I believe that bots treat wards as enemies. Because of this, if you drop a ward in lane, the bot will see the situation as a 2v1 and not walk up (continuously walking back and forth).
Steps:
Create a custom 5v5 bot game with intermediate bots
Go mid
Place a ward on the bot's side of mid lane (not under the tower, just closer to their side so that they can't auto attack it)
Observe that they will not walk into mid lane. They will walk back and forth endlessly.
Thank you for the feedback! We will investigate now and see if we can get a fix out :)
This seems to be fixed now. What are you feeding your developers?
Chomps, Runners, and uncrustables. Also if you have recommendations on how to improve the bots for new players, please give suggestions!
Optimizing the bots for new players is a hard problem, so I respect the work you guys are doing. Here are a few problem spaces that I believe need improvement:
- Wave management. The bots do not have the ability to freeze/push waves based on the state of the game. For example, being able to see the bots push a wave quickly, then rotate to secure dragon would be a valuable mechanic for new players to learn.
- Lane assignments. The lane assignments feel rigid. The lanes that bots are assigned to are the lanes that bots will generally stay in unless specific situations arise. They might head to mid if mid is being pushed in and help out for a bit, but then rotate back to their original lane assignments quickly. This is obviously very hard to get right, but for example, being able to see bots rotate for neutral objectives (e.g., Voidgrubs/Dragons) on their timers while assigning other bots with TPs/split push power opposite lanes would teach new players the importance of playing the map rather than only the lanes. In addition to this, a low-hanging fruit would be having the bots push lanes that have more towers up. For example, if top lane's 1st-tier tower has not been taken yet but bot lane is already on the 3rd-tier tower, they should swap to top lane and try to finish that tower off (given that the state of the game allows for it).
- Ability to listen to pings. While this is lower priority since most users would not hop into a custom game with bots on their team, it would be nice to be able to ping the bots to guide their decision-making. Also, adding the ability to lane swap with bots/ask them to help defend an objective would be cool.These are a few of the mechanics I think would improve the current iteration of the bots immensely. However, given that the Wild Rift bots already do most of these (excluding wave management logic), I think your team is well aware of these problem spaces and are on top of it. Looking forward to the next batch of updates!
Thank you for your thoughts! I will share these with the team as we want to improve the bots in early Q1 to both increase the skill + improve their current playstyles. :)
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