Bots in Custom Games Not useful

NerDD18·2/15/2020, 9:58:43 PM·1 votes·1,691 views

Not sure about others but I will often create a 5 v 5 custom game against bots when practicing a new champ or just trying to work on something specific. The interface in this is lackadaisical. Why i cant apply bots to a specific lane on both sides is beyond me. Applying top, jung, mid, adc and supp as desired. Also with this the overall difficulty of the bots is lacking. Why cant i select a master level bot that would simulate masters or even challenger level play. I think this feature would be super useful in the game and would help people learn advanced concepts in league. I really hope Riot re-evaluates this feature and makes it better for players of all skill lvls. Please leave your thoughts if you desire.

1 Comments

Razor Feather2/15/2020, 10:16:36 PM2 votes

Making bots that actually play the game intelligently and human like is really, really hard.

You can make bots with absolutely perfect skill shot aim and dodge capability fairly easily. You can also make them execute combos frame perfectly, and always land skills the instant you come out of zhonyas and such. All that boils down to just doing some fairly straightforward position and time calculations.

Having them actually intelligently flank an enemy, make baron plays, split push, manage vision, and all that other stuff? That requires complex decision making based on an enormous amount of variables and incomplete information, which is really hard to deal with. Even worse, it needs to be done in a way that isn't plainly predictable or consistent, otherwise players just learn how it works and exploit it, and it falls apart. League is also a very symmetric game, and so the bots wouldn't be able to cheat to get around their weaknesses without making them a very different opponent to human players.

Basically, you can make bots that are inhumanly perfect super pros at hitting you with every single skill shot, but you aren't likely to get a convincing mid skill player out of them on the more strategic side of things. There maybe could be an argument for "skill shot training mode" where you can set the precision level of bots that just do nothing but shoot things at you and dodge stuff, but a real "simulated challenger experience" is not happening.