What happened to the bots? They used to be pretty good, now they're completely braindead.

[sSasha-uwu]

Bots just walk around aimlessly in lane, sometimes not even casting spells that would easily secure a kill. Enemy bots are also insanely aggressive in lane, constantly taking creep aggro and diving under tower when there is zero chance of a kill. If you put creep equilibrium in front of your tower you can basically just farm kills because they constantly wander into tower range and get themselves killed. They also don't contest any runes aside from the very first bounty runes, which I feel like I remember them doing.

In the mid game, bots just wander around the map, not farming or grouping up for objectives. When they do rarely group up for objectives, it's never tormentor or roshan, always a tower. If they see an enemy hero they either dive them enemy into T4s or instantly abandon the entire fight and go back to wandering around the map. You essentially have to 1v5 the whole game because they either die while diving or don't actually fight. It's especially annoying because the bots are pretty good at using glyph so you have to 1v5 like ten times in a row just to get a lane of barracks. Either that or split push, which the bots are pretty decent at defending against when it comes to towers, but for some reason they're really skittish when it comes to defending barracks.

When an actual fight does happen it's completely dependent on abilities instead of items, because they never farm them. My ally lifestealer had essentially starting items + about 500 gold of items at minute 30. They also group up insanely aggressively and always get hit by 5 man ravages, echo slams, etc. If I see a warlock get picked I know he's going to have 40 kills by the end of the game because the bots are insanely horny for the golem and always attempt to right click it to death, dying in the process and getting their allies killed with fatal bonds.

I remember first downloading this script like a year ago and being really impressed, but now they're almost indistinguishable from the default bots. I'm sure valve has done some fuckery with the bot api as usual, but man.

[Doombringer-MarAlith]

I'm not so sure about this. The bots are way way better than what they were a year ago. Yes, big updates do introduce new quirks while fixing old bugs, that's expected with a system as complicated as this. Their performance continuously improves, however. While I do agree with some of your points (bounty runes, better racks defense), it feels like you're talking from a perspective 2-3 updates late. Yes, before you could abuse them heavily by dragging them into the tower range, but that's not the case at all in the latest commit. Now their main weakness is (and you haven't even mentioned this - do you actually HAVE the latest update?) miscalculating TP usage. You can abuse them quite easily by interrupting teleports (or just actually doing enough damage), resulting in a kill where they would've survived if they just ran off. I'm not sure the difficulty setting you use, or if you use FretBots at all, but we had to lower the difficulty lately because the bots have improved drastically. Of course, sometimes they still end up in a disarray, but there's just no way you can claim that they're "almost indistinguishable from default bots". And trust me, it is better that they try to push instead of trying to do Roshan, and especially Tormentor.