Your first lobbies are mostly not real people
New players routinely report that the game felt manageable for the first few hours and then abruptly did not. The likely explanation is that up to somewhere around level four or five you are largely matched against bots presented as ordinary players — not labelled, not in a tutorial mode, just in the lobby. This is worth knowing for exactly one reason: the difficulty you experienced in your first evening is not the difficulty of the game, so do not pick a class or judge your own skill on it.
- Bots appear as normal player characters, with names and gear, and drop loot when killed.
- They are generally free kills carrying reasonable loot, so they are worth taking rather than avoiding.
- The transition is not announced. Nothing tells you the lobby composition changed.
Three tells, in order of reliability
None of these are confirmed by the developers. They are patterns one high-hour player reports, and the first is the only one that is close to objective — the other two are judgement calls that get easier with hours played.
| Tell | What to look for | How much to trust it |
|---|---|---|
| The name | Real player names are capped at 15 characters. A name longer than that cannot belong to a player, and the source cites a 17-character example | Strongest. It is a hard limit rather than a behavioural read, though a bot can also be given a short name — so a long name proves a bot, and a short one proves nothing |
| The movement | Bots run in straight lines — directly forward, directly back, or strafing flat. They rarely move diagonally and do not use movement abilities to gain an angle | Good once you know what a real player looks like. Reads badly against genuinely new players, who also move simply |
| The attention | A bot fixated on a monster can take several hits from you before switching to you at all. A player turns immediately | Reliable in the moment, but you have already committed to the fight by the time you learn it |
The name
- What to look for
- Real player names are capped at 15 characters. A name longer than that cannot belong to a player, and the source cites a 17-character example
- How much to trust it
- Strongest. It is a hard limit rather than a behavioural read, though a bot can also be given a short name — so a long name proves a bot, and a short one proves nothing
The movement
- What to look for
- Bots run in straight lines — directly forward, directly back, or strafing flat. They rarely move diagonally and do not use movement abilities to gain an angle
- How much to trust it
- Good once you know what a real player looks like. Reads badly against genuinely new players, who also move simply
The attention
- What to look for
- A bot fixated on a monster can take several hits from you before switching to you at all. A player turns immediately
- How much to trust it
- Reliable in the moment, but you have already committed to the fight by the time you learn it
It is probably the whole lobby, not one straggler
The source reports never having found a single bot mixed into a lobby of real players — if one player in a match reads as a bot, the rest generally do too. He hedges this himself, and it is the least verifiable claim here, but it is a useful working assumption: identifying one bot is a reason to relax about the rest of the run rather than to keep watching your back for the real player who is probably not there.
- Practical effect: one confirmed bot means a run where you can take the boss, the Mist Lord or a contested loot zone far more cheaply than usual.
- The reverse also holds. If one opponent is clearly a real player, stop assuming the rest are free.
- This is a pattern, not a rule, and the source says so.
Losing repeatedly may put you back among them
There appears to be some form of pity behaviour: a run of losses can drop you into a bot lobby again, presumably to let you rebuild. This is the most heavily hedged claim in the material — the source says he is still investigating how it works and declines to describe it in detail — so treat it as a possibility rather than a mechanic to plan around. If you are losing badly and a lobby suddenly feels easy again, this may be why, and the correct response is to bank a few runs rather than to assume you have improved.
Gear value looks like it decides the rest of the lobby
Separately from bots, the source reports a consistent pattern in who else turns up: within a single difficulty, the equipment you bring seems to be reflected in what your opponents bring. Enter Normal in a full set of blues and most people you meet are also in blues. This is an observation rather than a confirmed system, and it is not the same as skill-based matchmaking — for that question and the Steam-thread history behind it, see the matchmaking entry in the player questions section.
- If the pattern holds, it is exploitable in both directions. Bringing a strong set means the players you meet carry loot worth taking; bringing a cheap set means fewer fully-equipped opponents to run into while you do tasks or chest runs.
- The cost of deliberately under-gearing is real: Mist Lords and elite enemies get considerably harder, so you are trading PvE capability for PvP quiet.
- The source says he mostly ignores this and brings his best gear anyway, which is a reasonable default.