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I'd love to see some of that AI on important bosses in an enclosed environment. Event (be they raid, dungeon, story, etc) bosses being less scripted and more autonomous.
This is a really important point to remember if we want TF-like content to be experienced by a majority of players.
Just so I understand, is that movement penalty you mention at the end intended to prevent the jousting problem?
Spurn all ye kindle.
People absolutely play games just because they are fun Zee. Most games never had any kind of grind associated with them, that is a very recent thing.
True, it caught on because it plays on human psychology in a big way, but having a game be fun first and foremost is pretty important.
Fortunately you can both have carrots and still have a game worth playing.
Yeah, not just because of PvP. And I would agree that jousting, if performed successfully, would minimize or potentially negate the risk vs. reward model. Except that it really didn't do all that much for preventing jousting. PvPers figured out how to jump-cancel more than a few animations and still have the powers go off.
Side-note: Whenever I heard the word 'root', I think of either the band The Roots and their song [youtube]XfQzll6ggCw[/youtube] or [youtube]Xf1YF_MH1xc[/youtube] by Beastie Boys.
I'm of the opinion that having "flexible guardrails" on the heuristic AI would seem to be a desirable attribute, such that the more the PCs outnumber the Big Bad™ the lower the guardrails go and the more "badass" the AI is allowed to be. Practical upshot of this being that content run in a Team-8 context will play out differently than content run in a League-16 or League-24 context, because the AI [i]will respond differently[/i] to the increased adversity of facing off against that many PCs. That way, the AI "fights smarter" against larger groups of (PC) enemies, versus fighting "dumber" against soloists.
And what can help that smart vs dumb determination for the AI?
Why, the number of Lieutenant, Boss, Elite Boss, etc. mobs there are present and currently being engaged by the PCs.
And what goes up in quantity when the Team size expands?
Why ... the number of Lieutenant, Boss, Elite Boss, etc. mobs there are present to be engaged by the PCs at any given place and time ...
Funny how that works out, isn't it?
[youtube]iNaW8WW3FMI[/youtube]
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
People play games because they are fun but that doesn't mean they won't choose a game which rewards them for playing over a game which does not. more than one game exists you know! even if CoT ends up being the only superhero one around.
Sure, many people love seeing numbers go up and having the illusion of progress, yes. Plenty of games do that now since publishers started to realize how much more money they could make if they turned their games into casinos. Loot crates and other ways of monetizing psychological vulnerabilities are not really what I was trying to discuss though, that is kind of another topic, let me stop myself there.
The trick is in the execution. There's nothing wrong with having unlocks and carrots in general. If you start making them exclusive to specific timeframes and then removing access to them forever after that (many freemium games do this to try to force quick cash injections with a sense of urgency and exclusivity) then you are giving a big middle finger to people that have lives and jobs. Ditto if you have huge grinds in general to obtain those carrots, unreasonably high prices in the carrot shop, make carrots exclusive to specific content that isn't desireable to all players, and so forth.
My main concern is that the game respects my time. I know I'm the odd man out in an MMO crowd in that I'd actually prefer a game without levels at all that removed most if not all of the grind of all kinds from the game. I understand that won't be the case at all. I just want to know that I won't have to essentially put down unwieldy sums of cash and/or amounts of time in order to get the carrots that look interesting to me from those inevitable treadmills.
If cool hats are locked behind an achievement that only lasts for a month and I'll be overseas during that time? Big letdown. If a hat is only obtainable through specific gameplay that I find less interesting? Boo to that.
Of course everything is supposedly going to be available in the cash shop in CoT as account unlocks so it basically comes down to price and how much players will get for subscribing.
One way to smooth that out was mentioned previously, having carrotbux associated with a variety of gameplay achievements so that players can pursue what they like most and still get stuff that may not be directly unlocked through that gameplay. Do enough crafting and get a PVP hat or whatever. A simple way of doing this since everything will be in the cash shop is having injections of cash shop currency into an account for the first time they perform certain achievements (account based not character based since unlocks are account wide), but it doesn't have to be handled exactly that way.
If the prices and income from subscription are reasonable and the devs don't try to push artificial exclusivity as a means of trying to milk whales then there is no problem. The only reason I bring it up is that this is an issue that is an extremely common stumbling block for game developers and since it potentially ties directly into game income there are always incentives for policies focused on whale hunting and short term profit.
Something I think might be interesting is if the AI has a series of "hard" and "soft" moves it can make, and it can learn to categorize those moves as it sees fit using the neural networking, but it will use more of the soft moves when the fight is going poorly for the players; Not so much that the fight ever becomes easier, but just give the players a bit of breathing room if they're getting their asses handed to them, but when they're cohesive and fighting hard and keeping the pressure up, feel free to cut loose and use more of the hard moves. I kind of have a feeling that momentum will already do some of this, but as Tannim mentioned the problem with the AI playing super optimally and just crushing the players, this would allow the AI to purposefully make "mistakes" when the players need a break.
As a baseline, think about the sort of things that a player might do wrong if they're distracted, fatigued or over-confident; Not aiming a cone/AoE attack just right, not managing energy usage so that they are unable to get off that big alpha strike or the mass hold, using an Inspiration a bit too early, etc. These would be examples of "soft" moves. Hard moves might include using the big alpha strike on the defender that's providing most of the healing or defense, Ignoring aggro and going for the glass cannons, etc. All the "optimal" moves players learn to execute when they're part of a cohesive team that plays together often.
~ DariusWolfe
Errant, TNT, Vibrant and Fluxion on Liberty
I've always been curious about complex AI in video games and how to make it 'fair', as in not all-knowing. For example, I don't think AI should be able to 'detect' you until you enter one of its sensory fields just as a PC can't detect another PC unless that PC is spotted (sight) or heard in games that allow sound detection. There are other methods, like radar or special inherent abilites, like tremor sense, that could apply as well. So, in a simple AI test, if the AI didn't 'sense' where a player spawned it shouldn't know where we spawn. It could use logic to widdle down the area, knowing the spawn point isn't likely within its sensory range. It also seems like AI often knows where we are and where we are going without being close enough to sense us. There is also the factor of being 'within' sight but so far away there's a less likely chance of actually being spotted. Like a sniper that is technically within sight but is in a bush so most players wouldn't actually see them, so it depends on how foliage plays into anti-detection in the coding. This might be, and probably is, far too detailed for AI in a game like CoT, but I've always wondered what it would be like to play against an AI that is as 'handicapped' as players but with as much complex 'thought'.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
We aren't talking about a strategy game here. MMO combat tends to be very simple, relatively speaking. Also, AI is generally written as part of the game itself, not as an independent entity playing the game in the way a human player would. Most implementations have access to all the game information inherently because they are the game in a literal sense.
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