Gwennifer

Thanks for the fast response!

Are there any plans on punishing players who permanently Akshan E in base? They ruin the game for everyone else and it's impossible to tell if they're an account farmer or just toxic. My group of friends and I have seen the same players multiple days in a row with the entire lobby reporting them every time, so it seems like either reports are disabled in the mode or given the same weight as normal games, which may not be triggering the proper thresholds on punishments. 4/5 reports is the same 80% of players present as in a normal game, so if the weights weren't increased, then it'd be virtually impossible to get the system to punish players.

It may be easier to just temporarily disable Akshan in Bots while a better solution is found.

Okay, gonna take off my dev voice and say...

BRO I HATE THIS SHIT. After I played with a player who did this the first time, I told my team we need to make people who do this have a bad time against our bots as this is unacceptable for anyone in our game. I could not imagine the pain a new player would experience running into this kind of behavior.

Okay Game Dev voice back on -- we made it so our bots will recall and kill any player who tries to enter their base prior to 5 minutes. Given this strategy is primarily intended to farm account levels (from what I am personally guessing -- if players know other motivations, please let me know!), we want to make sure our bots can adapt to these new strategies anyways.

If we still see consistent behaviors like this, we would just want to adapt the bots to be flexible enough to handle countering them over reducing the player's autonomy.

In regards to smurfs/player-made bots, I do think this is on top of mind for folks but I cannot speak...

Laernu423

Dashi if you guys do this right (the upper tier of AI at the end of your plan)….the coop vs AI que could end up being better bigger and harder than the pvp que 😂.

Few of us only hope that the ML AI are available in custom matches. A lot of us roam there instead of with randoms, even if just duo!

Late to the party I know, but this is insanely interesting, cannot wait for your pbe test!

That would be amazing to be honest! I would love to play against difficult bots.

I will say, one of our goals is to deprecate and replace all current bot features with our bots (so at some point we want to enable our new bots on customs!) but we need to get the bots to feel great first and then those areas are easier to extend to.

Please do try them out when we hit PBE and let us know how we can further improve them! Also, let us know of any bugs or weird behaviors!

kerthard

I wonder if I'll find these more interesting for me to do my 1v5 bots rampage challenge than the Current intermediate bots.

I would be curious! My gut says not for our intro-level bots, but only you can let us know!

I do think you will prefer our advanced bots when we release & iterate on them though since we want to ramp up the bots quickly :D

Gwennifer

Are there any plans for an advanced bot tier?

Yep yep! When we do our full launch, we will replace Intro / Beginner / Advanced Bots when we do a full launch to ensure there is a smoother feeling ramp up into PVP

Kaillens

I mean, isn't there any possibility it goes south and everything burn of the ground trting to fight a drake ?

Oh yes, just like a normal game of League :D

warpenguin55

So that's why Renekton bot would randomly afk?

That is why Renekton would do it without the other bots doing it, yep yep!

terkke

excited to lose to the bots not because instant-reaction mechanics or perfect aim with skillshots, but because they're stacking drakes and ganking while I test the viability of my Swain jungle with Predator

Hello, Bot PO here (and article writer!) Please do go wild against them and give us any weird bugs you can find and report them to us so we can release a great product for y'all when we launch on live later on!

Zarathielis

I know it will make quite some time to make the normal bots, but does this mean that doom bots could potentially come back?

I can't promise anything, but I am building this system for those opportunities in the future.... And I am a big fan of DoomBots of Doom :D

terkke

Honestly the problems I had before were more related to specific champions: sometimes when Taric goes back to the lane alone he just stands there menacingly doing nothing waiting for someone so he can use W. Or how some champions can be “lured” in the top lane to cross the river and take 3 shots from tower at level 1, like Garen or Malphite.

And how Leona has perfect timed cc when you step under tower. Damn.

Yea, the old system was more 1 Bot Brain per champion design, which is why quirks in basic functions could occur in one bot. (It also caused a lot of pain for developers as if they found 1 bug in 1 bot.... They would need to fix it across each bot individually.)

With our current system, a lot of our goals are centered around the ability to quickly iterate out bugs/quirks at scale.

That being said, there is a likelihood you will see these behaviors and many more when we go to PBE over the next month or so. So please do let us know if you see these issues so we can fix them prior to a full launch! (And to also test our new fancy iteration tooling :) )

MontySucker

Yep, this is honestly a great point for Riot to expand the game related information delivery across the board.

