On the heels of this morning’s “Why, oh god, WHY does the EU have Co-Op vs. AI first?!?” on the forums, Riot has set the new feature live on the US servers. Players can now queue up as a premade team or solo and be paired with teammates to play against bots. The bots might be better than the standard Custom Game fare, but they certainly aren’t good.

Part of the problem is that they don’t jungle, and the bots seem to make bad decisions in 2v1 situations. If you stick to the lanes, chances are you’re going to win and win easily. When you start to get near brush, that’s where the bots actually seem okay, but mostly because their reaction times are instant. I blinked over a wall as Kassadin in one game, only to have the Annie on the other side instantly hit me with three skills. No joke, the combo landed before fog of war cleared, but I still managed to get the kill.

I did have one instance over my three games that I actually thought the bots played well. Trundle Bot and Ashe Bot were both top, both underleveled. They slipped into fog of war near our outer turret as my team made our way through the jungle to gank. As we approached from river, I got exhausted, ignited, silenced and Ruptured by the Cho’gath we hadn’t known was up there. It was a damn good bait, and like I said before, the timing was instant.

As much as the bots benefit from being run by a computer, they’re also hurt by it. You can kite the bots just by getting close to them with low health. They instantly run toward you and will often chase just up to tower range. I’ve also seen bots trying to take jungle minions get stuck walking in circles when a champion approaches them.

All of that said, it’s definitely more interesting to get ignited by an Ashe after she arrows you from outside the screen than it was to watch Yi bot two-step his way back to a turret while you killed him in Custom Games. What do you guys think?

Bioware co-founder and CEO Ray Muzyka talked with Videogamer.com about Dragon Age: Origins today and made some interesting statements regarding multiplayer in RPGs. Two of Bioware’s most recent releases have been single player RPGs, something I found a little distressing. As I get older I’m finding I want games to be more social, and Bioware is one of my favorite developers, so naturally I’m most excited for the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic. But I don’t want to miss titles like Mass Effect or DA:O because I really love the storyline, which is something that dissolves the deeper you get into an MMO. Lucky for me, Muzyka wants to help.

He sees the same sort of paradox in multiplayer/RPG gaming. It’s hard to keep control of a good story when you open the world to millions of player interactions, but those single player experiences leave something to be desired. As Muzyka puts it, “It’s hard to weave a great single-player storyline into a multiplayer experience. It’s not impossible. We’ve done it, and we’re doing it again now in Star Wars: The Old Republic. But it is challenging.”

As for the other way around, he’s not totally thrilled with the idea of a co-op mode for something like Mass Effect 2. “They could make a great gameplay experience,” he said. “Whether we’ll do them or not remains to be decided.” I think “could” is key because I’ve yet to see a co-op experience that I would choose over the single player, at least in an RPG.

For more on DA:O you can read the full interview at Videogamer.com.