My chess app opponent went from taking 3 seconds per move to instant, and the chats stopped making sense
Played this same bot for about a year on my phone and it used to pause, blunder sometimes, even send weird little messages like "good game, tough one." Since a patch back in March I think it moves in under a second every time and the chat replies are all cheerful and generic, no matter if I win or lose. Did they swap the personality model or am I just playing a different thing now?
The instant moves thing is the tell for me. Real thinking takes time, even for a bot. If it's replying in under a second every single move, that's not a smarter opponent, that's a different setup where they cut the delay to save on server costs or whatever. Same with the chat. Generic happy replies to every outcome means the old model that actually reacted to the game got replaced with something cheaper and safer. The March patch probably swapped the whole back end and they just didn't tell anyone. So no, you're not crazy and you're not playing the same thing. You're playing the budget version of it.