I don’t understand why AI teammates dont do what they are told. Due to odd playing hours and low population I’ve played games where I am the only real person. My AI teammates just run around being terrible even if I ping the map while the enemy AI seems to team up. Why?
the ai control was changed so it follows players instead of pings.
Having the ai follow a player offers a more restricted area in the pro/con of players leaving a game. If you want an ai to go somewhere, you ping them and they’ll follow you within a certain leash range.
I think they could have them at least lane or something instead of sitting in base and then when you ping them they follow you and help out. I get that laning alone could cause them to die due to ganks, but wouldn’t they be able to see it coming anyway and retreat to a "safe"area at least?
I dislike how they’re soulless until you ping them. Its almost like that character’s spirit literally left with the person who left.
It would be nice if they followed the ping commands of whoever they are following. Would make them a lot more versatile
this is closer to how ai use to function at one point in the game.
my recollection of who said what, when, etc isn’t what it used to be, but ircc, one of the devs/blues had posted some of the discussions they had had regarding ai for the game, especially in the aftermath of an update that ‘broke’ the ai. A lot of ai searches get to the Gu aifeedback thread (the ‘biology major’) and my impression has been that while there have been plans for, and work on, the ai, it’s one of those things that got left high and dry when assets for HotS would get shifted away. Stuff may have been left unimplemented without the people behind it to actually put it to live servers, or other issues may have been ‘worse’, so the current system was a means to try to band-aid fix addressing an issue that isn’t back directly by monetary compensation.
At the time of lane/ping responses, the ai was prone to having priority conflicts and would loop actions because it was torn between the two systems they use for the ai. I don’t know at what resource point they made changes to address that, esp since one of the issues for this game is how individual ai needs to be, and with the heavy team cutbacks, the personal to do that for all the roster was off the table, so who was left – at the time – may have been trying to prioritize a certain level of stability in the aftermath of too much to fix, without enough to actually fix it.
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It was better but it was severely dumbed down, now it runs back and forth or straight and doesnt even attempt to play.
Apart from AI only games, I have a sneaking suspicion that they really don’t want teams with an AI to win, or it could lead to vote kicks and stuff. Silly me, that’s WoW, so just basically trying to bully a player to log off, or something.
But with a five man team, some members could just leave, benefit from the AI, and then relog by the end of match to avoid leaver’s.
Proper AI isn’t hard, as such the VS AI opponent team is fairly competent. Also intentionally leaving the player alive sometimes after training them to 1%, which I believe is part of the charm.
Thing is, even if the AI isn’t literally perfect in decision making, they have the benefit of speed resulting in 100% hit rating, instant reactions (like not targeting enemies with Protected, Evasion, or leeching shields like Zarya) including also perfectly timed combo moves, perfect stutter stepping and targeting (up from a casual attack move which usually targets minions) and of course the ability to move out of everything. All this compared to the reaction time of humans. (The AI often predicts stutter patterns as well, and a few weeks ago I had a match with some AI teammates and the delete power was huge, big win for us.)
If anything, introducing humanity to AI means dumbing them down, adding delay to their decision making, aiming issues and bad decision making (CM4P5!), and intentionally create time windows by mistiming combos to give players a chance to escape, simulating bad cooldowns or what have you. I mean it just feels good to escape a stunlock.
Line of thought is very similar to my QQ over in the Salt Minues about summoners. AI is perfectly capable of interrupting every single one of your spells by placing some minion in the way - I think some videos like that were in Heroes Moments, too, likely by players though. 
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I can absolutely confirm that is how the AI used to work.
They used to follow pings back in the day and were much more useful because of that.
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