@kabam Crashed I know you are just responding and I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack but I believe the situation is dire. Everyone is talking about the ai. Even the CCP who typically side steps the ai or casually mentions it is complaining openly. Months to fix is something many of us have heard here on the forums many of times. It has become a point of frustration and easy to disregard as another false promise
Don't worry, I don't take it as a personal attack. I know you and others are frustrated, and you have a right to be.
The info DNA has shared in this thread is important, not because everybody needs to know how the AI works, but because I think players should know what we are actually talking about when we say "AI". "Fixing" it isn't easy, because it's not "broken", it's just different. In a rhythm fighting game, different is a problem. Players learned one thing, now it's at least in some cases another. And it was not an intentional change that caused this discrepancy. If we could simply set the AI to work like it did 2 years ago we would, but we can't.
And just to be clear, DNA basically said this already, but I want to reiterate. The AI doesn't know what a parry is, it doesn't know what a dex is, it doesn't know what an intercept is. So we can't just tell it "light intercept less" because it doesn't know what that means. It's a weighted random number generator that is happening to roll light attack at the moment it needs to to intercept you. As the community has seen, any "fix" has consequences. So if we are able to set the AI to not roll light attack in those situations, it still has to do something. And what that something is might end up being even more frustrating.
There has been a group that has been working to address these issues already for months. We aren't taking it lightly, but I want to be reasonable about expectations here. We are committed to resolving these issues but it's probably the hardest thing to "fix" that the team has ever been faced with, because the system we are working with wasn't designed with any real intention for these situations that are very relevant to the modern MCoC experience.
@kabam Crashed I know you are just responding and I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack but I believe the situation is dire. Everyone is talking about the ai. Even the CCP who typically side steps the ai or casually mentions it is complaining openly. Months to fix is something many of us have heard here on the forums many of times. It has become a point of frustration and easy to disregard as another false promise
Don't worry, I don't take it as a personal attack. I know you and others are frustrated, and you have a right to be.
The info DNA has shared in this thread is important, not because everybody needs to know how the AI works, but because I think players should know what we are actually talking about when we say "AI". "Fixing" it isn't easy, because it's not "broken", it's just different. In a rhythm fighting game, different is a problem. Players learned one thing, now it's at least in some cases another. And it was not an intentional change that caused this discrepancy. If we could simply set the AI to work like it did 2 years ago we would, but we can't.
And just to be clear, DNA basically said this already, but I want to reiterate. The AI doesn't know what a parry is, it doesn't know what a dex is, it doesn't know what an intercept is. So we can't just tell it "light intercept less" because it doesn't know what that means. It's a weighted random number generator that is happening to roll light attack at the moment it needs to to intercept you. As the community has seen, any "fix" has consequences. So if we are able to set the AI to not roll light attack in those situations, it still has to do something. And what that something is might end up being even more frustrating.
There has been a group that has been working to address these issues already for months. We aren't taking it lightly, but I want to be reasonable about expectations here. We are committed to resolving these issues but it's probably the hardest thing to "fix" that the team has ever been faced with, because the system we are working with wasn't designed with any real intention for these situations that are very relevant to the modern MCoC experience.
Ok fine the AI doesn't know what a parry is, or what an intercept is, or doesn't know how to perform a light intercept. Its hard to think its random though when so many of us are experiencing it... Fine its random, what about recovery time? That is not "random".
@kabam Crashed I know you are just responding and I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack but I believe the situation is dire. Everyone is talking about the ai. Even the CCP who typically side steps the ai or casually mentions it is complaining openly. Months to fix is something many of us have heard here on the forums many of times. It has become a point of frustration and easy to disregard as another false promise
Don't worry, I don't take it as a personal attack. I know you and others are frustrated, and you have a right to be.
The info DNA has shared in this thread is important, not because everybody needs to know how the AI works, but because I think players should know what we are actually talking about when we say "AI". "Fixing" it isn't easy, because it's not "broken", it's just different. In a rhythm fighting game, different is a problem. Players learned one thing, now it's at least in some cases another. And it was not an intentional change that caused this discrepancy. If we could simply set the AI to work like it did 2 years ago we would, but we can't.
And just to be clear, DNA basically said this already, but I want to reiterate. The AI doesn't know what a parry is, it doesn't know what a dex is, it doesn't know what an intercept is. So we can't just tell it "light intercept less" because it doesn't know what that means. It's a weighted random number generator that is happening to roll light attack at the moment it needs to to intercept you. As the community has seen, any "fix" has consequences. So if we are able to set the AI to not roll light attack in those situations, it still has to do something. And what that something is might end up being even more frustrating.
There has been a group that has been working to address these issues already for months. We aren't taking it lightly, but I want to be reasonable about expectations here. We are committed to resolving these issues but it's probably the hardest thing to "fix" that the team has ever been faced with, because the system we are working with wasn't designed with any real intention for these situations that are very relevant to the modern MCoC experience.
insightful information about the AI. it sounds like a very basic finite state machine. But instead of taking the state of the players character, it randomly chooses an action at any time period.
If it is completely random, that would be very simple and less data intensive to develop, but with a very inconsistent result. but i hope that the model does take in some data from what the players character does
It's not really RNG and it's not even A.I. (I hate how everyone calls everything A.I. now) It's a responsive algorithm, that's what he meant by "weighted." Basically, the defender does something based on what you are or aren't doing. You dash in with a medium:
25% chance defender blocks
25% chance defender dashes back
5% chance defender light attacks
5% chance defender medium attacks
etc.
