Join pre-existing games in Gauntlet

[hushed aurora]

Anyone else tired of playing bots? Ever get that feeling that there are probably others like you playing bots right now? Why not have to ability to take over bots mid-game and join other players?

As a player joining a game I would enjoy the challenge of wiping the bots terrible team for gold and rebuying illuvials. You never know they may even already have a good team with great placement - yeah right!

As a player grinding away on my own I would be excited to see a player join and take place of a G4UDI (makes me feel sick seeing that name). A nice popup notification to let the player know would be nice.

I know lobbies are coming, but that could take some time and even if they do come this could still be hugely beneficial.

Let me know your thoughts.

[upper juniper]

Its hard to find players because airdrop incentivize them to go in OW

Season2 rework and hopefully rewards in leviathan modes will fix this instantly

We should also get rankings soon and probably a rework in the queue to give us more time to find players or completely remove the gaudis

I dont think enabling people to join ongoing bot lobbies would be a good idea as its basically an auto lose to join late taking over the bots poor team and economy

[hushed aurora]

I don't think we're going to get a ton of new players instantly to fix the bots, I would have thought it would be a gradual increase, so the bots will be an issue for some time.

I don't think it's an auto lose if you join a pre-existing game, a skilled player can take what's good, sell the bad illuvials and see how they do. You could also give them bonus XP or rank points if they do well.

Right now, many just wait for people to join a gauntlet lobby because they know otherwise they will play bots. At least with this there's the chance you'll find other players online, or if not, there's a chance other players will join you while you're playing bots.

Right now, if a Gauntlet game lasts say 25 minutes, and to search for a game it lets you search for 1m 30s, well theoretically within that 25 minute time span, if a new player were to search for a new game every 2 minutes, they wouldn't match with anyone and there could be 12 games going at once, all with 1 player and 7 bots in each.

With this system, within 2 minutes of starting a game, a new player would join, and another 2 minutes after that etc. There would be 1 full game and one with 4 players instead of 12 empty games.

You can also put limits so you won't take over a bot with under 40 health or something, so at least you won't join a game and insta-lose.

Another benefit of this is if you join another player online, you're more likely to "play another game" as you know someone else is actually online!

[upper juniper]

I see your point and it could be a good option for casual free gauntlet if there would be not ranking but id say it would be best to wait and see

I would like the free mode to also have rankings as its a huge incentive to play and get people around your level to improve. If we have rankings we cant have bots because they are all very bad and it would screw up the rankings

I stand by my point thats its auto lose taking a bot over. Missing some key unit(s) because you got in late or simply having 20 left gold because the bot didnt econ or rolled properly in only 5-10 rounds is the completely ruining your game. Wasting 20 gold early is easily the equivalent of 80-100+ gold lost by the end of the game. Thats why in my opinion is would be a terrible player experience to take over a bot, unless the free gauntlet is fully casual with no rankings