Save the game, NERF the AI( skynet in progress)

Not sure if kabam have seen any posts on how many ppl noticing the change in AI & yet nothing from kabam on this.

• Speed , reflexes, recovery timing, passive & aggressive nature is really inconsistent with AI & too fast at times for human fingers to beat them no matter how much space you have vs them in fight & yet they counter it at the blink of an eye.

• AI currently i would say is really on making game annoying & rage quit level if not "game breaking".

• you guys ask us about game mode, device type, connection type & interaction. BUT in FACT, AI in almost every game mode in game is really hard to deal with at times.
.
PS: in bgs , we understand there ai uses parry, dex , heavy/special/ intercepts & other mastery related stuff but what about other modes like AQ, Incursions, EQ, Story Quest & others as well.
But nothing been done on this & now situation is getting really bad with "AI behaviour" & it won't be wrong to say AI is slowly turning into skynet( for reference) to understand where AI is really going currently within the game.

Comments

AverageDesi

Fake news

A_Fungi

Skill issue

Typhoon

I have a belly button

Go_To

What exactly do you want them to do? Just saying nerf the ai is stupid. A lot of people are fine with the ai and “nerfing” them could cause things to be even more difficult if they change behaviors

Darkknight_94

Then

What exactly do u want then? Not a single change in current "AI"
.
Well i guess then AI blocking in mid of special attack is fine.
Ai throwing sp just after going down by attacker heavy & throwing sp while laying on ground & you cant even punish them .
AI doing 2-3 hit, dash back, repeat & then 5 hit combo to get close to sp3, not throwing sp until sp3 even with Taunt.
"Few of things ai being doing in the game recently"
I guess that comes under ai "working as intended" category

ReignkingTW

Just reduce it by 20 or 30 points.

Darkknight_94

Let me correct here instead of nerf, make some changes to AI & make it consistent then inconsistent speed, reflexes, recovery & agressive-passive nature.

Pikolu

I imagine this isn't an issue with the AI but other things in the game. There are many specials you can get clipped by and still dexterity out because of how the spacing of the animation is. I'm always grateful when I'm able to dexterity out of Knulls sp2 when I get clipped by a hit in the middle of it. This issue comes because I got hit by the edge of a hit box and then the next hit whiffs because I'm out of reach and the hit stun from the hit that hit me has ended and I get control again. Kindred has a similar problem if the first hit of his sp2 whiffs and you're using the Mephisto synergy for unblockable. One of the hits will whiff and AI gets control back in time.

Potential solutions for the specials is kabam has to change how the entire system works and have the hitstun of each hit have a duration that lasts to the end of the special so you can't get out if a hit whiffs. They could code a special lock to the enemies while they are knocked down so the AI can't use a special during that time.

There's many avenues available that could allieve the problems much easier than just saying "fix the AI".

Demonzfyre

Do you have anything to show the difference in A.I from when you thought it was "normal" to now?

Searmenis

deja vue

DarkNightRise

First of all my friend, working as intended or another possibility that is Kabam doesn’t know how to fix wth is going on

)

DarkNightRise

Second, from my point of view, I think the second possibility is more viable because there are many better way to make money rather than tweaking the AI. However, they stop updating and responding to any thread about input or AI, regarding how huge data of this game have developed, I don’t think they can fix it or the cost could be too high. So, live with it or just quite the game bro, 9 years old for a mobile game is already too long! In a business model, if any one know about Marketing, this is the final phase, and they will just try to make as much money as possible rather spending to fix anything.

Demonzfyre

Yes, exactly. This thread is like the other 200 before it, expecting Kabam to fix an invisible problem that no one can seem to show.

Again, just like I've said before, I feel like some actions the A.I does is different that before, like recovery and dash ins but can't ever seem to get it on video either.

DNA3000

The reason they keep asking for these details is because complaints about the AI getting harder have been continuous for the past four years plus. If all of them were actually correct, the AI would have already taken over the world.

In point of fact, *sometimes* I think I see things when people report them, but 99% of the time I don't. Even when people are saying "everyone" is seeing problems "everywhere" I can't find them on any of the devices I play in any of the game modes. These problems that people think are widespread and obvious aren't. If they were, they would probably be easier to find and eliminate.

