LoL devs announce reworked bots that simulate “real games” for beginners

League of Legends devs have announced plans to introduce reworked bots that simulate “real games” for beginners to practice with. 

You would be forgiven if you didn’t know League of Legends has a game mode in which newer players can play against bots. It’s a way for newcomers to get used to how the game plays. However, anyone can quickly notice that the bots in this particular mode don’t exactly play like real people. 

Be it bots not jungling, not ganking, not taking objectives, or even appropriate roles, it may give newer players a skewed taste of what actual LoL games are like. 

And it seems the devs are now looking to improve on the onboarding experience as they have announced some major changes to the game’s bots. 

In a dev update released on August 29, Riot announced several things from changes to Ranked, Arena, and Mythic Items. Included also were changes to the bot AI functionality. 

In a full dev blog explaining the changes, the devs outlined plans to release new introductory-level bots for players to play against, which should be hitting the PBE around September or October. 

As explained by the devs on their difficulty, “We want to reiterate these bots will be at an “intro bot” level. Therefore, we expect all of you lovely PBE veteran players to crush them with your mad skills.” 

However, as explained by the devs, the bots are very much meant for “new-to-League” players who want to try out the game. 

As for what new skills the bots will have, the bots will jungle, gank, support each other, have proper role selection (with appropriate runes, spells, and lane positions), and take objectives (killing Dragon and Baron). These changes should simulate real games players may face. 

As for if the devs are planning on making harder iterations of the bots, they explain, “These intro bots out to our live servers sometime next year after some more iteration. Afterward, we’ll start on training this new bot AI to reach beginner and intermediate levels of play.”