I don’t play V.S. A.I. at all, so I might not have noticed if something changed in the last patch. But I just played a game of QM with 2 friends. Our probius player went afk. (It was a horrible loss. There’s no winning with a Probius bot.)
But what was weird is that he was rotating between lanes and double soaking, and even though no one pinged him, he kept doing his thing instead of going back to the core. Both of my friends were surprised by this as well.
If a player did not even load into the match, the bots seem to be autonomous right away. But if a player leaves in the middle of the match, the bot returns to base (even in the middle of a fight) unless someone pings it.
In my opinion this was the worst change they made to bots. It was not always like this. It is really bad if you are fighting, someone drops and suddenly your bot runs away back to the base unless it is clicked. And still people don’t get to click on bots. So many times bot just sit in bases not doing anything. Also: since clicked bots basilly follow you around just like a dog on a leash, there often is not really a good choice to ping the bot. If you have range and backline heroes, who of them should ping a tank that should frontline? The tank will then move around the backline instead of tanking the frontline. Same with all melee heroes. If your Morales drops, you suddenly will have a melee Morales since anyone of the melee heroes needs to ping her and then suddenly she stays next to the frontline where she just should not be.
Bots in the game were once really elite. They were doing their own thing and even could combo. Then year after year they dumbed them down to a state where a match is basically an insta loss once you have a bot healer or bot tank. And if you have a bot right from the start it is most often also a loss, unless you play against a really weak team.
I agree with everything Swamplord said.
The AI’s are now mostly an instaloss because they follow like zombies or do nothing in base. They only move autonymously if the player is gone right away at the start of the game.
The biology major guy they hired somehow made them worse than the original AI this game had since beta testing.
The original AI was good enough to temporarily cover disconnected players in HGC for a minute or two when teams ran out of pauses. The tank AI’s like ETC and Muradin were particularly good.
I agree with what both you and Lord Swamp had to say. Swamp answered Phase’s question here:
These bots act almost like the old AI prior to when it received the “upgrade”, and are a slight improvement over regular bot replacements.
In the defense of the biology major, he didn’t break the AI, but was put to work after someone else broke it. They really should have just rolled back that change, but they must have had their reasons for keeping it.
But they kept saying rolling back to the previous A.I. state was impossible.
But the games does so if the player never loads into the game??? 
It’s a mixed bag a bit with the A.I. Prior to the current setup they would run around independently…while also randomly picking talents. So if someone is dced long enough they would come back to a hodge podge of talents that may screw them over. They would also do some goofy things while running around, at least from what I can recall.
The A.I was more active before the 2018-2019 goof up. It would throw hands before the minions would arrive, though from what I heard it was easy to exploit that. They also would deathball around after a certain point, push with camps, and would go out of their way to gank anyone that over extends.
If you picked Elite A.I back then, you better be in a balanced group and had your game face on, otherwise they would smack you. Even Adept A.I if allowed to get a level advantage would be a rough match.
Elite can still be a problem today if players do not take it seriously and/or know what they are doing, but it isn’t as much of a nightmare to deal with as it used to be.
The current A.I is more passive. Even Elite A.I is nowhere near as aggressive as it used to be nor does it combo players as frequently as it used to. They’ll still delete players, but that usually requires the player to try and go and take on two or more A.I at once.
About the only thing the current A.I is good at is soaking and pushing lanes if left alone.
Also of note was that the A.I was at it’s apex about 6-12 months before the goof up. Before that, it was pretty dumb with them constantly making changes. There for a while they would just clump up and let themselves get carpet bombed by Kael’thas and other AoE heroes.
As Kevingu spelled out in his ai threads, the Ai then was scripted with 2 goals. However, it was prone for having priority conflicts between the two and end up looping movement back-and-forth, or essentially doing nothing but waiting to die, respawn, and reset the priority check.
The further we get from those glory days of ai, the more I feel recollection is better influenced by rose-tints or people not knowing how to exploit the ai back then. I wouldn’t say they were remarkably better, but were opportunistically functional in a time where lane and roles weren’t as well-defined, so it was easier to sometimes leave the ai to be off on its own.
The bots haven’t changed anything. If you think that they have changed, then it’s just your imagination.
Thank you for your insightful comment.
The Dev’s did make major changes to the AI, so much so, a Dev was tasked to fix it. Don’t believe me? Well, here is a link to that official thread.
This was years ago now, so perhaps you weren’t playing Hots during that time, or you only started playing in the past few years.