Ahh much appreciated
I realized my problem that I wasn't using "bots" as plural in the console
thank ya!

Kalitos yes I am using the bot warfare bot

whenever I try to set the difficulty of bots in game with the dvar "bot_difficulty", nothing will change. It will say the difficulty is default to "1" which is regular, but changing it to "0", or "2", or "3" will not actually apply, even after a map restart.
bots are permanently stuck on regular