Explanation - health potions cost a small amount of in game money and have to be ferried by a courier to the player. Most pros (and good players copying the pros) didn’t do this because it wasn’t considered cost effective. They would rather save up for a larger purchase. Until they repeatedly lost to OpenAI bots spending absurd amounts of money on health potions.
The AI didn't follow "best practice" because it wasn't trained on human games, found a better way and that was quickly adopted by all, becoming the new best practice.
League of Legends players discovered this like 15 years ago (the "13 health pot start"), I wonder why this didn't cross over. I suppose the player bases don't actually intersect very much?
It's mostly because it's was a different scarce resource at that time that was seen as non-optimal use by the players, the courier. It can ferry item to you, in a normal game there was only one of them for your whole team, which mean using it would take that ability away for your teammate during the ferry time.
One constraint to those showmatches at the time was that every heroes had their own courier, and player at that point were not accustomed to using it for "low value" travel, unlike the AI that was using it liberally.
In a later patch, the 1 courier per hero feature was added, and now pro players are much better at managing it, but at that time it was truly a heavy opportunity cost.
I think maybe the games are a bit different and it wasn't viable? I was pretty into the original WC3 Dota and starting with tangos for healing was a pretty popular strategy for supports and solo lane players.
caveat: my Dota 2 knowledge is lacking because I haven't followed the game for about a decade now and I have essentially 0 experience with League.
Sounds like any other game that AI powered search finds new optimal strategies. Chess , go, poker all have new strategies that no human thought of for hundreds of years. Some of them seem obvious in hindsight but that’s how knowledge works generally
Because they did, this comment chain is somewhat of an attempt at revisionist history to try and make a connection that other games had "revelations" about AI more than it's a statement trying to accurately portray the situation.
It's worth noting here that most of these comments are missing that another dimension of the game that's completely absent which heavily influences decision making of normal gameplay: communication and progression from other lanes in the game. It's almost kind of a long running joke in the game that you'd laugh if someone asked you to 1v1 mid because it usually meant you beat them technically and they're grasping for straws to show superiority, despite how segmented and different from normal gameplay it is and how useless of a skill beating someone in such a constrained environment is.
To this point, there were better manually crafted "AI" bots that could team with eachother effectively at a higher level than the average player since the original custom map in 2003-2005. The breakthrough here IMO wasn't that it was actually making any novel decisionmaking but that it was able to perform at a high level and improve by conventional ML training, which I think is a separate callout than most of the stargazing done in the comments here.
I wouldn't say profeciency 1v1 mid (specifically the even MORE watered down rules applied here that you automatically lose after only 3 deaths or the tower is taken) translates accurately to anything in the original way you play the game unless your 1v1 matchup has a similar expectation of sitting parked in the lane, and even then it translates poorly. Sacrificing a death to kill a tower and spending all your gold so your effective loss is minimized is a legitimate trade, but in this fake constructed scenario the win/loss condition is already met. You approach the two entirely differently and more importantly, more simplisticly. That doesn't even address that some hero matchups have intentional designs to be weaker earlier in the game and/or are meant to participate in fights with multiple heroes or doing secondary objects and can't assert the same posture which goes completely unaddressed by this narrow slice of gameplay.
All that buildup to say that healing potions and staying in the lane have been a tenant of normal gameplay since it's conception, and the expectation has shifted from patch to patch. What was "discovered" here is that if you don't optimize for longer term gameplay like you would for a normal game and do the most you can to optimize for a narrow slice of early skirmishes, potions have a higher cost value effectiveness. Not sure anyone beside laymen to the game thought that was a revelation.
The AI didn't follow "best practice" because it wasn't trained on human games, found a better way and that was quickly adopted by all, becoming the new best practice.