With the introduction of Pokémon UNITE into the gaming world, we now have a unique take in the world of online gamer-rage prevention. In UNITE, every time a player loses a ranked game, they have a chance for their next game to be entirely filled with bots. The higher your rank is in the current season, however, the more games you often have to lose in a row to be placed into one of these types of matches. You can’t control whether you get into one or not, and you usually can tell pretty quickly when it happens (more on that later). In these games, any teammates you queue up together with will still play with you, but any teammates not in your party, along with all enemy Pokémon, will be AI-controlled bots with randomly generated trainer IDs. If you win, you’ll still get the same rewards and ranking boost you normally would for a ranked game against real people. Lose, and you’ll almost always just get queued right back up into another one if you keep playing, giving you more chances to break your losing streak until you manage to pull out a victory.

So… There Can Be Bots in My Ranked Games?

To answer plainly, yes. Whenever you lose a ranked game in Pokémon UNITE, you have a chance of encountering them in your next game, whether you want to or not. These bots aren’t particularly difficult to defeat; they simply walk down their designated lane and target whatever enemies they come across, running away when their health gets low. They prioritize objectives as soon as they spawn, but do not otherwise act as a team. Even for the inexperienced player, these matches are often not too much of a challenge, and for those with higher skill levels it’s far from competitive. The enemy team’s bots even tend to surrender under certain conditions, like if your advantage grows to five-hundred points or the enemies fail to score one-hundred points in five minutes. As an interesting side note, your team’s bots will never offer to surrender if you’re losing, but if you ever try to do so then they’ll say yes—however you’ll just get put right into another one if you queue up again afterwards.

How Can I Tell If I’m in a Bot Game?

There are quite a few ways to get a hunch that you’re dealing with bots, from the character selection screen to in-game behavior to even the game’s loading screen. First of all, while selecting the Pokémon you wish to play, bots will be programmed to wait a bit before selecting theirs, so they don’t interfere with your choice. While players have to somewhat laboriously swap between characters to get to the one they want, bots will navigate to theirs almost instantly, and will lock in their choice right away. They won’t communicate what lane they plan to go to, and they won’t say anything with the game’s available quick messages pregame.

In the game’s loading screen, each bot will be displayed as having a somewhat random rank among those that you can queue up together with, and many will also have random skins. A significantly large tell, however, is that upon selecting a bot’s Pokémon to display their trainer ID, each bot will simply display a generic, identical pose with no extra decals or stickers, as if they haven’t edited their image at all. Then, once the game is fully loaded and everyone enters the stadium, all bots will wait a couple of seconds before leaving the starting spot at precisely the same time. Even though they made no effort to communicate previously what area of the map they will go to, they will each synchronously and steadily move to their respective Pokémon’s recommended area. From there, as mentioned previously, they’ll operate through the game with clunky, telegraphed movements as they target the enemy team’s Pokémon, run away when they get low on HP, and move lazily toward objectives as they spawn, often ignoring any and all enemies not directly in their sight range.

Finally, once the game has ended, the game will reach its concluding scoreboard and game review screen, listing all of the “players” and their contributions to the game. Under normal circumstances, here you can select a player from either team for a bevy of options such as adding them as a friend, reporting them, or complimenting them for playing well. However, such options are not present for bots—in fact, you can’t even select them in the first place. If there was any doubt before, then this is the surefire way to tell that, yes indeed, you just played out a ranked game with a bunch of bots—and still got performance points and rank changes in the process.

But What’s the Point?

Upon realizing that ranked games could be populated with bots, many players had mixed feelings on the concept. While some saw it as a nice way to prevent their rank from plummeting too far in one sitting, other more hardcore players called it unfair or unwanted pity by the game and its developers. If a player is losing games, then why should they be rewarded with practically free wins? In a sense, they have a point—as someone who’s quite competitive myself, I can certainly understand this point of view. However, I believe that many factors are at play behind the decision to include this feature in the game.

Whether companies like to admit it or not, MOBA titles and their player bases tend to have a negative reputation in terms of toxic behavior. Rage-quitting, abusive and/or offensive language in in-game chat, inappropriate player names, trolling, the list of seemingly everyday occurrences goes on. As developers of these games struggle to find ways to prevent their communities from committing such actions, newer titles like UNITE have begun to include more drastic or controversial methods for preventing toxicity. For example, UNITE does not have any form of flexible in-game chat, even between teammates. You can give helpful announcements, like “I’m going here!” or “Retreat!”, but other than these options players can’t simply say whatever they want whenever they want (for better or worse). This is partially due to UNITE being a Nintendo Switch title rather than a PC one, meaning there are no keyboards available. However, it also functions as a barrier, conveniently shielding players from the thoughts and words of others so they don’t elicit compounding reactions of players going off on each other and ruining the game at hand.

