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Another thing is that the reason these servers have low player counts in the first place is because of the fucking bots themselves. People join, realize they're playing against fake people, and then leave because they don't find that to be any fun.
What these shitty fucking servers depend on is people not noticing the fact. It's the most annoying part about the entire thing. They've been half-assedly trying to make bots appear as real people for the longest time. In Source games for one, they give them names and avatars off random Steam profiles and make it so they don't show up as bots in the server browser.
it doesn't fool anybody who's caring to pay attention because it's still obvious from a bunch of things that they're bots, but the target is people who have their brain turned off and are too oblivious to it. They'll stay on the server for hours thinking they're playing with actual people. I guess the intent is to get enough of those people until the server fills up because otherwise they wouldn't play at all. As if servers without bots never organically fill up.
It might've worked well back in 2012, but people kind of pay more attention while playing on servers now.
Even if you notice them once in-game, it's still fucking irritating to join a server that shows up as with no bots but has them.
The farthest length I've seen them go was in a MW2 server. They actually had the bots actively chatting in the chat between each other and typing to you when you killed them. Literally like Quake 3 bots, but not reciprocating. It still wasn't good enough to fool anyone with a brain, but holy shit.
The only other motive I can think of is ads. Source servers had them back in the day with HTML MOTDs, so you could probably save some money by baiting people to play on your server. Though it's redundant now because that's just not a thing anymore.
