Bots Teach the All-Mid Fallacy

As many of you know, one really bad lowbie tendency is for players to think that THE way to win every single game is for all five players to just congregate mid and try to push, the moment the laning phase is even arguably over. But this is definitely not the best default strategy. It is relatively high risk, with lower chance of reward and a great risk of it backfiring if you get wiped. It should be the situational exception, not the rule.

As I'd increased in skill, the players I would be matched with in a pickup game had become less likely to suffer from this "All Mid" obsession...

Until now.

Of late, relatively new players started showing up who had no pre-intermediate-bot experience. And the bots have given them the impression this ridiculous strategy is THE way to play.

Intermediate bots, for those who don't know, have this absurd tendency to suddenly go All Mid relatively early in a match, and then do almost nothing else. If you are playing a custom game where you solo against five bots to practice with a new champ, when Intermediate bots started doing this, no amount of savvy can save you. Personally, I had to start adding one or two bots to my own team, to hold them off mid so I could either split or get a little peel and kill them one at a time.

Now think of the lowbies who are moving up into 30+ play. At some point they started playing matches against Intermediate bots, and they suddenly faced what seemed (in their unskilled eyes) to be the one great strategy: all five on the opposing team going mid and refusing to stop.

So those players learn to EMULATE that bad strategy, and think that is all you ever need to do.

It's bad enough that they grow up thinking the game is solely PVP, ignoring objectives unless the enemy team is wiped. Bots encourage that mistake, too. But now they're learning that it should be "All Mid" _and _ only PVP.

But because some of them learn the mechanics of the game so they can do that one thing...team fight...well enough to win a few matches, they are beginning to show up in ever-higher elos.

Thus those of us who understand the actual game objectives are increasingly faced with pickup teammates who not only ignore objectives at best running around the map seeking enemy fights exclusively, but now they have an idiotic obsession with pushing mid, often even ignoring top and bot when even a full team push (if anywhere at all) obviously should have been there, instead.