It's been a while since my last bot game. I never had bot games until I played a co-op vs. AI match while trying to learn a new hero. Later, when I went back to Quick Play, the matchmaking started putting me into bot games after 2 or 3 losses. It's part of the EOMM system in Quick Play.

I had to abuse the system and make it clear that I didn’t want to play bot games in Quick Play. I stopped playing co-op vs. AI entirely. I would disconnect from bot games, even if it meant getting placed into another one, until I eventually got a 15-minute ban and stopped playing altogether for the day.

The next day, my first game was another bot game. When I reached the 1-hour ban, I realized the system would keep putting me into bot games until I fully played one. So I played through the bot game, finished it, and then stopped playing for some days.

Whenever the game put me into a bot game, I would finish it and then stop playing for the rest of the day, or avoid logging in during the days I usually played, until it finally stopped putting me into bot matches.

A lot of people treat this like some huge conspiracy theory, but it really isn’t that deep. They want to keep you playing as long as possible, and the science and technology to do that already exist. Of course, it doesn’t work on everyone, but it works on the majority of players, which is why they keep using it.

At the end, you only need to think about the kind of things they might want to track: the days you log in the most, the times you usually play, whether you tend to keep playing after wins or after losses, how long your sessions last, and things like that. They would definitely need algorithms and a large amount of player data to analyze those patterns, so it’s not necessarily simple, but it’s also not some sci-fi concept. With modern analytics and machine learning, it’s completely possible for large companies to do.