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excited to lose to the bots not because instant-reaction mechanics or perfect aim with skillshots, but because they're stacking drakes and ganking while I test the viability of my Swain jungle with Predator
excited to lose to the bots not because instant-reaction mechanics or perfect aim with skillshots, but because they're stacking drakes and ganking while I test the viability of my Swain jungle with Predator
Hello, Bot PO here (and article writer!) Please do go wild against them and give us any weird bugs you can find and report them to us so we can release a great product for y'all when we launch on live later on!
I know it will make quite some time to make the normal bots, but does this mean that doom bots could potentially come back?
I can't promise anything, but I am building this system for those opportunities in the future.... And I am a big fan of DoomBots of Doom :D
Honestly the problems I had before were more related to specific champions: sometimes when Taric goes back to the lane alone he just stands there
menacinglydoing nothing waiting for someone so he can use W. Or how some champions can be “lured” in the top lane to cross the river and take 3 shots from tower at level 1, like Garen or Malphite.And how Leona has perfect timed cc when you step under tower. Damn.
Yea, the old system was more 1 Bot Brain per champion design, which is why quirks in basic functions could occur in one bot. (It also caused a lot of pain for developers as if they found 1 bug in 1 bot.... They would need to fix it across each bot individually.)
With our current system, a lot of our goals are centered around the ability to quickly iterate out bugs/quirks at scale.
That being said, there is a likelihood you will see these behaviors and many more when we go to PBE over the next month or so. So please do let us know if you see these issues so we can fix them prior to a full launch! (And to also test our new fancy iteration tooling :) )
Yep, this is honestly a great point for Riot to expand the game related information delivery across the board.
You should be able to see what every champion does in game without having to google it.
Better jungle implementation for coop vs ai. The very same things that tell the jungle bot how how to play could show up as indicators for a human player in coop vs ai.
Plenty of other available things too. Could tie in quests(tutorials) into the coop vs ai system.
Just all sorta of little things they could do that would add up to make the new player experience way better.
Better jungle implementation for coop vs ai. The very same things that tell the jungle bot how how to play could show up as indicators for a human player in coop vs ai.
We are actually using the jungle recommendation path that is given to players at the moment!
Additionally, we are considering that when we get to updating custom bots, you can play with the bots as allies as well. Then they will use pings and emotes for in-game communication systems to help the new players learn these communication systems. :)
I appreciate the work you've been doing on the bots already, I don't even have to test them out to say so. Glad they're getting an update and hopefully they will help new players out a lot.
Thank you so much! We have a long way to go but I am very proud of the work we have accomplished so far :)
Just expressing excitement about all this.
My son and fiancé would have a much more gentle intro to League if bots actually taught how to play the game.
Yay! I am happy we can help you get more folks in! I actually think one of the biggest personal motivators for me was just how painful it was to get into League like 11 years ago. I wanted to play more in co-op versus AI to learn more but I just hit a skill ceiling and had to eat the like... 10 game loss streak for my MMR to be set.
I want to make the game that I love easier for others who also love it to share with new friends and family :)
I was waiting for the news about the new bots coming
So are we! Please check them out on PBE and give us feedback. :)
Are you able to share if we can expect any new bots added and if the start of game and end game chat messages will remain, I really like the latter for flavor
Do you mean their custom quotes that the current bots state at the beginning or at the end of the game?
If so, that is on our roadmap, but probably sometime around full launch (or slightly after depending on the feedback during the PBE 2-week test!)
Can you control the bots with pings? in heroes of the storm you could ping yourself to have the bot follow you or ping it to go away and it would stop following you
Not at the moment, but if /when we get to a point where you can have a bot as an ally, we do want a way for the players to communicate with the bot through pings and shot calls. (Ex: All players vote to do dragon, Bot goes to dragon)
Petition to add Doom bots as the highest level of Coop vs AI if all goes well (first iteration-ish)
signed
Bring back Teemo bot, destroyer of worlds! But yeah, I know it's probably a bit out, gotta make sure the normal bots work fine first!
Praise be Lil' Devil Teemo Bot!
Wonder if Riot's getting rid of Renekton bot's tendency to run it down, orr keeping that in for added realism.
I taught him everything he knows
Hijacking to ask if the new bots changes may expand champion pool or we'll be keeping the same roster of champions with simpler kits
Currently, we are using simpler champions for this PBE test to focus on the basics of all champs feeling good over a specific champion feeling good (Ex: Using Spells, farming, laning, etc. over ensuring Yasuo knows his wombo combo or Evelynn being able to use her Ult to escape)
That said, we do want to ensure all popular champs and commonly seen champs are covered quickly after we launch to ensure players can learn to play against them prior to going into normals.
