Bot farms in Battlefield 6 have now been gutted. You are no longer able to farm for experience, weapon attachments, and challenges inside Portal bot lobbies of your own making. Adding to this, experience gained in Portal experiences has been drastically decreased after the first two weeks of the game saw the mode overrun with XP farming servers trying to alleviate the game’s otherwise glacial sense of progression. I’m torn on this, and it seems like the entire community is, too.
Battlefield games have always been a grind. In Battlefield 2, it took literal years to rank up (I played for hundreds of hours and I don’t think I ever made it to the top). I actually appreciated how long it took to rank up. When you saw a player on the enemy team with such a level, you knew that they were seriously dedicated to the game.
However, the issue is not with the ranking system in Battlefield 6, but with how long it takes to unlock gun attachments. EA has addressed this by increasing the XP gain for attachments across the board, but some players are still unhappy that they have to play the game at all.
Bot Farming Has Been Rampant
That sounds a little salty on my part, but it’s quite funny how many players have spent dozens of hours killing bots in Battlefield 6 instead of real people. If you take a look at the handy Battlefield 6 tracker, you can see players with literally tens of thousands of kills in just a handful of matches, all earning max rank and weapon experience. It’s not EA’s fault. There are a substantial number of people who will spend hours just farming bots to unlock everything, and ultimately later complain that there’s nothing to do.
At the same time, it’s obvious why players have chosen to do this: there was a shortcut to get the best things in the game. EA saw this problem with the bot farming servers in Battlefield 2042 and made absolutely no effort to combat it at all. Almost all the weapons in Battlefield 6 become substantially more powerful when you get the best unlocks, like Suppressors, Thermal Scopes, and expensive Vertical Grips to reduce recoil. The pre-patch grind had the experience values at somewhere like 10-15 hours of using only one single gun to max out its mastery level and unlock all possible attachments. I think with the new experience system, it’s under 10.
Some of the challenges to unlock weapons and traits are also extremely tedious. To unlock the PSR sniper rifle, you need to hit two hundred 200m+ headshots with a sniper. I’ve spoken about this before, but the maps in Battlefield are so damn small that this is actually impossible on all but two or three of the maps. The engineer vehicle repair challenge, where you need to repair 4,000 damage on vehicles in a single match, is also practically impossible: I spent an entire 35-minute-long game of Breakthrough repairing tanks and still did not get the challenge completed.
These arbitrary, grindy and excessively difficult challenges have pushed players into bot lobbies. I don’t like bot lobbies at all (I really think they reduce the integrity of the game and make the grind essentially meaningless), but I totally understand why so many players have opted for this approach. With the option to farm and play the game with full progression in PvE now completely removed, I do understand the sentiment that some players have that EA has broken its promise of how Portal was intended to work.
Except, the bot farms have completely destroyed how Portal works. It’s meant to be a place where you can find user-generated content, from specific server and match types to maps players have constructed. At the moment, there’s nothing on the list other than XP farms. This is totally useless considering all the hype around the potential of Portal just a couple of weeks ago, and I hope with some changes we can get back to the way it was intended to be: a dedicated fan rebuilding Battlefield 2’s Strike At Karkand from the ground up. Please?
