I've gotten a few friends into LoL recently, and I played some bot games with them to try and teach them the basics in a stress-free environment. Last-hitting, pushing, jungle timers, harassing, building/counterbuilding, teamfighting, global objectives, etc.

Unfortunately, those matches proved to be far less educational than I assumed. In fact, I can conclude that playing bot games inevitably makes you worse at LoL, for a plethora of reasons that I will highlight below:

Lack of proper matchmaking discourages teamwork

Matchmaking for Co-op vs. AI depends not on any form of elo/MMR, only by summoner level. This means that even if you're in Diamond, queueing for Co-op vs. AI may as well match you with a Rumble who starts Mana Manipulator and feeds first blood in 2 minutes. Granted, this barely matters since you can carry 1v5 against bots, but it's not very conducive to establishing a teamwork environment; since you have zero confidence in the abilities of your teammates, every game turns into "I must carry or lose", reminiscent of the attitude many players in Bronze/Silver tend to have.

Unfortunately, as soon as you enter a mindset of "carry and ignore teammates", you become a toxic player. At this point, the performance of your teammates don't matter; all that needs to happen is for you, personally, to get fed, which requires KSing as much as possible and hoping your teammates die to the bots so their bounty resets to 300 gold. This isn't a good thing for players to pick up.

Bots lack the fundamental gameplay patterns of even novice LoL players

All the bots have equivalent runes/masteries as a level 15 summoner, causing them to do much less damage than the average level 30 player, on top of being less durable. They also take completely ******ed summoner spells (which may or may not be responsible for half of the **** guides that get published here), start with no consumables, don't ward, never use Flash defensively, recall too often, suck at CSing, go OOM in seconds, constantly push the wave, fail to autoattack harass, don't abuse your cooldowns, can't zone players out, have a preordained skill order and item sequence, and have easily baited skillshots. If a team of players who can go even against bots went into a Bronze V PvP game, they will immediately feed so hard that world hunger is solved for the next millenium.

But hey, Veigar Bot does his burst combo properly. So at least these guys will know how to use a DFG, right? Right?

Towers make you invincible in bot games

The way that the bot AI treats towers is ridiculous; they treat tower range like a fountain laser and don't even venture close. They will literally never tower dive you even if you're at 50 health and they have full HP. I see some players stubbornly farm bot lane with 1 tick of health against full HP enemies and never worry about death by abusing this; in a real game, these players will feed free kills to the enemy due to their misconception that the lane towers will protect them from harm.

Only one desirable position exists

Currently, Riot has not yet developed a jungler bot. Bots are distributed amongst the lanes in a 2-1-2 fashion. This leads to an awkward choice for players who are aware of the current meta:

• By going 2-1-2, they create a duo top situation where two players have to share CS (most likely), or a 2-support team comp (less likely and inefficient).
• By going 1-1-2 + jungler, whoever that is top lane gets the short end of the stick. Most lanes can get kills without the jungler's help due to bad AI, so the jungler is very unlikely to profit much from ganks, leaving him low in gold income.

To sum it up:

• If you call top, you will either have to share CS with a Garen who is incompetent at last-hitting and pushes constantly, or be stuck 1v2 for the majority of the match as the jungler farms jungle for 6 minutes before ganking. You don't want this.
• If you call jungle, your top laner will hate you, you have no idea if you will get a good smiteless leash or end up not hitting level 2 after a buff because your teammates stood too close, and you also cannot predict whether or not you'll ever have the time to gank because your teammates may constantly be overpushed or their lane opponents will be constantly dead. You don't want this.
• If you call mid, you'll have solo lane farm, an opponent who is easily killed over and over again, quick access to two wraith camps and two blues, as well as the ability to gank any lane at any time. You want this.
• If you call ADC, you might end up in a duo lane with a non-support champion who takes your kills, or a "support" Nidalee that started Doran's Ring and autoattacks creeps while last-hitting champions with Javelin Toss. You don't want this.
• If you call support, your ADC might constantly push the lane, suck at last-hitting, not pay attention to your initiates, or just feed. Plus, you don't get to counterward, control objectives, deep ward enemy jungle, time enemy wards, zone the enemy out, or really, doing 90% of the stuff that supports normally do in a PvP game. This is possibly the most boring role possible in a bot game. You don't want this.

This creates an extremely high incentive to call mid in a bot game because every other position is completely undesirable, so from the start of champion select, your team may already be in disagreement with each other.

The Blind Pick nature does not adequately prepare players for PvP

Bot games are 100% blind pick, meaning you are picking your champions without any idea who you're up against. Picking Akali mid only to discover that you're up against Fiddlesticks? Good luck.

Players are not taught counterpicking, and this thus encourages the "I will play only my favorite champion in every game" mindset. When these players leave Co-op vs. AI and play PvP games, they become part of the the plague. Where do you think the instalock players come from? This gamemode practically encourages it.

Team composition is also never given thought in this game mode, although this arguably applies all the way up to Gold level solo queue, so it's not an issue specific to bot games.

The game is one giant laning phase that never ends

Bots don't farm their own jungle, allowing your jungler to be completely lenient about timing buffs and warding. There is never the threat of a jungler gank either, leaving players to safely tunnel-vision and overextend forever with no consequence. As a general rule, bots don't roam unless turrets are down, and don't group up to push down turrets unless they are ahead significantly. Players basically are taught to not care about dragon because there's no pressure on it, ever.

Ganks are predictable (since bots leave lane within vision of the human players), thus making wards even less useful as a simple MIA ping will 100% substitute effectively for them. As a matter of fact, this basically hints to players "bro, you don't have to buy wards as long as your teammates call ss. Save the gold to rush your Infinity Edge faster!"

Bot games indoctrinate people into not purchasing wards. This is unacceptable.

Frequent champion kills are overvalued compared to CSing

Bots get significantly more Gold per 10 than players, as well as a passive XP gain when they are behind; for comparison, a 2/0/5 Mordekaiser with 330 CS at 25 minutes has only slightly more gold than and is only 2 levels up on the 0/14/0 Garen Bot who has less than 50 CS. It is essentially impossible to outfarm the bots, and the only way to make sure they don't snowball out of control with this passive gold is to kill them over and over again as early as possible.

This eventually becomes habituated into the players' minds, essentially teaching them to do dumb early all-ins that would never work in a PvP situation, and completely ignore CSing in favor of kills (I've consistently had more farm than the rest of my team combined, from the few games I played).

So what's the point of all this?

Riot has severely undervalued the importance of this gamemode, and needs to allocate resources into fixing all the deficiencies of the LoL AI as soon as possible. Do you know what most new League players start off playing?

Co-op vs. AI.

I bet almost every single person here has played bot games before venturing into PvP. With bot games being the garbage dump that they are right now, however, anyone who plays them invariably becomes worse at League of Legends. After a certain point, they will think that bots are too easy and venture into PvP.

These players will then instantly call mid, buy 0 wards, start Doran's Ring, feed first blood to an enemy after a dumb level 2 all-in, die to jungler ganks over and over while complaining about lanes not calling MIA, have 10 CS at 10 minutes, fail to group up when dragon is pinged, then go AFK.

Do you want these guys in your PvP games?