To find and fix these problems requires figuring out why you see them and I don't. Or I see them and you don't. If you think the problem should be obvious and all they have to do is "find the bug" and "fix it" then okay, I don't see the problem, so the code doesn't have the problem, so problem solved.

These sporadic complaints almost certainly have to be situational issues, something whose common denominator might be something very subtle. And even when a group of people complain about "AI problems" there's no guarantee they are all complaining about the same problem. It might take a lot of people reporting a lot of problems with a lot of data before they find and address some of these issues, and it may be a lot of tiny ones rather than just one or two big ones.

Or people can just throw up their hands and say that since they aren't seeing any obvious benefit from reporting this data they shouldn't bother, in which case the problems will likely never be found. To me that seems to be shooting one's self in the foot, but all I can do is report what I see when I see it. Maybe that means eventually my issues will be found.

RonSwanson

That's what skynet wants you to think

DNA3000

A dev mentioned in a private discussion not long ago a point in their development timeline that is over ten years in the future.

Of course, whether the game exists ten or more years from now is not completely under their control, but the devs currently have no plans to sunset the game.

Demonzfyre

So the best business model is to shut down after 9 years? Can I ask what class you learned that in?

The company I work has been in business for 86 years. I need to warn them about how they've been doing it wrong for 77 years.

iDestroyerZ

I want to ask you a question since you have a pretty good knowledge about stuff and a good relationship with kabam, is it possible for them to change the engine of the game? Maybe that will fix this huge amount of bugs that keeps happening in every single area of the game and etc
I know they made some changes to the engine around 2020-2021 but i don't know if they changed the entire thing back them, i feel like if they don't have any plans to sunset the game rn, they need to do something to improve the overall state of the game cause it's bad =/ i know there's not a game that don't have any bugs but rn every single thing they try to do, seems to make things worse

Chris_Summers

Disagree.

DarkNightRise

I always see your comment contribute nothing for the admin or the post! Just take the Marketing 101, you will understand the life cycle of a product and what specific marketing for each phase dude! Actually I’m curious what type of job do you have you because I have seen you spend time in this forum more than your job actually!

DarkNightRise

As I said, regarding to the downtrend of Marvel recently or the superhero in general, plus the current condition of this game, if you’re the manager, it makes sense if you monetize the game as much as possible before it is closed. The game is a business model, and from the view of a good manager, it’s right strategy to do it

DNA3000

In theory they could migrate the game to a new engine. In practice this would only make things worse.

The change they made to the underlying engine was they upgraded it to the latest supported version of Unity, the underlying framework the game was built upon. They've done this many times in the past (because they are required to or lose vendor support) and sometimes when this happens there are glitches. No two versions of a framework are exactly identical, even when the APIs are exactly identical there are often subtle differences. Way back when 12.0 happened they also upgraded Unity, and that actually caused the *first* "Parry is broken" problems in the game.

Most recently the problem was that the pre-2020 version of Unity had a long-standing bug with the way timing worked in the engine, specifically in iOS. When this bug was fixed, it threw the timing of the game itself off, because the game was in effect written to match the broken timing, and that timing was now different. Moreover, there was no way to just change the game to match the way the old timing worked, because the new timing didn't differ from the old timing in a consistent way. There were things the old game did that were literally impossible under the new engine. So Kabam was forced to rewrite parts of the game, including the input system which is not just about reading input from the player but also integrating those events with the rest of what's happening in the game, moment by moment.

All of this can have huge downstream effects that are very complex to mitigate or resolve. For example, consider the case where the players notice that the AI is doing something differently now than before. That may have nothing to do with the AI at all. The AI is constantly making "decisions" about what it wants to do, but it must still adhere to the rules of how the game engine works. Some actions are possible, some are impossible. If the game's timing changes and makes a previously impossible action possible, say there was no window of opportunity to launch an attack between two events before, but now with slightly different timing there's a tiny one frame window between the two events that sometimes opens up, then humans might not notice but the AI will. The AI always "wanted" to do that, but it couldn't before because that was impossible, and now because the timing is possible the AI starts doing that.

