I think it would be good to add 288 bots to the ranked ladder: 2 bots for every character and every bot level (1-9). The bots would have an ELO that functions exactly the same as a player’s ELO. The bots shouldn’t be able to match up with other bots (or if they do, you can just force the lower-level bot to forfeit).
This does 3 HUGE things:
- Steam says there are roughly 400 concurrent users each day. If most of those users are everyday veterans, then bots give newer players a more reasonable obstacle to overcome toward the bottom of the ranked ladder. For reference, whenever I show this game to my friends, I have them play against bots because losing to me over and over is likely going to turn them away from the game (and I finished last season in low platinum - 1114 ELO).
- This gives newer players that are actually good at the game a solid sense of progression that encourages them to continue climbing the ladder.
- This gives YOU (the developers) a tool for loosely measuring how players fare against each character in the lower to mid ranks of ladder. If you can track each bot’s ELO and compare it to the other bots over the course of multiple seasons, then you might find trends that could help you finetune characters or adjust bot behaviors, or do whatever your creative dev hearts want to do with that data.
If you don’t like the idea of bots accidentally bleeding into upper-ladder players, then you could cap bot ELO to a specific rank (but you might lose out on that data collection bit that I’m curious about).