XDefiant’s game director has confirmed that the Spiderbot was inadvertently buffed as part of season one’s update—but it should be fixed soon.
While yesterday’s season one update added new weapons, a new faction, a new map, and more to XDefiant, the patch also accidentally made one of the game’s most annoying abilities even worse.
“So when the game launched there was a bug that you could shoot down at your feet and destroy the spiderbot,” Rubin said on Twitter/X. “This was not intended. However, there was also a bug in that meleeing them was way harder than it was supposed to be. So, we wanted to keep the bug of shooting them off your own face in the game until we fixed other spiderbot issues. However, the bug fix got integrated into the season one patch and so an important counter was removed unintentionally.”
XDefiant players immediately started to complain on social media about the Spiderbot after yesterday’s update went live, pointing out that it felt stronger in spite of its supposed nerf, which increased its cooldown and adjusted the bot behavior.
“We are reverting that fix in the next non-emergency patch,” Rubin confirmed. “So, you will again be able to shoot them off your own face by shooting at your feet. The other changes to spiderbot will remain. i.e. longer cooldown, etc.”
Rubin also said future tweaks are coming to the Spiderbot, changing how it works “so that there is an easier and clearer way to get them off your own face.” But until then, shooting them off of your face will still be possible.
It’s unclear when the Spiderbot changes will go live. For now, players can hop into Ranked mode and hope that their enemies are merciful and pick a different faction.