Nobody asks this one straight out. They post “recommend me a server,” but what they actually mean is something else: “I log in at nine in the evening, I have an hour and a half, and there is nobody to run a dungeon with.” That is where the fork in the road is: a server where bots fill the empty party slots, or a server where everything rests on live players and you are the one who has to work around them.
What follows is not an argument that bots are better than people. They are not. It is a breakdown of what each option gives you, what it costs, and how to work out which one fits you personally.
The argument is not about quality of play
It looks like a choice between “the real game” and “playing with dummies.” In practice it is a choice between two currencies you pay for your evening with.
- A live population is paid for in time and coincidence. Five or twenty-five people of the right roles and roughly the same level of preparation have to line up in the same hour. When it lines up, you get the thing people come to MMOs for. When it does not, the evening goes into waiting.
- Bots are paid for in predictability. The group forms when it suits you, but it acts on written rules. After a dozen runs you know those rules, and part of the thrill leaves along with them.
Everything after that depends on which currency you are short of. A person with a free evening and a guild he knows is short of one. A person who plays in snatches between shifts, or lives in a time zone where the realm’s prime time lands in the dead of night, is short of the other.
What bots actually cover
- Your schedule. Content opens the moment you sit down at the computer, not the moment a roster comes together. For an irregular schedule that is the main argument, and often the only one.
- Downtime. The time that goes into looking for a group, waiting on latecomers and re-forming after a disband goes back into the game itself.
- Learning content with no witnesses. You can take your time working out a mechanic, try a different spec and get it wrong ten times in a row without feeling that you have let four strangers down.
- Repeatability. You can run one place as many times as it takes to drill a rotation or a route. A live group usually will not sign up for a tenth trip to the same instance.
What bots do not cover, and should not
- Unpredictability. A live player does what nobody expects of him: he pulls a lost fight out of the fire with some strange call, or throws away a won one. That is what the stories people retell afterwards are made of.
- Social ties. A friends list, familiar names in chat, the feeling that people on the realm recognize you — a bot produces none of that.
- A guild as a structure. Raid schedules, loot distribution, roles and mutual obligations are a separate layer of the game with rules of its own; how it is put together is laid out on the page about guilds and raids.
- Somebody else’s experience. One line from a player who has cleared that fight fifteen times saves you an evening of experiments. A bot cannot give advice.
- The weight of an achievement, and a living economy. A hard clear is worth exactly as much as it is hard to repeat, and auction house prices hold up on the people who buy and sell things.
A bot fills an empty slot in the group. It does not fill an empty slot on your friends list, and it was never designed for that job.
The two options, point by point
| What we are comparing | Server with bots | Betting on a live population |
|---|---|---|
| When you can start | Any moment you log in | When the roster comes together |
| Time before content starts | Minutes | From minutes to “not happening tonight” |
| Room for mistakes | Practically unlimited | Limited by the group’s patience |
| Predictability of a fight | High, and it grows over time | Low, every run is its own |
| What is left after the session | Character progress | Progress, contacts, reputation |
| Role in the economy | Indirect | Direct: players make the market |
| Who has the hardest time | Those who play for the people | Those with no predictable evenings |
How to tell which one fits you
You probably want the bot mode
- You cannot name two evenings a week when you will definitely be in the game.
- Your recent sessions ended not in a wipe, but in a group that never came together.
- You want to work a mechanic out in peace, not demonstrate it to strangers.
- You have come back after a long break and are not ready to be responsible for somebody else’s evening yet.
You probably want a live population
- Your best MMO memories are tied to people, not to loot.
- It matters to you that somebody sees the result and acknowledges it.
- You are willing to bend your schedule around somebody else’s for shared progress.
- Boredom arrives sooner than the fatigue of waiting.
Why one does not replace the other
Bots do not restore the feeling of a living world. A live population does not hand you a group on demand at three in the morning. These are different tools, and the disappointment almost always shows up where somebody expected a mode to do something it was never built to do.
For many people the honest answer is “both, just on different days.” The practical move is to choose a project on its foundations: game version, rates, donation model, and whether there are people online during the hours you personally play. And to keep the bot mode around as a way not to lose an evening when the group does not come together. On Valor it is set up like this: a regular realm on 3.3.5a with x3 rates, and a separately documented bot mode; how it works from the inside is covered in the article about solo mode.
If you are still at the “let me see whether this suits me at all” stage, start with the getting started page: installing the game and taking the first steps will take less time than one evening spent looking for a group.