For the PBE Tech test though, I believe we will have a random mix of current bot champs along with new bot champs as we also wanted to have coverage of both while testing (and y'all are getting our testing champs for this launch :D).
Does this mean you can add more champions as bots? I know some could be tricky, but only having ~50 available gets kinda boring. I would love to be able to play against more champions as bots, especially newer ones
Yep yep! Currently our goal for the PBE tech test is about ~30 but we want to ramp to a wide mix of old/new/popular/easy/complex so that new players can get a taste of all flavors.
Ideally long-term, we can have a bot come out with a new champ release (but that is much further down the roadmap as we need to make sure our tech is sound prior to expanding it.)
question: if i say mean things to the bots in all chat will they respond back saying mean things to me?
Not for the PBE Test... But maybe one day if enough players ask for it ;P
Is it at all possible to have a feedback tab popup after a game? Like when a survey pops up
When testing WoW on the PTR/Alpha, the popup in game itself makes reporting easier for users and they'd be more inclined to give feedback with an in client feedback system
I understand if it's not possible, but maybe you could bring up something like this and see if it would be possible(hell, the idea already has come up at Riot for sure haha)
I have already looked into a tool like this and unfortunately, there really is not one for a case like this on PBE.
I am hopeful that when we get to live, we can figure out some working system for more iterative improvements we want to make after we launch! :D
Hijacking, but if eight bot are fighting against each other, what gonna happen ?
In what way? :0
They will play the game to the best of their abilities against each other as 2 distinct teams with 4 distinct champion brains on each side.
f**king a. An actual rioter giving detailed and honest information. I f**king love it.
<3 I try my best!
maybe use those bots for when a person is afk in a real game, like heroes of the storm used to do it!!!!!!
This is something we are talking about internally, but we have to wait to see how good the bots are, and we need to have a Bot available for each champion.
Once these are available, then it would be a discussion on what would be a good implementation, as many games handle this differently so we would want to be thoughtful on if/how we go about implementing it :)
Hey cool! I’ve never talked to anyone from Riot before.
Yes the new player experience has always been rough, last year I even made a post before you guys announced better bots.
It’s been difficult saying
“K the game is like this except with Junglers, also top is supposed to be solo, also you have more summoners including flash which is… necessary… also we usually fight for Dragons and objectives”
Yea, when I was a player, I was always super hyped when Rioters would respond so I try to pay it forward (especially since I joined the League dev team! Prior I was on Wild Rift and Player Support, so not a lot of relevant information for this group!).
Please do try to test the bots out on PBE! We do expect everyone to crush them, but our hope is our bots feel a lot more like true players (albeit true newbie players!)
I'm a bit disappointed that it's only intro bots. I feel like the easy bots are actually more important. You'll only be playing on intro a few times, and then easy for most of your practice time. I remember me and my friend played mostly easy bots (and then a bit of intermediate) until level 30.
Is the plan for all difficulties to be shipped on live together at least?
I feel you homie, I also want advanced bots so I can play a more even match, and I agree with you that beginner/advanced queues are more important for players.
From a dev perspective and a tech perspective though, ensuring that our bots have the fundamentals in place and testing them at scale will make Beginner/Advanced queues fundamentally easier as both are built on the backbone of intro. :D
When we do launch these bots to players on Live though, we 100% plan to replace all 3 at once. It would be a very weird experience as a new player to go from Intro (where jungling and taking objectives exists) back to the old bots where there is no jungle and no objective taking.
Are you guys using machine learning or agent based modeling to train these bots? I've wanted to do something like that for so long, but bots are against Riot's TOS sadge.
Currently, we are using Behavior Trees as a starting point but we want to investigate supervised learning longer-term as we can supplement or replace our Behavior Trees with parts of ML where it makes sense in a tree. (Ex: something that changes every 2 weeks is probably a good candidate for ML due to it frequently changing.)
Have you thought about adding an actual incentive to test patches on the PBE? i.e. rewards for your main League account?
For PBE, we do not really want to do that as PBE is located within NA, so offering an incentive might get a bunch of players from other regions to download and be a downgraded experience for all players testing since ping would be pretty bad.
But we are talking with other teams about some rewards for testing out the bots when we hit live servers to encourage a bunch of peeps to try it out!
Ah I see that is unfortunate in terms of the tool on the PBE but being able to iterate upon them come live is something I'm looking forward. I'm looking forward to the bots in general
Yep yep! Hopefully, the bot test goes well when we hit PBE so we can ramp quickly into making the Beginner/Advanced bots :D
So there are some preexisting issues with bot aggro being easily manipulated, I imagine that as this first trial run comes to PBE, some of that behavior will still be evident, right?