You can stare at the AI code all day and never "see" why this happens. This is a dynamic situation that requires analyzing the game's frame by frame behavior. But if everything is now running with slightly different clocks than before, these changes can affect the AI in lots of random ways in different situations. For bonus points, the game will behave slightly differently if the game client skips frames, because a skipped frame is a moment in time where things won't happen when they ordinarily would, opening some windows and closing others between events. The AI might behave differently on my phone than yours.

None of this would change if we magically ported the game to another engine. In effect, that's what Kabam was already forced to do: port the game from old Unity to new Unity. New Unity works differently, so the game also works differently. And every time they try to tweak it to return the game to what players expect in one place, they can disturb things in another place. Moving to another engine would only exacerbate that problem.

I should point out that none of this has anything to do with players getting thousands of crystals accidentally, or champion abilities working differently than described (usually) or any of the other bugs in the game. Those have different causes you can't blame on the engine. What you can blame on the engine, and what can't be easily fixed, is the game has a playerbase that has a long history of having certain expectations of how the game works in real time that changes to the underlying engine - which are unavoidable when you use someone else's engine - can sometimes throw a monkey wrench into.

You might also ask: why us? Why not every other mobile game out there? Well, very few games actually implement frame precise timing requirements on the game play in environments where the players have perfect control over the circumstances. One frame difference can be the difference between a well timed block and a punch to the face. Meanwhile, in Shooter XYZ one frame difference usually isn't the difference between a shot hitting and a shot missing, and even when it is the players in Shooter XYZ never actually know if their shot would have hit or not. They only know if it hits or not. They don't have frame accurate muscle memory, and can't test the game repeatedly under exactly identical circumstances. Not many games are as sensitive to this kind of thing as MCOC is. However, if you look at the Unity boards around the time of the iOS clock fix, you'll see there were a lot of developers going nuts over trying to work around this change.

DNA3000

This is word salad.

Buttehrs

You obviously don't know how anything monetary works in regards to games then.

iDestroyerZ

I truly appreciate your response, it's always nice to have a better ideia of what's going on....it's sad that changing the engine wouldn't solve these problems =/ mcoc is a good game and deserves to live those 10 years you mentioned
Really hope the devs find a way to solve this problems cause we're in a such delicate state where everytime they wanna add/fix something, another one breaks it -.-
If i remember correctly, a few years ago we used to have a maintenance after 00 every once in a while, do u know why they stopped doing that?

Demonzfyre

I know what the lifestyle of a product is/means. The problem is you're comparing a theory to something that doesn't change or evolve.

Looking at this game from it's release from 2014/2015 in it's first year to what the game is now, it's not the same game, it's evolved. Kabam markets this game well and having it being backed by Marvel makes it easier.

This game will fail if they don't keep changing aspects of this game and evolving it. To simply say it's been going for 9 years and they're only trying to make money at this point is pure ridiculousness. That's not how any of this works. That's not even "marketing 101". Marketing doesn't keep your business alive. It's part of how a business keeps going but isn't the way a company survives.

I work for a retail company that sells furniture, appliances, electronics and flooring. The business model for us has evolved in its 86 years to be one of the top businesses out there. We hit 2 billion in sales in 2022 and we don't have hundreds of stores.

We've added new product lines and departments to drive customers to us. We've developed land with shopping and restaurants to drive business to us.

This game has done the same. If they were looking to monetize the game, it wouldn't be free. They wouldn't make it easier for new players to make progress. Everything we've been used to doing will be monetized.

DarkNightRise

I appreciate any disagreement but with proof and arguments not just like this

DarkNightRise

I don’t say it’s absolutely true! But what is happening in this game are supporting my opinion. Do you see the downtrend of Marvel, or how the monetary strategy is applied recently?

DarkNightRise

I appreciate your knowledge and argument about how is the game engine work, but there is only one thing I don’t understand is that why Kabam doesn’t share this kind of information publicly with us? I remembered they made a thread about how hard to navigate input issue, but from that point they never update anything about this even though it’s clear that this “input issue” haven’t sold just worse!

Buttehrs

The proof is in the game itself. Almost no games make it as long as mcoc has. 9 years is beyond insane in the mobile game world. And it still makes I think top 3 in money only behind candy crush and clash of clans. So obviously, your very wrong in saying they are just trying to make as much before it dies otherwise the game would have ended years ago. But too many of you think you know everything when you know very little.