At least on the Klaipeda server, each instance of this particular map is occupied by a Teleport/Squire/Sage bot. I bring up this map in particular because it’s been the main map I’ve been burning Challenge Mode resets on. I’m not sure if it’s been about a year or maybe longer than that, but it’s what I’ve been spending most of my time doing when I’m not idling in town. In that time, I haven’t really noticed many bots on the map. Maybe there were one or two, but they’d eventually go away.
What changed? It seems like the new strain of bot will hop into any Sage service, take whatever warp they have, and plant down roots there. To be more specific, they’ll save the warp location with their own Sage, set up their Squire’s repair shop to repair their own gear, and let loose their teleporting character to quickly sweep up the entire map, instantly killing any mob in the general area they teleport to.
In doing so, there is almost always a Challenge Mode portal open on the map. However, because of the method the bots use, it always ends up in a random, usually suboptimal spot. For the other characters I play, this isn’t too much of an issue; I just need to get to the portal, use it, then warp to my Base Camp, then begin CM in a better spot. No big deal.
On my better equipped character, however, I’m usually able to get CM Stage 6, sometimes even Stage 7, cleared before the 10 minute timer on the portal ends. With a One Entry Voucher, this lets me get two runs out of just 1 portal. Nothing’s been greater than seeing my clear times get lower and lower as I figured out how to build for this.
Now that these bots are a constant presence, I’d have to wait for a bot-spawned portal to close before manually opening my own, and after the 2 runs are complete, odds are that a bot has already spawned a new portal… and then I’d have to wait for that one, and so on. It really is an awful feeling, knowing that there is nothing I can do about this. The option to report them is there, and I have reported them, but based on what I’ve seen, this changes nothing.
Anyway, I just wanted to type this all out somewhere. I’m not really looking for suggestions on what I should do about it, since the answer is clearly to gear up well enough that I don’t instantly get tossed from 421+ Challenge Mode parties when they see that I have subpar gear AND a non-standard Cleric build. Anything I’ve mentioned could very well apply to most maps bots are regularly seen on, but this is the one I’ve gone to the most often.
I just hope that Francis’s canned response, if it does come, doesn’t give me agita I will never be able to recover from.