NetEase has been slaying the FPS arena recently, and with Bad Guitar Studio, a subsidiary developer of the group, launching Fragpunk with an impressive 113k concurrent players and thousands of Twitch streamers enjoying the whacky, card-cracking team shooter, we had a blissful few days of runnin’ and gunnin’. But just like Marvel Rivals before it, Fragpunk is already plagued with bots not even a week after its release.
Most of the best FPS games have bots. It’s a scourge and, unfortunately, a standard practice, but it was a realisation that came disappointingly quickly to Fragpunk players. We’ve all come to expect the odd bot on our team, especially when we’re playing in the early hours of the morning and the rest of our server is mostly asleep. Player numbers take a dip, and so it’s a standard practice in almost all live-service, competitive games to come across an AI buddy there to helpfully fill out the numbers.
But for a game only in its fourth day of life, the number of players voicing their frustrations is surely cause for concern. Despite its almost immediate popularity, Fragpunk received mixed reviews in the first few days after launch, and this was mostly due to players growing increasingly frustrated with the thinly-veiled inclusion of bots. Granted, the game is now sitting pretty with a ‘Mostly Positive’ tag on Steam, thanks to a push from the subreddit, but the issue still remains.
Perhaps the worst part, however, is the fact that bots are running rampant in ranked matches. If you suffer a particularly bad losing streak in quickplay, you can almost accept the easy-mode match that looms on the horizon. The skill-based matchmaking and hidden MMR that sadly exists in every shooter works dutifully to provide the dopamine hit of a win and pull you out of the quagmire so you keep queuing for one last game and don’t log off on a loss. We get it, it happens, and it’s an industry norm.
But when we lock in and load up for ranked, we shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not we get lumped with an AI that runs headfirst into a wall for the whole match. If you suffer a losing streak in ranked, then that should be the only thing spurring you forward. The whole point of a competitive mode is to git gud on your own, and winning a ‘freebie’ match against bots completely destroys the integrity of the whole thing. One frustrated commenter on a recent Reddit thread hit the nail on the head and said, “people play a multiplayer game to go up against real life humans – not to play against bots.”
Fragpunk is still in its infancy, so we can hold out hope that developer Bad Guitar Studio will listen to its community and recognize what the players want. In the meantime, check out Marvel Rivals on Steam Deck for some more snappy shooting and find out which heroes are stomping the meta in our Overwatch 2 tier list. Or, if you just want some freebies, we’ve got plenty of Tribe Nine codes and Genshin Impact codes for you, too.