When Co-op vs. AI launched at the end of the week, I took a couple hours to test things out. Though I wasn’t particularly impressed with the bots, I was shocked to see just how rude players were to one another when playing against a computer.

To break in the new bots, I played champions like Gangplank, Veigar, and Kassadin – champions that can kill an underfarmed player very quickly if they streak out ahead. It was a lot of fun, despite nearly constant cries from my teammates to “stop ks noob.” I sort of understand the anti-KS mentality in PvP. There’s reputation at stake for a lot of people, and everyone likes to have a nice K/D/A ratio. Against computers, though, who cares?

In my last Co-op vs. AI game (Kassadin), I had a player calling me a noob the whole game because I died a few times. After the game he went on and on about my win count, how he hoped to meet me in ranked, etc. He went on like that for two full pages of lobby text with no response from me other than, “yeah, I was trying my hardest.”

It’s a strange thing to join a Co-op game mode if the only goal is to berate your teammates. Have you had a similar experience?

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?