anyone else see the irony in celestial thinking bots will save QL

"maybe someone could code this bot for id."

no. virtually impossible to do client-side, anyone who manages would not only create a 'super cheat', but make noble-prize winning achievement in AI and informatics.

P.S.
But if I were at id, I could probably add this 'auto-balance team' in 10 minutes using existing bots.

inb4 obvious troll is obvious and other obnoxious 4chav shit

For what it's worth, client side bots are certainly possible - http://www.telefragged.com/Q2BotCore/ gives a framework for writing client side bots for q2 (a couple of bots exist using it). Obviously that doesn't help with q3/ql, but now q3 net code is know it isn't impossible to do something similar.

Obviously far easier to modify the logic used for bot_minplayers to just ensure even teams though (I imagine that cvar is all OP is remembering, although it doesn't guarantee even teams if players massively stack one team)

so no nobel prize for informatics? :(

it's not the same thing as I was implying

1st anticheat than bots...

I agree QL needs online bot support, although not exactly for the reasons posted by OP.

Bot support would be perfect for beginners and even medium skilled players to practice against for their learning a bit of teamplay and everything that team-games includes.

For example, my Spanish TDM clan cannot really practice decent 4v4 games for the following reasons:

- TDM is dead in Spain
- We can't really play outside Spain because of ping over 9000
- The few TDMs that are occasionally played in Spain and France are full of quitters, ragers, and detlew.

The perfect solution would be for servers with bots, and while not necessarily providing much of a combat challenge, they would be better than no bots at all. Even if the bots get owned, a clans goal should be to reduce their own fatalities against these supposedly "newb" bots, until they can defeat bots 4v4 without dying once or loosing a single quad, or even a single RA / MH / etc...

-- From here on is secondary --

There could be two or three awards related to this, eg: "Win a match against Major and her three clones without conceding a single frag".

To encourage new players to try the bots out and hopefully get addicted to QL, there could be more awards for player(s) -vs- bot gameplay.

"Defeat Xaero and his band of malevolent mud-jousters!" Each award of this type could have 1v4 and 4v4 variations, but this would mean preparing a new "Bot Challenge" menu on the website so this idea is secondary.

tl;dr bots would be great for teamplay practice

QL still has the bot_minplayers server-side cvar, but it was buggy in Q3 and I'm not sure if it's fixed. They could also easily set the skill of the bots based on sv_skillrating value.
Programming a bot for CTF would be a remarkable coding achievement, but don't forget that it would probably triple the CPU usage on the servers, and it's also far beyond the capabilities of the current QL dev team imo.

edit: and bot commands like follow me still works in QL

how do i give the command?

in team chat like this:

"I'm the leader" or "Get the flag"
"defend the yellow armor" or "Grunt defend the yellow armor"
"Daemia help Sorlag" or "help me" or "Xaero accompany Crash and Visor"
"Sarge camp here" or "Defend the base"

You can form squads:
“Uriel and Lucy create team Delta or “Hunter join Delta" or "Uriel leave your team"
after that you can order entire squads like this:
"Delta partol from the Plasmagun to the Railgun to the
red armor and back"

They will take out whatever they can understand from the sentence. Q3 bot commands are awesome , and it was well ahead of anything back in the last century.

here is the complete documentation, hf:)

that was an awesome read!

yea, an awesome piece of code never ever upgraded or coded any further, what a shame:((

I actually bought Team Arena, it's a shame how it kind of never got any attention.

I played that one too and I really liked some of the custom maps from the threewave packs, and from other packs as well. The custom clients with advanced options like better HUD came too late to draw enough attention and TA remained in the shadow of the more promising (and more "pro frirendly") mods like 3W for example..

Many TA maps were huge, and huge CTF maps never work with public games (except some great 16v16 terra maps perhaps), and a CTF map needs to be played in public before it can be considered as a viable option in tourneys

There were many problems ofc, like it was not focusing on duel which was a big minus in an egoistic game like Q3, but - imo - the main problem was that the fixed TA power-ups were killing the very soul of CTF. (It must be noted that you can't really blame id for that because noone could see that coming that time.)
It turned out that they not only slow down the gameplay because you had to go back to the base to pick one up and have a chance, but they also made non-tie games more imba as well by heavily favoring defense over attack.
With the lack of the teamplay skills in 2001, tbh only the top tier games were worthy and fun. (and the mindless 16v16 pub terra games on jolt ofc xD)

I still don't get it why we don't have all the Team Arena gametypes and maps in QL when id owns the rights. I can understand that not many would like or play those things, but I just can't see how having more options like Harvester, 1CTF could hurt QuakeLive in any way.

ps.: btw jolt points to fb now. wtf.

Well turns out this is not working in QL, at least not for me in CTF:(
Whatever command you may issue, the only thing bots will respond with is "Where are you nick?, I can't find you...", and they just ignore the command.

\add spiter bot pack for ql

FUCK YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

oh wait i stoped playing that pice of garbage :l

QL bots are totally bugged. Most of them use only preferred weapon and won't switch even if they're out of ammo and will just run around on empty. They tend to freeze a lot (especially in TDM) and won't move until you get close to them. I don't remember how they acted in vq3 but they weren't this dumb in OSP.

Anyway, even if they improve them I don't like the idea of bots joining online games.

Yeah they are really dumb in QL. They just kinda wander around aimlessly like zombies. I think they do somewhat time the megahealth in some duel maps but that's about it. If you get them low on heath they don't even shoot at you, they just walk around until you pummel them. And this is on nightmare setting.

But /addbot major 5 ftw
I tell you what, she can hit some epic air rockets.