Anyone remember Bot Epidemic?

[corruptrelic]

http://botepidemic.impulse9.net/index.htm

(Just a mirror - Bot Epidemic went under years ago)

Looks like the domain is STILL registered after all these years as I'd love nothing more than to get it started up again.

Bots in games have really lost their voice as it's ever more clear with each new FPS that's released. Developers are leaving out bots all together, or doing a half ass job on them (Battlefield 2 and 2142) thinking nobody cares.

Its nice to see Bots-United still here, but it'd be great to see Bots-United evolve into so much more.. a site with news, interviews, reviews, a catalog of PC and console games with bots, petitions sent out to developers for bots, and more.
I was only one of the news guys on bot epidemic (celtic) but I regret more than anything slacking off at the end and losing it. Ze0 was a great guy also, he picked up where cube left off and really did a lot for BE.
Maybe you're still around, ze0? What do you say, want to put up BE again? Under a new name but under the same vein that BE once was?
Or anyone else for that matter.. would anyone be interested?

[Maleficus]

Its harder today to get excited about bots then it was back then because theres SO many games today. Back in the day, it was Quake( 1 & 2 ), Half Life, and Unreal ( which shipped with bots ) as your main FPS games. Odds were you were playing one ( or all ) of the three, and that was it. Even if you had broadband, it was nice to have bots as a training simulator, or a relaxing diversion.

Now, we have dozens of games. Considering how much of an investment of time it is to create a bot by a 3rd party author, often times great bots are being made for games that have become passe, with everyone running to the next big thing. Sometimes the bot author himself gets caught up in the rush to play the next big thing, and the bot dies. Sometimes theres no time to create a bot for the game, because the "Next Big Thing"(tm) hits the shelves before ppl are done playing the current one.

Most companies that do create bots, create them as a bullet point for the back of the box to help sell the game, and not as a true means to expand the gamer's experience. Either thru lack of experience or time ( or both ), they ship bots that aren't good for much more then target practice ( which has led to the rather frustrating belief by most gamers that bots aren't good for anything more then target practice ).

I do miss the old days - I watched Bot Epidemic very intently for the latest news on all the bots. I'd love to see it, or something akin to it, back in action, but I'm not sure how likely it will be. Unless some game came out that really held players attention, and showed it would benefit from bots somehow.

[Zacker]

I do indeed remember Bot Epidemic and it was my favorite place for bot news

I am afraid that Zeo is never around anymore though.

[@$3.1415rin]

yeah, it was the first hosting place for my website for free which was also actually working

[zeee0]

Of course I remember Bot Epidemic, I used to webmaster it.

Yes, I am that ze0, or zeee0 as it were (username had to be more than 3 characters). I too was very sad to see it go, what happened was that Marv (of Telefragged) who was in charge of registering the domains for sites affiliated with Telefragged, neglected to renew the registration on the domain botepidemic.com and with that it died. I am glad that someone has put up a mirror - I intended to do that for a while, as I had a complete archive of the site on a hard disk, and was going to bring it back under a different name (botepidemic.net, or something like that), but real life took over and I never got around to it.

These days as everyone has mentioned it is all so different and the demand for bots is almost non existent in FPS games. Unfortunately, I am no longer in the scene, though I do show my face in #qc on IRC from time to time, just to say "Hi!".

Nice to see people remember the site, especially you celtic88! It is a shame that era is long gone, Bot Epidemic was pulling something like 400,000 unique page views per month, and in those days the UGO banners were pay per click, so I think Marv/Telefragged was/were making a pretty little penny from all of our volunteer work.

Most of the folks from around that time ended up working in the game industry, not surprisingly. Anyway, feel free to e-mail me at ash.reynolds87@gmail.com if you end up reading this any of you old'schoolers.

Oh, and by the way I still play QuakeWorld competitively online (in Australia) and there is still a relatively large number of players that frequent the servers here and in Europe especially. Since broadband has now become the norm, bots have really become redundant, as we don't have to try and struggle with 400ms pings on 56k modems to play QuakeWorld online.

Cheers,

ze0.

[genmac]

As a forever bot user definitely that's one of the bots site I always visit almost everyday a decade ago.

Todays bots aren't bad like pezbot for cod 4.
cod bo1-2 bots are also good.
Brink bots well their ok but the game itself is just not that interesting.

CSS bots well their ok but I still prefer podbot in cs1.5 or 1.6.

hl2dm and dods finally has good working bots tnx to Cheeseh's rcbot2.