/dev: New Bot AI, Oh My! Coming 14.6!

After sashaying away last September, our bots are back and here to stay starting in patch 14.6! Darcy “DashiJador” Ludington here once again, this time with the Bots Team, ready and excited to announce the launch of the new bot tech into the Co-op versus AI: Intro, Beginner, and Advanced queues!

With these updates, our primary goal is that this new AI will provide newer players with a space to learn and grow while providing our experienced players with a lower-stress mode to enjoy. At the end of the day, we wanted to create an experience that feels much more like what you would see gameplay-wise in your normal games of Summoner’s Rift and we’re excited for our bots to do just that!

PBE Learnings

Last September our bots were live on PBE where you fine gamers were able to playtest and provide feedback to us on what you liked, disliked, and experienced while playing (and beating up our poor Intro bots). During this time, we got a lot of fantastic and actionable player feedback that we’ve been implementing alongside our development of Intermediate skill-level bots.

Here’s some of the updates we made over the last six months thanks to your feedback:

• Fixed 80+ bugs discovered and identified via the PBE (thank you to those who reported issues!)
• Heavily improved the itemization, movement, and combat of the bots.
• Added in usage of environmental plants like Blast Cone, Honeyfruit, and Scryer's Bloom.
• Expanded the starting bot champion pool with additional champions.
• Improved how Intro and Beginner bots feel, providing us a way to provide a better difficulty ramping experience between queues.
• Many, many performance passes and infrastructure changes to enable faster improvements to bots.

So what does this mean for players?

Well, a few things:

• Co-op versus AI should feel more similar to an actual, PVP League of Legends game with the target of helping players learn the game.
• Bots can now jungle, rotate between lanes, and take map objectives.
• Enable developers to quickly iterate and scale the bots behaviors to new experiences, experiences, and ways to delight all you lovely players.

Where do I report bugs?

While our bots are better in-game now, they certainly aren’t immune to the occasional bug, but we’ll be here to help them get back up to full power. If you happen to stumble upon any unwanted bugs when going against our bots please submit them through any of the League channels that we currently take feedback and bugs through:

• LoL Bug Reporter
• Player Support

What’s next?

For now, we want to focus on continually improving and adapting these bots for new players as our main focus for these bots. We’ll also be taking a look at updating custom games and tutorials with our new bots. The current bots in customs are using the old bot tech and system, so please feel free to compare and contrast between the bots available in customs! We want to make sure that our bots currently hit our main goals for new players before rolling them out into other parts of League for more experienced players, but our immediate next steps are:

• Lots and lots and lots of bug crushing.
• Enabling our bots in custom games and removing the old.
• Improving the tutorial experience with our new bot AI.
• Working with you lovely players on how to make the bots play better.
• Enabling more combo-based champions and making specific champion bots truly “feel” more in line with their actual gameplay.

Thank you all for your patience and we hope the new bots and the new Challenges being released can provide some good old fashioned League of Legends fun! We’ll keep you updated on smaller changes via the Patch Notes, so make sure to check them out!

See you in Co-op versus AI!

-Signed the Bots Team