Spotting a handful of Apex Legends bots isn’t unusual in casual matches. In many cases, AI combatants are required to fill in the gaps if there aren’t enough real players loading into the action.
With Season 17 in progress, fans of Respawn Entertainment’s battle royale have recently shared their frustrations surrounding a poorly designed Mixtape mode and skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) not being as effective as they'd like.
The latest topic of conversation with the community involves bots, with several players having reported a sudden increase in AI-controlled Legends appearing all over the map during games.
Apex Legends bot lobbies in Season 17
Reddit user herb_of_life outlined in a recent post that they believe a number of Trios matches now contain bots, rather than actual players.
The player claimed: “I just played a Trios game (solo) and I swear at least 60% of the players were bots. All the usernames were ‘bot_xxxxx’. How is this possible?” While the exact cause of the apparent bot lobbies remains a mystery, it appears it’s not an isolated occurrence. In response, another fan revealed: “I just played 3 different games and I think there were only 3 real teams in each game, everyone else had 'bot_…' in their name.”
Spotting bots at lower levels is a familiar sight. For example, bot-heavy orientation matches were introduced in Season 16, to provide newcomers with a chance to get to grips with the fast-paced action Apex Legends has to offer. As it’s a fairly new feature, there’s a possibility of these orientation matches being responsible for the sudden influx of bots appearing.
Until the game's developer shuts down the bots, it appears they’ll feature in public matches for a little while longer. Disabling orientation matches may stop the bots from infiltrating matches, but for now, we’ll have to wait for Respawn Entertainment to apply a more permanent fix.
For more Apex Legends, take a look at our weapon tier list revealing the best guns to use right now.
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