You don’t seem to understand that it can’t be balanced properly. You keep saying it can, but you’re not factoring in aspects of human thinking which cannot be replicated in ANY AI yet. Predicting patterns based on teammate locations, and character class, making decisions of when to run and when to engage, when to fight minions and when to fight players.
You cannot properly balance an AI to ACT like a human, certainly not with the limited processing capabilities we have here.
So, you have to “balance” it with other, objective qualities… like how many shots it will hit in a given time-frame… or tweaking it’s health/damage output numbers. ALL of those options require unfair mathematical input on behalf of the dev as to how well your enemies perform against you.
Basically, that’s a garbage way to lose or win.
And how do you tweak it to perform the same for someone who’s been playing the game for weeks vs someone who got it today? The same way, you just adjust some numbers and “hope” that it comes in line with what’s representative of the skill level of the characters in the game… but you can’t know. And you’re talking about implementing thousands of man-hours of work in order to get to that stage where it’s kind of/sort of close to maybe working a little.
The reality of it is that if the game is anywhere close to balanced with the level of skill of the human combatants, then the AI is going to always be a hindrance to it’s team, or a boon, either dealing more damage than a player would or less, and the longer it’s there, the more it will skew the game… which is already skewed, because of another reason (the disconnect)
So, punish the disconnect, ignore the game for the purposes of ELO, and move along. It’s just one game out of your ELO calculations.
And, yes, it is substantiated, because in this very thread you’ve got more nay-sayers than supporters, and there’s not an outcry anywhere for bots being dropped in other than this thread. So, while it may not have been proven, it’s logically predictable based off of readily available evidence.
But I’m wasting my time here, I was just trying to helpfully explain to you “why” the devs won’t implement it, not trying to convince anyone not to do it… I don’t have to. They won’t. The player base they’re pursuing would eat them alive for it, even if it wasn’t a waste of resources in the first place. And I assure you, they understand how impossible it is with current technology to balance a bot. They won’t be wasting their time.