Most of us in the Battlefield community have been looking forward to the Season 1 reveal for Battlefield 6 all week, while everyone else has been dreading the arrival of some new rules for Portal, the mode where community-created content can be found.
Portal has been having a rough go of it, and most of it through faults of the main game. Namely: how slow weapon progression has been. BF6 players’ response was to create servers with inflated tickets and a lot of bots to make it easier for players to farm kills and XP very quickly.
That trend lasted for about a week before Battlefield Studios started cracking down on those servers, but the developer also boosted XP earn rates in the core game to compensate – even if many felt it didn’t go far enough.
Now, the developer is instituting more restrictive rules on what types of Portal servers can earn full XP. In a new blog post, BF Studios said that only Verified Experiences without bots will continue to grant full XP. In other words, if the experience has bots, it won’t earn the full suite of XP across account, weapons and so on.
You can still create Custom Experiences that include bots, but you’ll then have to contend with a reduced rate of progression. The same is also true for all other Custom Experiences, even if they do not include bots. These changes have been rolling out over the past several days, and the developer said in the post that it’s already seen a reduction in the number of PvE servers.
Bots may return in the future, but not before BF Studios explores “potential solutions that address current issues.” This leaves Verified Experience as the only type of Portal servers where you can earn full progression.
Verified Experiences alter some gameplay parameters without making major changes to the experience. Examples of that include infantry-only variants of Breakthrough, Hardcore versions of various game modes, and servers with exclusive rotations of certain maps and modes.
Those created by EA will have BFPortalOfficial, and BattlefieldOfficial listed as the creator of the experience.
What these changes don’t address, of course, are lingering frustrations about Battlefield 6’s progression system, particularly when it comes to challenges, many of which cannot be reasonably done in regular gameplay.
The blog post doesn’t offer solutions there, except promising that teams “are actively working on updates for challenges,” with details to arrive when they are available. Until then, you should probably make peace with the fact that you’ll have to grind XP in normal multiplayer.
Catch up on our latest Battlefield 6 coverage, such as the top meta weapons and builds so far, and our recommendations for the best vehicle loadouts.