You should be able to see what every champion does in game without having to google it.

Better jungle implementation for coop vs ai. The very same things that tell the jungle bot how how to play could show up as indicators for a human player in coop vs ai.

Plenty of other available things too. Could tie in quests(tutorials) into the coop vs ai system.

Just all sorta of little things they could do that would add up to make the new player experience way better.

Better jungle implementation for coop vs ai. The very same things that tell the jungle bot how how to play could show up as indicators for a human player in coop vs ai.

We are actually using the jungle recommendation path that is given to players at the moment!

Additionally, we are considering that when we get to updating custom bots, you can play with the bots as allies as well. Then they will use pings and emotes for in-game communication systems to help the new players learn these communication systems. :)

PandaWeeknd

I appreciate the work you've been doing on the bots already, I don't even have to test them out to say so. Glad they're getting an update and hopefully they will help new players out a lot.

Thank you so much! We have a long way to go but I am very proud of the work we have accomplished so far :)

Magerune

Just expressing excitement about all this.

My son and fiancé would have a much more gentle intro to League if bots actually taught how to play the game.

Yay! I am happy we can help you get more folks in! I actually think one of the biggest personal motivators for me was just how painful it was to get into League like 11 years ago. I wanted to play more in co-op versus AI to learn more but I just hit a skill ceiling and had to eat the like... 10 game loss streak for my MMR to be set.

I want to make the game that I love easier for others who also love it to share with new friends and family :)

TheBluestMan

I was waiting for the news about the new bots coming

So are we! Please check them out on PBE and give us feedback. :)

Spideraxe30

Are you able to share if we can expect any new bots added and if the start of game and end game chat messages will remain, I really like the latter for flavor

Do you mean their custom quotes that the current bots state at the beginning or at the end of the game?

If so, that is on our roadmap, but probably sometime around full launch (or slightly after depending on the feedback during the PBE 2-week test!)

deemion22

Can you control the bots with pings? in heroes of the storm you could ping yourself to have the bot follow you or ping it to go away and it would stop following you

Not at the moment, but if /when we get to a point where you can have a bot as an ally, we do want a way for the players to communicate with the bot through pings and shot calls. (Ex: All players vote to do dragon, Bot goes to dragon)

Zarathielis

Bring back Teemo bot, destroyer of worlds! But yeah, I know it's probably a bit out, gotta make sure the normal bots work fine first!

Praise be Lil' Devil Teemo Bot!

WoorieKod

Hijacking to ask if the new bots changes may expand champion pool or we'll be keeping the same roster of champions with simpler kits

Currently, we are using simpler champions for this PBE test to focus on the basics of all champs feeling good over a specific champion feeling good (Ex: Using Spells, farming, laning, etc. over ensuring Yasuo knows his wombo combo or Evelynn being able to use her Ult to escape)

That said, we do want to ensure all popular champs and commonly seen champs are covered quickly after we launch to ensure players can learn to play against them prior to going into normals.

For the PBE Tech test though, I believe we will have a random mix of current bot champs along with new bot champs as we also wanted to have coverage of both while testing (and y'all are getting our testing champs for this launch :D).

beanj_fan

Does this mean you can add more champions as bots? I know some could be tricky, but only having ~50 available gets kinda boring. I would love to be able to play against more champions as bots, especially newer ones

Yep yep! Currently our goal for the PBE tech test is about ~30 but we want to ramp to a wide mix of old/new/popular/easy/complex so that new players can get a taste of all flavors.

Ideally long-term, we can have a bot come out with a new champ release (but that is much further down the roadmap as we need to make sure our tech is sound prior to expanding it.)

SamiraSimp

question: if i say mean things to the bots in all chat will they respond back saying mean things to me?

Not for the PBE Test... But maybe one day if enough players ask for it ;P

bondsmatthew

Is it at all possible to have a feedback tab popup after a game? Like when a survey pops up

When testing WoW on the PTR/Alpha, the popup in game itself makes reporting easier for users and they'd be more inclined to give feedback with an in client feedback system

I understand if it's not possible, but maybe you could bring up something like this and see if it would be possible(hell, the idea already has come up at Riot for sure haha)

I have already looked into a tool like this and unfortunately, there really is not one for a case like this on PBE.

I am hopeful that when we get to live, we can figure out some working system for more iterative improvements we want to make after we launch! :D