It would be good if AI bots are added in custom games so that rookies can practice the angles and crosshair placements in different maps. It would also helps in improvising our headshots, and our movement across the maps. Also the bots can be made more challenging by setting different difficulty level, which the player can adjust according to his/her own convenience.
External link →I believe a dev replied to this question at one point and the actual answer was basically that spinning up a practice range takes up an entire multiplayer server slot and they tend to reserve server space for actual matches, or something to that effect.
This is correct! Range instances use a disproportionate amount of our server resources for just one player. Some of the suggestions in here would improve that situation - like allowing multiple people to join a range session - but require some engineering effort to set up to work with multiple people. Playing deathmatch while in queue is also something we want to do, but first we need to build the tech to allow players to join an in-progress match so that we can have long running deathmatches that players flow into and out of - otherwise deathmatches would quickly empty as players found matches. My team is looking at building that tech, but it's a large effort because we made a lot of assumptions in originally building our platform, game client, and game server that matches would always start with the full set of players that would be allowed to connect, and breaking those assumptions creates a lot of work.
Bots in customs are another great ask, fragging bots is a great way to learn the game, and also a great way to blow off steam after a long session of getting outpeeked in compet. As others in this thread have pointed out, we do have SOME bot technology as seen in the range / tutorial. Taking those guys and turning them into more intelligent things capable of playing our standard game mode is also quite challenging, even setting abilities aside. But it is another thing my team is investigating.
I love seeing threads like these and I want these things too, we just have to weigh them against other stuff we're trying to ship.
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