So the thing to remember here is the rewards formula has both the awards that are reflected through score, and also one-time SL rewards for kills (and assists).
So Stona is right that in terms of SCORE and score-based endgame rewards, the effect of having more bots is fairly small. A destroyer has 440 base points of score from damage to give away, and a kill score bonus of 30 (10 for a bot) and assists. So score per game will likely stay close to what it was before these changes. Because RP is more tightly correlated with score, it won’t see much of a change either.
As some have mentioned, there are countervailing effects we can’t measure by having more ships closer to your BR now, larger (and possibly shorter) matches and shorter queue times, which I would guess will basically fully offset score and RP effects on a per-hour basis.
The exception is SL, which has those “pop up” bonuses you see on screen and are also in the end game record. Those amount to 25-40% of your total SL earnings on a game, so reducing them by 70% for the bots you kill should produce a notable reduction in SL from naval on both a per-game and per hour basis.
Bottom line is if you’re a premium player with insurance just grinding or doing naval vehicle events, you likely won’t notice this. If you’re using naval to farm SL, on the other hand, this will be a setback.
I would actually argue making bots and players pay the same could cause its own problems and needs to be fully considered. There would be a temptation in certain games (which we’ve seen in low-BR RB, often 80% bots already) for the players on both sides to just ignore each other and farm the bots if the payout is going to be the same for less effort.
The other issue here is, when one side loses all its human players, the game auto-ends, so we could see naval game length on average decrease here, as well. You need a human on the other side to stay in, even if there’s only one starting on each side, if you’re going to max score. It would actually make a lot of sense in some games for the two sides to communicate and agree to avoid killing each other to prevent a premature game end.
Before, smart play actually killed off humans first, because they paid more, were more dangerous, and you were more likely to get the win bonus, so even if it led to a short game the win bonus compensated. All the incentives ran in the same direction. Now… Not always.
