Why hello again my fellow League connoisseurs, it is me, Darcy “Riot DashiJador” Ludington and my trusty co-lead Emmett “Riot Sentanel” Coakley. We are here to give you an update as a follow-up to our previous article, /dev: Leveling Up Bots. Without further ado, we’d like to announce that our new introductory level bots will be hitting the PBE for a trial run in either September or October for 2 weeks!
We’re releasing intro level bots first because our priority is getting these bots ramped up for newer players, but we’ll keep you all posted on other bot work which will be further down the road.
Even the Bots are excited to meet you!
What to Expect?
We want to reiterate that 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. If you have any new-to-League friends who are interested, we would love to have them try it out! Don’t have a PBE account? No worries, you can sign up for one here.
Additionally, since we wanted to try our hand at some new features that we think are needed (even for Intro-level bots) here are some of the new skills we’ve been training bots to do:
- Jungling
- Ganking
- Supporting each other
- Role Selection (with appropriate rune, spell, and lane positions)
- Taking objectives (like dragons and Baron!)
Bots that take dragon together, survive together!
How Can I Try These Bots?
Make sure you have a PBE Account and download the League PBE Client. After that, you should see a new queue called “Beta Bots.” This queue will have the bots with new AI available! (Please note that our PBE servers are only located in NA.) Remember, they’ll only be here for 2 weeks so make sure you visit them while they’re here!
What’s Next?
After the trial run, we’ll take down our new Beta Bots queue and everything on PBE will go back to normal, for now. On our side we’ll look at player feedback to make improvements, ensure that the bots work on a wide variety of players’ specs, and bugs found during the test will be squished. Then we’re off to start building out higher ranks of bot skill so we can eventually replace both Beginner and Intermediate bots.
If all goes well, our goal is to roll these intro bots out to our live servers sometime next year after some more iteration. Afterwards, we’ll start on training this new bot AI to reach beginner and intermediate levels of play!As always, all your bots are belong to us, and see you on PBE!
