Why can't we bridge the gap between bots and norms?
Hey, all. Silver 4 scrub here, been playing since January.
League seems to have a bit of a problem with the new and new-ish player experience, and I think part of that has to be bots. It's nice that we can practice a new champ against AI before going into a game against real opponents, but the bot experience ends at far too low a level for it to be a valuable tool after a relatively short time.
For example, I recently picked up Darius, and I'd like to git gud with him. I can utterly terrorize intermediate bots, easily 1v2ing the top lane, getting pentakills, 30+ kills in an 18-minute game, etc. But then I queue up for a normal game, and it becomes painfully obvious that I'm simply not a good Darius player. I tend to lose most laning phases, and I don't have the skills and knowledge of his kit to not get kited and neutralized later in game. Bots are therefore virtually useless to me; they offer no meaningful practice beyond getting to use my abilities and see how they work. They might as well be target dummies.
So, why don't we have Advanced bots? I respect that they're perhaps hard to program due to the nature of the game, and perhaps we'll never get a Jungle bot that can handle their complex farm routine adequately, but at the very least we could have bots be level 30 "players" with full rune and mastery pages. And balanced team comps, rather than the ARAM nonsense they currently exhibit. Putting slightly more demand on the players to win a bots game could offer some degree of preparation for taking an unfamiliar champ into a real match, at least for scrubs like me.