overtime to work on the weekends?

Been playing for 2 weeks, haven’t had a bot in a single game so can’t relate, tried all modes

They took away game modes to help with this issue (lack of players) a few people had a sook so they brang back the game modes and now people complain about not enough players. Theres too many modes available for the player base, we either need server browsers or less modes.

That game mode removal nonsense never helped with this issue for my or my group.

We wouldn't have even known they did anything if I hadn't checked reddit or the custom search menu.