Why did they remove leaver AI?

Actually I’m not really blaming anyone. I understand why people complain so much about it, and it sure sucks to have an AI in your team during a game.
However, it doesn’t happen so much to me that I would complain about it.
Maybe once every 20-30 games. It happens. And in QM. In Storm League, I never encountered such a problem.

AI on “elite” setting used to be amazing for some heroes.
i’m not sure what blizz have done, but atleast in ARAM the AI is now absolutely useless,
they don’t even land skillshots anymore.

its like they’ve been deliberately dumbified.

Before: “Bots always feed, I can’t stop them.”
Now: “Bots just sit in the spawn and do nothing.” - don’t even know how to ping the bots.

Honestly, the bots are much better than those stupid people.

Not at all, we just find it funny how many magnitudes worse it’s gotten with each year.

There was a perfectly functional AI at one point, albeit just an AI and still nowhere on the terms of average players most likely. But they weren’t total liabilities like the ones now.

1 Like

The AI is still intact, you just have to ping them to follow you now. IMO it’s better this way because you’d ping the AI constantly and it wouldn’t listen to anyone, but now you and your teammates can just ping it when you need it to come somewhere and it will mimic your engages instead of YOLOing and dying constantly.

The AI is smarter like this.

I have to agree with Dainsleif, the old AI was more functional than what we have now. Unless a player pinged it, I admit freely they didn’t come to objectives, they would help take a camp, overall they worked better.

I do like the change they made so the AI now sits in base until pinged. Whatever they did to it though in 2017? it made it overall far worse.

Pinging the bots doesn’t really help, their behavior in teamfights is far too passive. If you back off even a couple feet just to gain some breathing room, a full health bot will completely disengage. Makes it so that the only one who can realistically ping ANY bot and get it to participate is a tank or melee dps, which makes it particularly rough if the bot IS the tank.

1 Like

Then you prefer a bot that keeps feeding to enemies, and you have no way to make it retreat?

No, I prefer a bot that will at least try to soak and follow ping commands. If I ping a camp, it should try to take it. If there is a team fight and it is at 100 percent health it should engage.

1 Like

This. Bots exist for us, not the other way around (not for us to babysit them like children).
It’s a distant shadow of a human player, replacing them during a disconnect.

Ping bot + camp = bot tries to take camp.
Ping bot + lane = bot tries to collect exp in lane.
Ping bot + enemy hero during a fight = bot tries to attack enemy hero.

That’s how it’d be in an ideal world. But sadly it’s not at the moment.

They used to do all that, then they made them far more passive so that they don’t feed in lane, I suppose. I don’t see why they couldn’t just program them to collect exp safer instead of walking directly into enemies.

It can’t be a resource/money issue, because they hired that biology major fairly recently to give AI a rehaul.
(February 2020)

Unless they ran out of funds and fired him already.

He hasn’t said a word on the AI development for ages.

Then you need to suggest a new idea, the old bot couldn’t do this, nor the new one. I don’t mind if people want better bots. But for people who say the old bots are better, it’s just stupid.

The old bots did EXACTLY that.

If you pinged a camp they would go to it. If you pinged an enemy they would try to kill it. If you pinged the core, they would defend it.

I’ve been here since beta I know full well what the old AI was capable of.

Which is what needed to be changed. They didn’t have to make them 100 percent passive and thus completely useless. It’s even made playing vs AI less enjoyable with AI teammates because the behavior of the bots has changed so much that you have to struggle to get them to help with objectives.

… And they did retreat if you pinged them to follow you and you hearthed, they would also hearth out.

I used to farm vs AI with AI teammates constantly for exp so I could play new heroes in ranked. I know exactly what they did and did not do.

I agree that’s a good point, they need to improve or change. I have no problem with that.

The only thing I disagree in this thread is that some stupid people say the old bots are worse because they don’t know how to ping the bots and the bots always stay AFK in base.

Just consider, you can ping the new bots and walk them to the camps. But, you couldn’t force the old bots to retreat, absolutely no way.

You can but there still exists the issue of the way they behave in teamfights, especially if you’re forced as the healer (for example) to have a tank bot follow you because nobody else knows how or is willing to do it. This happens to me often, as a healer/ranged assassin main. If I ping a tank bot it will only engage with the enemy once I am in melee range, otherwise they kind of circle around me and do nothing, and will only go a few feet ahead of me to continue fighting before falling back and doing nothing, which doesn’t help at all.

If I ping an enemy it should attack it until I ping a retreat. I mean it would suck to HAVE to micromanage bots like that but I’d rather do that than lose because we don’t have the extra body to soak up damage.

It’s no different than micromanaging 3 different heroes with Lost Vikings, imo.

It would greatly add to HotS’s skillcap and remove some of the buzzkill from having an AI, if you could heavily micro it to achieve map objectives, get exp or chase enemies.

It wouldn’t suck as much to have an AI on your side as it does now.
It’d still be no match for a real human player, but at least it could be useful.

Plus you could micro it while you are dead (using pings), further equalizing the game when one team has an AI.

Exactly. I wasn’t saying to go back to the old style AI and just leave it at that, but to adjust the new AI so that it functions autonomously, through micromanaging, or both, and isn’t just literal dead weight.

Warcraft 3 AIs were better. In Frozen Throne you could give control to another player, so if you/they could micro manage even a little your chances were way better. Not sure why you couldn’t give the remaining players a number key to take over the other hero and give it commands not so different than pets on WoW: follow, protect, heal, etc…

1 Like