Managing the Mental

Placing bots in ranked games periodically, while at first a far-fetched idea, seeks to have a similar effect to the lack of in-game chat. Inherently, players enjoy success, and there’s an almost instinctual level of joy, satisfaction, or relief that usually follows a victory in any form. Even beyond that, the simple acknowledgement of things going well in a game can be enough to provide a form of mental reset, and this is where bot games can help significantly. Bot games only occur in ranked play when players lose, often requiring more than one loss consecutively. For those who lose games in particularly difficult or frustrating ways, bot games can provide a way to cathartically blow off steam in a controlled environment and relieve the stress built up over hours of gameplay. Whether they see it as unwanted pity or not, the simple positive reinforcement of in-game success and victory can help players in frustrating situations take a deep breath and reset their mental state, helping to stem the flow of negative energy and emotions from one player to another by letting them take out their anger on the AI rather than on real people.

For those who believe this is unwarranted or undesirable, another factor that must be considered here is the game’s target audience. From its inception, Pokémon UNITE was created to aim at a younger community than many other MOBAs. The colorful, kid-friendly franchise of lovable and loyal creatures was designed to be more accessible to children than other gritty, violent, and/or suggestive titles. Especially within the MOBA scene, games like League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of the Storm feature sexualized temptresses, bloodthirsty vampires, and cigar-smoking vigilantes. These titles are especially impactful with older adolescents and adults, who are much more accustomed to maturely rated gaming atmospheres. However, none of these elements are present in UNITE, its “rated E for Everyone” meaning that young children (and parents of young children) will often be the product’s consumers. As such, extra care must be taken so that the tempers of a less mature target audience can be managed, and so that such an audience can have a safer introduction to an otherwise infamous and stigmatized genre of gaming.

Making the Most of Bot Games

Knowing how to identify bot games and what purpose they serve is all well and good, but at the end of the day playing against bots for five to ten minutes can get a bit boring, especially for skilled players. That said, there are multiple ways to take advantage of the situation when it arrives. For those who are focused on grinding away at the ranked ladder, bot games not only provide an opportunity to get a win in the books, but also a chance to earn such much-needed performance points. After every game (win or lose), you receive performance points for a variety of reasons: sportsmanship, consecutive wins, and (most relevant to our interests) points scored. For every one-hundred points you scored in the game, you will receive a small bonus to your performance points granted in the ending results screen. These performance points can add up, and when you gather, enough they increase your rank-up progress as if you had won a game. Possessing one hundred of them can also prevent your rank from lowering after a loss. As the AI in bot games doesn’t make much of an effort to stop you from scoring, taking advantage of this can easily net you upwards of two or three hundred points tallied, if not more. If rank is what you’re concerned with, then run up that score as much as you can and milk some value out of the bots’ negligence.

The lack of difficulty involved with bot games provides more than just competitive advantages for dedicated players. For many confident that they can defeat the AI on mechanical prowess and game knowledge alone, bot games provide a largely risk-free and genuinely productive environment for practicing with new characters, build paths, and strategies. If there’s a Pokémon you like but aren’t confident playing with, a new set of items you thought of, or a pathway through the central jungle that you want to test out, then take advantage of the opportunity to familiarize yourself with these playstyles with far less risk. You’ll even increase your rank if you win, maximizing the efficiency of your practice without wasting any time you want to spend climbing up the ladder!

All in all, ranked games filled with bots are a controversial yet surprisingly beneficial aspect of Pokémon UNITE and its gameplay experience. They help players on a losing streak take a deep breath and reset their mental state, while providing a lax, easy environment for experimentation, practice, and stress relief. This makes them a useful tool for anyone interested in testing the waters of ranked play, but especially for the younger players that UNITE caters to as a target audience. Although they can be a bit boring or dull at times in practice, there are more than enough ways to make practical or entertaining use of them, and fortunately the AI will often surrender early if the score isn’t close. Compared to the boons of being rewarded for taking a breather and providing a better environment for younger gamers, however, I’d say the pros certainly outweigh the cons.