Several patches ago we introduced bots to Revn that fill in for players when a team has fewer than 5 players. Let’s take a look at how they’ve impacted the meta.
One of the primary objectives of the bots is gathering resources for their team. During the two months before bots arrived, the average Metal per player per minute was 396. After the update, this stat increased to 450. This 13% increase in resources means players can buy more items and upgrade abilities faster.
And, match times have not changed at all. Matches average 22 minutes, which is pretty close to our target of 20 minutes.
Let’s look at the number of deaths per player. I expect that players will have more deaths, because the bots are pretty good at killing us.
When the game didn’t have bots, the average player died 3.38 times per match. With bots, that statistic jumped to 4.47. Unfortunately, we haven’t been tracking stats for the bots directly, so we can’t say exactly how many kills the bots get per match. We are working on tracking this data in the future though.
I think its safe to say that bots have had a significant impact on the meta in Revn. Players are getting more resources, and Revenant Bots present a new challenge to even our most skilled players. Perhaps too much of a challenge, as some of our testers have told us. In recent patches, we’ve reduced their accuracy to make them more “human”, and we will be monitoring our community hubs (Discord and Reddit) for feedback on these changes.
One final number I’d like to analyze is Nexus Damage. This stat is a great way to know if one team is doing all of the attacking or defending, or if the match has a back-and-forth.
With bots, there have been 51 losses, 16 of which had non-zero Nexus Damage. That’s a 31% statistic for a back-and-forth match.
In the 2 months prior to the bots update, there were 116 losses, and only 20 of those teams dealt damage to the enemy Nexus. That’s a 17% frequency.
So, the odds of a back-and-forth match have nearly doubled, which is awesome!
It’ll be a little while before we update Revenant Bots again. They appear to be doing their job, and we’ve got other aspects of the game to focus on. However we will return to bots in the future, and improve their artificial intelligence.
Thanks for reading another one of my graph-heavy blogs!
-Silas
