To prevent many players from making life too easy for themselves via Portal, Dice is pulling the plug and dividing its community in the process.
Many Battlefield fans feel like they’ve been transported back to November 2021. At that time, Battlefield 2042 was still brand new on the market and caused a lot of anger with its technical condition. At that time, however, all experience points in Portal mode were disabled in response to XP farming.
About four years later, history seems to be repeating itself, because on October 21, 2025, the XP blockade now also affected the Portal mode of Battlefield 6 – at least when a game relies on bots. Announced by Dice on October 22 as a “backend update,” the change ensures that the game is played fairly. 1980833645956055486?s=43“>announced on October 22 as a ”backend update,” the change means that many portal servers will now award far fewer experience points.
Only a small bonus is now awarded for completing a round, meaning that the important XP for attachments is no longer available. After the announcement, many fans assumed that the challenges could no longer be completed on bot farms – but this appears to be a misunderstanding. We tested three challenges and were able to complete all three without any problems on the community servers.
“RIP Portal” – many fans are angry
The change is definitely triggering strong feelings in a large part of the community. Many voices on X or Reddit are clearly opposed to the changes, predicting a similarly inglorious end for Portal mode as in Battlefield 2042. These are the main arguments of those complaining about the XP block:
- Many see the main problem not with bot farms, but with unrealistic challenges. According to them, the challenges in the game are so difficult in places that they are impossible to solve without such servers with special rules. In their opinion, the mass of bot farms is more of a symptom. Currently, however, the challenges still work on bot servers.
- Another large group consists of people who cannot invest as much time in the game as some others. For them, bot farms were a good way to earn new weapons in a time-efficient manner and thus keep up with people who invest dozens of hours in the game every week.
- Then there are the people who actually want to play mainly against bots and are not so keen on PvP. They feel robbed of progress. This is particularly problematic because Dice announced in advance that in Portal, everyone can earn experience points in some form in every game mode.
- Finally, some see the change as too late. According to them, the damage has already been done, as many have already successfully used XP farms to level up. Now the rest have no chance of catching up in the foreseeable future.
They should have changed it so that only servers with default settings grant XP when there are bots on the server.
That way, there wouldn’t have been any XP farming servers like there are now. But once again, the problem was solved in the simplest way possible – which is not the best solution.
There are also dissenting voices
To a certain extent, however, the community is also shooting itself in the foot on this issue. After all, many players are also annoyed that it is even possible to achieve game progress in Portal by means of bot farming. For them, the argument that people with less time can get the attachments faster does not apply – according to them, such rewards are worthless if they are too easy to earn.
On top of that, they say the large number of bot farms makes it increasingly difficult to find normal games in Portal and also affects the game balance. After all, matchmaking would consider a player strengthened by bot farms to be more competent than they actually are. This is obviously problematic in a multiplayer game like Battlefield 6, which is designed for teams of equal strength.
