Overwatch 2 is the latest big title to face bot swarms, with players today complaining about bots ruining their competitive matches—and apparently, they’re starting to appear as often as every second lobby.
The competitive Overwatch 2 community is up in arms over the issue, with several different threads regarding the problem appearing across social media this week. Some claim they’ve seen as many as five players (a full stack) on the enemy team.
Blizzard does not include built-in bots in its hero shooter.
Many believe this is instead “bot farm” accounts that automatically rank up Overwatch smurfs to then be sold later for players wanting to add extra profiles to their collection.
Other issues are apparently more localized; another equally sizeable thread questioned the prevalence of bots in the EU region. The poster mentions situations similar to the one above and describes the behavior of these seemingly AI-controlled players: “They move weird, they hard feed, and they never get over 1k damage or healing.”
Overwatch 2 isn’t the only game experiencing an influx of bots in modern gaming right now either. Last year, bots in competitive video games became topical after OW‘s biggest competitor, Team Fortress 2, experienced a full-scale bot invasion. The game’s player count on Steam climbed to nearly 100 thousand, but nearly none of those were actual players. These Overwatch 2 bots, unlike TF2‘s, don’t seem to have aimbot or other cheats enabled. Instead, according to many disgruntled players, they just run around and do next to nothing.
While Valve took its sweet time fixing the explosion of bots in TF2 (and actually never really quashed them entirely), players are now hoping Blizzard will act swiftly in ending their presence, at least in competitive environments.
Dot Esports has reached out to Blizzard about these bot-player claims.
