How we test levelling

Before anyone plays a new build, test bots play it first. Each bot is a new character, made the way you would make one. It levels from its starting zone towards level 15, playing as a person would: it takes quests, fights, loots, equips upgrades, repairs and hands quests in. A round is twelve runs, every class on both factions. The release bar measures each lane's confirming run with a budget of eight hours; a four-hour round is a quick regression check for comparing builds. It's how we find out what works before people spend their evenings on it.

This page explains how the bots play and how to read their results. For what the results mean for release 1.0, see testing status. At the end, the classes go head to head: a leaderboard of the latest round, some awards and a page for each class, rebuilt every time a run is published.

Why bots

A bot doesn't get bored and doesn't skip the dull quest. Run after run, it plays the same content the same way, so when a result changes, something in the game changed. Twelve runs a round cover every class and both factions. That's about two days of play per round, more than we could ever test by hand.

The bots also play honestly. They use no shortcuts: no level-ups, no spawned items, no god mode. The one exception is teleporting between distant places, which saves walking time and changes nothing else. They talk to the server with the real game protocol, the same messages your client sends, and every message the server sends back is checked by the WildStar client's own message reader. A message the real client would reject is counted as a failure, even if the bot could have coped with it.

Fifteen levels at a time

We test in bands: levels 1–15, 16–30 and 31–50, then the endgame content. A band is a stretch of the game a new player can get through in an evening or two, and it is also how we plan the work (see the roadmap). The first release is 1–15, on both factions, for every class and path, so that's the band the bots play today. When 1–15 is solid we move on to 16–30, and the leaderboards below get a new section.

Nothing is closed above level 15: the band says how far we have validated the game, not how far you can play. Races are covered in 1–15 by the race lanes (every race has been played through), so from level 16 the bots vary class and faction and not race. If a bug points at one race, we drill that race for that bug.

How a bot plays

One bot plays every class. It doesn't know which class is "supposed" to be strong: it reads its abilities from the game data and uses them as written. So when a class does worse, that says something real about the class as we have built it, or about the content it ran into.

The day. The bot creates a character (Human, Soldier path) at the faction's level 3 start. It plays the starting zone and then the faction's levelling zones: on Alizar for the Exiles, on Olyssia for the Dominion. Over and over, it does whichever comes first:

1. hands in a quest that is done;
2. works on a quest it has, lowest level first;
3. accepts the nearest quest it is offered, lowest level first;
4. tries a public event or a path mission nearby;
5. moves on to the next zone when this one has nothing left.

Quests. Each objective has a plan: kill these creatures, use this item on that one, press F on these objects, talk to someone, go to a place, collect things. The plan comes from the quest's own data, never from a list we wrote by hand. If an objective makes no progress after three tries, the bot gives up on it, writes down why, and moves on, as a frustrated player would.

Fights. The bot picks lone creatures before packs and nearest before far. If something is already attacking it, it fights that instead. It stands close, faces its target and uses its abilities as they come off cooldown: a heal below half health, a shield below three quarters, damage the rest of the time. Before a fight it rests if it is below 70% health. When it has a heal, it uses it to rest faster. A creature that has killed it twice is left alone from then on.

Dying. The bot waits until the creatures that killed it have gone, then wakes where it fell with half its health. If something hostile is still standing over the body after 40 seconds, it uses the Holo-Crypt instead and walks back.

Gear. It loots everything, wears any upgrade its class can use, picks quest rewards for its class, repairs at a vendor when its gear wears down and throws away junk when its bags fill up.

What a bot doesn't do. It's a fair test of the content and the server, but not of skill:

• It knows more than you do. It reads the server's state directly: where the creatures are, its exact health, what is in its quest log.
• It walks in straight lines and doesn't use taxis.
• It sends the game's messages straight to the server, so it skips the checks the game client makes before sending them: whether it lets you talk to someone, click an object or use an ability. A quest a bot finishes can still be blocked for you, and only people playing find those.
• It doesn't dodge telegraphs, interrupt or use crowd control on purpose.
• It spends its points crudely: every tier point in one ability, the cheapest AMPs first.
• Mini-game windows (keypads, rescues) are answered as if won, not played.
• It skips gathering, crafting, dailies and contracts, and tries each public event and path mission only once.

A person who dodges and interrupts will do better than the bots, so read their deaths as an upper bound.

Reading the results

A run ends one of two ways:

• Reached 15: the character got to level 15 inside its time budget (eight hours for a bar round, four for a regression check). The time it took is the headline number: faster is smoother content.
• Stopped: the time ran out, or the bot had nothing left it could do. The report says where it stopped and why.

Each place the bot got stuck is a blocker: a quest item that never arrived, an objective that wouldn't count, a path mission that wouldn't finish, a teleport that failed. Every blocker gets looked at:

• most are bugs in the game, and become fixes;
• some are things the bot can't do yet, and become work on the bot;
• a few turn out to be quests that work exactly as the retail game did and were simply hard.

That's why a stopped run is useful: it points at the next thing to fix.

Numbers to keep in mind:

• Deaths count each time the bot died. Before 19 October 2026 the bot counted each death about twice; those older numbers are marked in the class histories.
• Quests count those handed in, not just accepted.
• A run's commit says which version of Bezgelor it played. The bot has versions too: when we change how it plays, older runs are no longer comparable, so the leaderboard only ever shows the latest round of the current bot. Older runs stay in each class's history.

Every run's full report is published, with its command, so anyone can run it again and check us. The method in more detail, the report format and the commands are in the test reports.

The runs

Levels 1–15

Leaderboard

The latest round of the current bot, class against class.

Awards

• Fastest to 15: Medic (Dominion), in 5 h 17 min. report
• Most kills: Engineer (Exile), 536 kills. report
• Fewest deaths (on a run that reached 15): Medic (Dominion), 2 deaths. report
• Quest machine: Spellslinger (Exile), 190 quests completed. report
• Hardest hitter: Esper (Dominion), Telekinetic Strike, 568603 damage. report
• Healer of the round: Esper (Exile), 154152 healing done. report
• Unluckiest: Spellslinger (Exile), 59 deaths. report

Fun facts from the latest runs

The ability that hit the most times was Ignite, with 9341 hits. The ability that did the most damage in total was Telekinetic Strike, with 1129099 damage. The best critical-hit rate was Warrior, at 8% of 20474 hits. [STUB] Conjured Fire Elemental won the most fights against the bots, 10 of them. The quest that took longest was The Protectors of Celestion, at 1 h 40 min (Esper, Exile). The fastest level-up was Spellslinger (Exile), from level 3 to 4 in 7 min. Across these runs: 2086 quests completed, 5679 creatures killed, 78.6 h played.

Levels 16–30

No runs yet: this band comes after the first release.

Levels 31–50

No runs yet: this band comes after the first release.

The classes