"Bot" Button — Become a robot today!

It seems to me like the Autopilot feature isn't seeing much use. What if it could be replaced by a "Bot" button that made your ship a bot? That way if you had to leave or put down your device, you wouldn't be sticking your teammates with a Floater.

Your teammates would be able to see that you'd been replaced by a bot, but your enemies wouldn't.

How does this sound? Would you want to see this in-game?

 

I am sure about one thing, the Autopilot doesn't help.

 

I feel this would encourage floating.. join a match, hit bot button and get rewards with 0 effort while doing something else. Maybe it would work if hitting the button would forfeit any rewards but then people would rather float to have a chance at getting something from the battle.

 

They need a setting to remove the button completely. I keep accidentally hitting it.

Yeah… it would have to give you, like, 1/5 of the normal rewards. I'm pretty sure floaters don't get anything from matches (except maybe a Star for a victory), so pressing the Bot button would be preferable. They would get a reward, and the team would get a little help.

That's a good point. I suppose some kind of penalty system could be put into place that checks to see if people are hitting the bot button at the start of a bunch of battles in a row… On the other hand, there's a penalty system in place right now for Infamy tankers, and we all know how well that's going.

 

Any way my vote is to remove the button completely. "I also keep accidentally hitting it".

 

You can also get it mostly off the screen by messing with the size and location in your settings.

 

For the autopilot button you can change its size and location on the screen in the options menu. Make it really small and put it in a corner to avoid it.

 

Funnily enough, I've actually done the exact same thing. Somehow I'm hitting it anyway!

 

I'm not sure. The game would be 99% bots, almost everyone would do the following:

Go into match
Press bot button
Turn on Xbox
Play fortnite

Maybe the game should detect if you're unable to play ( e.g somebody be calling, internet being an ass, etc) and make you a bot, and when you return you have control again

 

Yeah… ideally, the game would give some kind of penalty if you press the Bot button at the start of multiple matches in a row. That way it could kinda tell when people are taking advantage of the button.
The idea of the game detecting when you've gotten a call is a good one too.

 

Maybe it costs gold and always decreases your infamy by 10?

 

I mean a bot is better than a floater. Have it be a last resort option that activates when the player switches apps or their game crashes. All rewards are taken away and infamy either retains or drops. This shouldn't be a feature to encourge floating, but instead to lessen the crutch to floaters' teams.

 

Yes, keyword is last resort when connection is lost or app shuts down, we definitely don't want a button with 'Bot' on it. This would be similar to current gen mobile mmos with an 'Autoplay' button.

 

Yeah, it should just be a last resort for sure, with 0 positive value other than to not completely (but still partially) screw over your team.

 

But even then, unskilled players would just play as a bot. Also, some game crashes and wifi flops come very suddenly, you wont have time to press that bot button

 

There is no bot button, I want it to be automatic, only turning on when nobody is in control of the ship.

 

I'm not sure it would be worth hitting if it cost anything to press. I figure it could be free, and if the game thought you were taking advantage of it it could issue a penalty.

Becoming a bot when the game detects you've been disconnected is a good idea. The only the only problem is that if Infamy could only drop when using it it would unbalance the Infamy system. Right now it's balanced, with the Nightmare league reset removing Infamy and the bots at low levels adding in Infamy. Introducing something where Floaters took Infamy out of the game might unbalance the whole thing.

Would a Bot button that offers slightly better rewards than a floater gets but still offers less than an active player gets be a problem? People would have incentive to press it because they would get more rewards than they would floating, but actually playing the game would offer even better rewards.
If the game thought you were taking advantage of it (like by starting matches just for the decreased Bot button rewards), it would penalize you, so people wouldn't be able to use it for free rewards.

Playing as a Bot would provide very small rewards, to the point where playing and not doing well is still better. Also, using the Bot button for free rewards would incur a penalty.
Ideally if the game detects a bad connection or incoming phone call it would press the Bot button for you.

By the way, it just hit me, the penalty could be removing the Bot button completely. That way people who cheat with it wouldn't be able to anymore.

 

It would either take a lot of effort to sort through this manually or a lot of time to program. Programing an AI to detect abuse would surely have bugs which could still cause issues. The only way to remove any chance for user exploitation would be to completely remove any user control and have the bot effect trigger when the app closes and have some sort of cool down I.e. you have to wait 24 hours before bot mode could be triggered again. Getting unexpected phone calls and such should be a rare occurrence not the norm so once a day seems sufficient. If it does happen more than once in a day the user would float and get no rewards as usual but the number of floaters should still decrease.
It would still take a lot of time and effort to program the bot behavior especially if they made various iterations for expected skill level and I don't think the payoff would be worth it.

 

Give the infamy to the losing team's top contributor(s) (lower net infamy loss), this way the infamy doesn't leave the system and fighting as hard as you can 4v5 or 3v5 you don't lose as much for getting rekt.