Riot Needs an Auto-Ban System for Player Bots in AI Games

Hey All,

I'm trying to introduce a friend to League of Legends. He is a total beginner to MOBAs and is constantly asking questions about everything. Therefore I've decided the best place for him to practice and learn is in bot matches. However, bot matches are riddled with player bots that ruin the experience and I worry he is going to quit soon.

Before you say I should take him to normals, I don't think he is ready. He is still learning about the different roles and champions and even the basics of creep score and buying items. Therefore I want him to avoid the flames as much as possible and stick to bot games.

As for the bots themselves, there seems to be two variants. There's the stay out of lane and farm in jungle bots. These just slowly clear jungle camps and contribute nothing to the game. The second type of bot is the run middle and feed bot. These tend to just keep running up middle lane and play worse than the beginner AI bots.

Having one player bot on your team isn't terrible, but having more than one makes it impossible. All lanes generally get pushed in and the bots will eventually win due to attrition if you don't have at least two good players. My friend being one of the players gives me a pretty poor chance that the final player given to us is also good. Therefore you get frustrating 30 minute defeats as the bots contribute less and less toward pushing toward their nexus.

I've reported every bot I've seen, but there seems to be no end in sight. I'm getting at least one bot every game these days and sometimes two. Bot Players can automatically create accounts and bot to level 30 (or get banned in the process). For this reason I don't expect player reports to be able to handle detecting these bots and suggest some sort of automated system.

There must be some machine-learning algorithm that can be used to auto-flag bots. Maybe something that tracks player movement and purchasing patterns. If they follow a set game, never help in lane, or continually die in the same lane, they could be flagged as bots. Enough games and they are automatically removed.

It might also be prudent to place new accounts with other new accounts for the first few games to see if they have these patterns or not. If a player doesn't look like a bot, upgrade them to games with other players.

Although I worry mainly about my friend giving up, I wouldn't be surprised if other players join league and face similar experiences before quitting. I keep trying to explain to him that the reason we lose is cause we're 3v5 and its not his performance, but I worry that excuse will only last so long.

Thanks for reading,

Ammorth