It’s never fun when playing team-based competitive games only to find yourself down a player in the middle of a game, especially a close game where every player’s contribution makes a difference. Whether it be ragequitting, internet issues, or the game crashing, CS:GO Bots replaced the missing player(s), which was a feature to help the disadvantaged team. However the recent patch has completely removed Bots from competitive games.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, also known as CS:GO, is the most played game on Steam and one that has clearly withstood the test of time. Since its release in 2012, CS:GO has garnered a significant and active competitive scene, with Valve sponsoring many tournaments themselves. Though the game itself hasn’t received as much love from Valve in recent years, there is still a strong focus on its competitive integrity.
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Although Bots were not as good as an actual player, they still gave the outnumbered team a form of advantage in that a player who died can take control of the Bot. This usually required the Bots being given the “Hold this position” command in the game in order to prevent them from running into the enemy team, which would almost always result in them dying to a gunfight.
This meant that the Bot can still be incorporated into the team’s strategy as a back-up life for a player, which keeps the game more fair than just outright being down a person. However, there are downsides to this. For instance, a team could easily vote out a player they don’t like or isn’t doing well to simply give their best player an extra life each round, which doesn’t really seem like the main purpose of Bots. Valve, however, has not specified why they went through with such an impactful change to the game.
The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive subreddit appears to have mixed reactions to this, but many of them lament the loss of our low-IQ AI teammates and are paying their respects to them.
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VALORANT, Riot’s own take on the tactical shooting genre, was released last year and acted as CS:GO’s main competitor, though both games seem to be faring well in terms of player size, with CS:GO still as strong as ever.
VALORANT also does not have anything like CS:GO Bots to take the place of a missing player, but instead gives the team with numbers disadvantage extra cash per round and an Ult Orb in the place of the disconnected player.
CS:GO Bots aren’t being replaced by anything, which is odd. Of course, while it’s not uncommon for games to be inspired by its competition, we can’t expect them to completely imitate certain elements of other games. Still, it’s strange that not even a small cash boost is given in place of the Bot. We can only hope that Valve will add in something else as compensation to the team that’s down a player.
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