Make Ai "games" Challenging

Petrico·10/15/2015, 6:34:31 AM·7 votes·1,120 views

I'm really tired of playing a bots game to practice something, try and get better or maybe see if something niche can work w/o getting crucified for trying Brand jungle. It's always nice to try something crazy with 5 people against AI rather than ruin someones solo queue. No surprise someone picks Darius or Kat and just steam rolls, why not give Kat a Soulstealer , tons of damage because the bots have no programming to counter her early on so now it's damn near impossible for them to even slow the win before 15 minutes (exaggeration but sort of not). And that's intermediate, the harder gamestyle for practicing. I would love if Riot made a more difficult or even attempt impossible AI mode for people who want to honestly try practicing something that might not be by the books.

Ideas

1 Ban snowball items - while some champions are always going to be strong early or carry very well if done right, stuff like Souleater and Occult Sword just give a bunch of stats early on just for playing against enemies who have no strategy other than go to lane and try to trade. Of course any attempt to trade against 15+ stacks on a champion that already snowballs hard is out right suicidal, worse it's more like terrible feeding like they're part of a cult that wants to create a world ending demigod. The downside is you have to get kills (no big deal) and not die afterwards (very rare once you get enough damage and life steal). Because it's easy to maintain 20 stacks and any death that would occur usually comes from over confident tower dives or just after a quadrakill, I feel these items should be left out of a practice game meant for a group to get better at what they're playing without mid or adc trashing the poor AI.

2 Is programming a jungler really that hard? - Not a huge deal but it would be nice to give the bots a more authentic mentality, someone must jungle and wards should be a thing. Worse yet you might see bots buy wards or sightstone but it's doubtful they actually ever use them. Why bother with pink wards when the enemy will never gank or try warding themselves. Oh Wait! Real players do that. I can understand it's hard not to get wires crossed in making the AI behave almost human but it'd be nice if you could prove a jungler is viable by playing them against enemies that will try to watch for you without wasting 9 other peoples time.

2.5 Identify high priority targets - This might be a little easier but it plays into having a roaming champion to pick on bad match ups. Good players will notice a bad match up or see a lane is 1-4 and send help, gank when possible, or yell at them to play passive. Bots are almost worse than Bronze in this respect. On top of noticing rough lanes, it would be nice if bots had a trigger to step up their game to a new level. If someone picks Darius, automatically give top better gear. Vayne got picked, program mid to go missing more and attempt to push her out more. An item on the ban list got picked, make that person suffer 100 deaths.

3 Rubber band effect - If keeping a victory possible is so important, set something up so bots will always try to get to your level and not just a preset low gold income and item gifts. If one lane does well, all the bots farm better and get items faster, don't worry you have a carry, right? If a team is doing below average and just holding on, keep the bots low and let them figure it out. This is only if you want all games to be wins, personally I think a lose should be expected when someone try something out there like AD Leblanc.

4 Track AI Wins, and punish them - If someone has played bots too much, make it more likely they get a harder difficulty. Similar to rank, if you cheese your way to gold, you're going to hit the glass ceiling hard and not have the tools to get around it. Sure Darius stomps in solo and low Silver but there are ways to counter him or play safe, you should not be encouraged to use him as a free pass up when you don't deserve it. Same with bots, whatever someone is doing, they need to be shown cheap tricks wont get them far in a game like this. It might also be worth setting these traps for groups of constant AI players and avoid getting someone who just uses it as a sure fire Win of the Day or they're trying out jungle Twitch that week.

5 MUCH more IP - You get roughly more IP from winning 99.99% AI games each ~22 minutes than you ever will with maybe 3:4 win rate in solo matches that can go from surrender at 20 to ~45 minutes to more than an hour. Either give more IP to the other games or permanently cut AI games in half. Make people work for the free currency and who knows you might also see more RP buys.

6 Forget Fun - AI matches are meant to get people to a level where they can try solo or climb higher in ranked, if I'm wrong just shut the whole multiplayer thing down cause if that's not it the goal of AI games is a cheap easy win every time. It would certainly be annoying to have bots behave on top level at the start and quickly get to their post 20 minutes - ever so rare - fed and very powerful "We fucked up" late game phase. However winning every game isn't as fun as each win when the Win:Lose is 2:3. It's fun to win yes but it's also fun to work and succeed, bots now often feel like anything could beat them and you've won the game almost 8 minutes in. Don't worry about how frustrating it is for bots to have lightning reflexes or even hack the game, it might even be worth it as a reminder to move to playing human characters. In solo you're expected to know what you're doing the moment you call a lane and champion, how do you get there when bots are such pushovers you win everytime and they're miserable at challenging? If anyone is winning 100% for almost nothing, send them military grade AI that could perform brain surgery and challenge them to improve. Sure it's a little fun to kill everything with 1000 AD but you didn't use skill to get it. Don't let a short feeling of accomplishment from nothing prevent making AI games worth something.

8 Comments

DerZermetzelte10/15/2015, 6:57:29 AM1 votes

I've waited for challenging AI since i reached level 30. And that was in Season 2.

Also, regarding your concern about losses vs AI: I'd be totally fine with that. They just have to introduce them as "Hard" and it's k. Everyone else can still play "Easy" or "Intermediate". What's the point of naming the highest difficulty intermediate anyways? Doesn't really make sense, if there is no higher tier. Trying out new stuff in botgames has become worthless, because you will rofl-stomp them anyways, even as AP Yasuo with Clairvoyance and Clarity.

So yeah: Rito pls. Me want.

4ManVotedAgainst10/15/2015, 7:15:08 AM1 votes

Just do a 1v5 against Intermediate-Level Bots in Custom-Mode. Try winning as Caitlyn without the ZZ-Portal. I bet it cannot be done even by pro-players. http://www.replay.gg/?r=NA1&id=1978682642&key=kSMgzTkrraA4nbfSS7nDbXO1hREs9UcJ The link above is to my re-play of going 1v5 against Intermediate-Level Bots in Custom-Mode.

ZephyrDrake10/15/2015, 9:44:58 AM1 votes

no one likes having rubber band effects in games and playing against AIs is supposed to feel like you are playing with other people. Do you see other players just randomly get an influx of gold and/or experience when they get behind for no reason?

You already have a limit on how much IP you can get from AI games and cutting the gains in half isn't going to do anything but hurt new players

How are they going to just match you with "stronger" AIs? there are 2 lvls of AI right now so if they are going to add a 3rd difficulty they would just have it available right from the start so you can choose whether or not you play against that type of AI. That's how every single game works, you don't see a fighting game or any game with AI say "you are too good let me just randomly put you against stronger opponents even though you didn't want to"

forget fun? sorry but what? AI games are supposed to be something you use to blow some steam, sit back and relax or learn new mechanics of champions i rarely, if ever, play. Why the hell should i give that up?

With the way the AI works, having them jungle is the same as having a free 300g bag randomly walking in the enemy jungle. You would have to not only program a path (which would be obvious after a few games) but also how to behave against jungle camps, when low on HP, against invades, how to make dragon/baron calls without making it seem extremely obvious. With the way they are they can start a fight against a camp without having enough HP to do said camp and just die to it.

You can destroy the AI even without the stacking items so banning them would literally do nothing at all. If you need those items to stomp the AI then you have bigger issues to worry about.

While i can agree that AIs need a higher difficulty none of these things (except 2 and 2.5 and those should be a given if you make a harder difficulty) would make the AI harder. Some will do nothing at actually making them harder while others will just make them feel cheap and not fair at all to play against while hurting new player experiences

Kitten of Evil10/15/2015, 3:10:44 PM1 votes

Bring back doom bots!