There's many reasons why IA sucks in UT3, and most of them are, predictably enough, UI related.
Well im bored and have nothing usefull to do right now, so i might aswell get out my favorite whacking stick, and give this horse another good thrashing! yay!
1) We all know that UT3's UI is not very fun to work with, its clunky and poorly laid out, you need to go through several screens to get anything done.. well, thats not a huge problem if all you do with it is click the server browser and join a game, but this is not the case when playing IA, you need to use that horrible thing quite often, more so than ever now, because UT3 wont remember anything, not only do you have to reselect all your muties and bots every time you start the game, it wont even remember basic stuff like last map played between matches.
Seriously, the UI alone just drains the fun right out of it, its like you have to fill out a form every bloody time you want to play, a tax form at that! so it is all too easy to decide to just launch one of your other, more user freindly games instead, like one of the older UT's for instance..
2) There's very little you can do with a match, just add x amount of bots and start a map with X time and fraglimit, thats pretty much it, in the past we used to get much more, like configuring spawnprotection, enabeling or disabeling brightskins (ohh how i loathe them), configure freindly fire scale, config end of match delay time, allow weapon throwing, eh it goes on like this, i could probably go open UT2004 and write down a long list of them all, but my point should be made by now, there's a lot of gametype configuration that UT3 just doesen't have, and i miss it!
3) Bot selection, she is, how you say? le pewp! seriously, its just rubbish in UT3, no team selection, you can't see the bots you are adding, you can't make uneven teams, you can't set their default orders or tweak their combat behaviour, or set their preferred weapon, its just barren of all the things that used to be there, and for me its a deal breaker, i can't use this crap after having played the past UT's.
4) Eff yeah! Eff yeah! Mmm Giblets! Eff yeah! Me hungry! Eff yeah! MAKE IT STOP!!! mein gott why wont they just shut up allready!? WHY!!? plase make them stop, i can't go on any more..
5) The bots themselves are just not fun, bunch of wallhacking aimbotters the lot, not that UT bots have ever been the pinnacle of AI brilliance, but atleast they used to feel a bit human and where fun, now though, they have the response time of a paranoid gnat, and they can see through walls, nothing's funner then rounding a corner and starring down the smoothbore barrel of a Goliath aiming right at you, and he's allready pressed the trigger even before you rounded the corner..
And the difficulty settings are all messed up, its nolonger a linear curve, they can either suck unbelivably hard, or they can be CS h4xx0rz (not that you can't beat them, they just dont play fair), there is no middle ground, it just doesen't work.
The whole thing just smacks of "Fake difficulty", and they are not fun to play with.
So in summary, its a pain to set up a match the way you want, there's lots of configuration that you can nolonger do, and when you finally get the game started, the AI is not even fun.. and add to this all the generic pitfalls of UT3 that onliners also have to deal with, all of thouse annoyances, all of thouse missing config options, and you have created pure undiluted suck in its rawest form.
In all seriousness though, i'm beeing overly mean to the game here, but the point is, its just not fun, and games are supposed to be about the fun, sure IA may not technically be "broken", but its a swift kick to the nads comming from UT2004, its all the hassle with none of the payoff.
