Hey, thanks for clearing this up! What I still don't understand though is why it only started putting me in bot lobbies after the recent patch and not the week before. Is it possible that my mmr got reset due to the patch?
I doubt that the mmr was reset after the f2p transition, otherwise we'd have a large number of players reporting the same experience. I believe that you were still regarded as a returning player before the patch, just that due to the way the system works, you've been placed in more lobbies with higher mmr players.