Is there anything already known that we should keep an eye out for? I have a friend who will be on PBE trying the bots, and she's completely new, so I'm trying to take stock of anything that might be a major issue.
Yay! I would love her feedback especially then on what she liked/did not like.
I do not want to flag anything, as ideally you can give a fairly unbiased opinion and I would recommend going in with a mindset of being a newbie and just giving all feedback/pain points/recommendations you have.
I wonder if I'll find these more interesting for me to do my 1v5 bots
rampagechallenge than the Current intermediate bots.
I would be curious! My gut says not for our intro-level bots, but only you can let us know!
I do think you will prefer our advanced bots when we release & iterate on them though since we want to ramp up the bots quickly :D
Are there any plans for an advanced bot tier?
Yep yep! When we do our full launch, we will replace Intro / Beginner / Advanced Bots when we do a full launch to ensure there is a smoother feeling ramp up into PVP
I mean, isn't there any possibility it goes south and everything burn of the ground trting to fight a drake ?
Oh yes, just like a normal game of League :D
So that's why Renekton bot would randomly afk?
That is why Renekton would do it without the other bots doing it, yep yep!
Thanks for the fast response!
Are there any plans on punishing players who permanently Akshan E in base? They ruin the game for everyone else and it's impossible to tell if they're an account farmer or just toxic. My group of friends and I have seen the same players multiple days in a row with the entire lobby reporting them every time, so it seems like either reports are disabled in the mode or given the same weight as normal games, which may not be triggering the proper thresholds on punishments. 4/5 reports is the same 80% of players present as in a normal game, so if the weights weren't increased, then it'd be virtually impossible to get the system to punish players.
It may be easier to just temporarily disable Akshan in Bots while a better solution is found.
Okay, gonna take off my dev voice and say...
BRO I HATE THIS sh*t. After I played with a player who did this the first time, I told my team we need to make people who do this have a bad time against our bots as this is unacceptable for anyone in our game. I could not imagine the pain a new player would experience running into this kind of behavior.
Okay Game Dev voice back on -- we made it so our bots will recall and kill any player who tries to enter their base prior to 5 minutes. Given this strategy is primarily intended to farm account levels (from what I am personally guessing -- if players know other motivations, please let me know!), we want to make sure our bots can adapt to these new strategies anyways.
If we still see consistent behaviors like this, we would just want to adapt the bots to be flexible enough to handle countering them over reducing the player's autonomy.
In regards to smurfs/player-made bots, I do think this is on top of mind for folks but I cannot speak to efforts behind it due to it not being within my product ownership space. (I am happy to talk Co-op bots always though as I am the owner of this product space. :) )
Wouldn't it be easier to have a script detect if an Akshan swings longer than 1 Minute and flag them for a ban?It is more common tho for them to swing around Wolves.
Even easier would be to actually decide on that Akshan's swing shouldn't go longer like 30 seconds.
I could not talk to how easy or hard it is due to that being a different product space, services stack, and systems that I am not the owner of, so even if it were easier to implement, it would take time to become SMEs in that area and understand all the knock-on effects that change could have.
Regardless, we do want the bots to react similarly to humans in even strange or off-meta situations, so this Akshan behavior gives us a way to target off-meta gameplay styles for our bots.
hello!
jumping in on that point because I've seen that behavior so often though they do it around wolves too most of the times. Any plan to also have the bots seek the Akshan out in the jungle as well or maybe just straight up have them be flagged for using e over X amount of time and if they repeat the offense the account is automatically suspended since that technique is only ever used continuously by smurfs/account sellers?
Potentially! I think we would want to see how the bots react first with the current system, and if we continue to see issues with Akshan in particular, we would probably flag this to the appropriate teams who own those systems to see what we can do.
Push comes to shove, we can make Akshan inaccessible to Co-op versus AI, and might do so for Intro bots especially, but I feel like there might be a better solution available that we can explore post launching these new bots to live. (Like being able to vote kick and replace with an Akshan Riot bot.)
Would you know if the bot rewrite would fix bugs like bots rage quitting and sitting in fountain
If you mean the opponent bots, those bots will AFK to try to match AFKs on the player side currently. If you see the Riot bots afk outside fo this, please let me know with a video as I am curious what to try with our bots to ensure they do not do a similar behavior!
For our new bots, for the AFK matching, we would probably not have the bot afk to match the human player, instead having a bot take over the player's character so that players can still experience a 5v5 similar to continue learning how all 5 roles in a normal League SR game interact/work together.