And if you hold block, the numbers change and the defender will more likely through a heavy. And there are probably hundreds if not a few thousand lines based on the generic, regular ol' fights. Then add in special skills like doom being able to stun you if you are shocked in striking range while charging heavy. As someone said previously, adjusting this code is like putting a band-aid on over and over. And that leads to a mummy. And mummies are terrifying but also fragile. That's why it takes so long to fix. The worst part about all of this is we will probably get used to it and then the fix will come out and everyone can start complaining again.
@kabam Crashed I know you are just responding and I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack but I believe the situation is dire. Everyone is talking about the ai. Even the CCP who typically side steps the ai or casually mentions it is complaining openly. Months to fix is something many of us have heard here on the forums many of times. It has become a point of frustration and easy to disregard as another false promise
Don't worry, I don't take it as a personal attack. I know you and others are frustrated, and you have a right to be.
The info DNA has shared in this thread is important, not because everybody needs to know how the AI works, but because I think players should know what we are actually talking about when we say "AI". "Fixing" it isn't easy, because it's not "broken", it's just different. In a rhythm fighting game, different is a problem. Players learned one thing, now it's at least in some cases another. And it was not an intentional change that caused this discrepancy. If we could simply set the AI to work like it did 2 years ago we would, but we can't.
And just to be clear, DNA basically said this already, but I want to reiterate. The AI doesn't know what a parry is, it doesn't know what a dex is, it doesn't know what an intercept is. So we can't just tell it "light intercept less" because it doesn't know what that means. It's a weighted random number generator that is happening to roll light attack at the moment it needs to to intercept you. As the community has seen, any "fix" has consequences. So if we are able to set the AI to not roll light attack in those situations, it still has to do something. And what that something is might end up being even more frustrating.
There has been a group that has been working to address these issues already for months. We aren't taking it lightly, but I want to be reasonable about expectations here. We are committed to resolving these issues but it's probably the hardest thing to "fix" that the team has ever been faced with, because the system we are working with wasn't designed with any real intention for these situations that are very relevant to the modern MCoC experience.
But why can't it go back to how it was before? Is she really an AI in the sense that she can learn new things? What makes her behavior change without changing the code? Is it some kind of bug or is she supposed to be that way and it got out of control? I don't know how this game works, but some others have behavior patterns, as if there were a number of behavior patterns and each champion has a pre-defined pattern. RoL's AI is different from AW's AI, which is also different from BG's AI. When you change the AI, do you change which one exactly? This is all a bit confusing, if there is a simple way to explain it that would be great, many people in the community would like to understand and I think they would be more relaxed about it.
It's not really RNG and it's not even A.I. (I hate how everyone calls everything A.I. now) It's a responsive algorithm, that's what he meant by "weighted." Basically, the defender does something based on what you are or aren't doing. You dash in with a medium:
25% chance defender blocks
25% chance defender dashes back
5% chance defender light attacks
5% chance defender medium attacks
etc.
And if you hold block, the numbers change and the defender will more likely through a heavy. And there are probably hundreds if not a few thousand lines based on the generic, regular ol' fights. Then add in special skills like doom being able to stun you if you are shocked in striking range while charging heavy. As someone said previously, adjusting this code is like putting a band-aid on over and over. And that leads to a mummy. And mummies are terrifying but also fragile. That's why it takes so long to fix. The worst part about all of this is we will probably get used to it and then the fix will come out and everyone can start complaining again.
The mummy analogy probably isnt a bad one haha, long lasting live service games kinda do be like that
It's not really RNG and it's not even A.I. (I hate how everyone calls everything A.I. now) It's a responsive algorithm, that's what he meant by "weighted." Basically, the defender does something based on what you are or aren't doing. You dash in with a medium:
25% chance defender blocks
25% chance defender dashes back
5% chance defender light attacks
5% chance defender medium attacks
etc.
And if you hold block, the numbers change and the defender will more likely through a heavy. And there are probably hundreds if not a few thousand lines based on the generic, regular ol' fights. Then add in special skills like doom being able to stun you if you are shocked in striking range while charging heavy. As someone said previously, adjusting this code is like putting a band-aid on over and over. And that leads to a mummy. And mummies are terrifying but also fragile. That's why it takes so long to fix. The worst part about all of this is we will probably get used to it and then the fix will come out and everyone can start complaining again.
Agree but we can't ignore the fact this is one if not the most horrible state the ai has been in. I'm getting clapped like crazy as if i'm playing against an ai model based on MSD
I think the AI is behaving much better than it was, just that it is way too fast. If it were me, I would add slight pause that is RNG based before the defender can execute their attack (50 - 250 ms). But without actually knowing the code, that may just be adding another band-aid to the mummy. It's definitely worth a test on their test server and I would like to know the results. And also they are doing too many 5 hit combos when it only takes one to kill a 6R5A. But that would be one of those things they are probably already aware of and working on that will come later.
@kabam Crashed I know you are just responding and I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack but I believe the situation is dire. Everyone is talking about the ai. Even the CCP who typically side steps the ai or casually mentions it is complaining openly. Months to fix is something many of us have heard here on the forums many of times. It has become a point of frustration and easy to disregard as another false promise
Don't worry, I don't take it as a personal attack. I know you and others are frustrated, and you have a right to be.
The info DNA has shared in this thread is important, not because everybody needs to know how the AI works, but because I think players should know what we are actually talking about when we say "AI". "Fixing" it isn't easy, because it's not "broken", it's just different. In a rhythm fighting game, different is a problem. Players learned one thing, now it's at least in some cases another. And it was not an intentional change that caused this discrepancy. If we could simply set the AI to work like it did 2 years ago we would, but we can't.
And just to be clear, DNA basically said this already, but I want to reiterate. The AI doesn't know what a parry is, it doesn't know what a dex is, it doesn't know what an intercept is. So we can't just tell it "light intercept less" because it doesn't know what that means. It's a weighted random number generator that is happening to roll light attack at the moment it needs to to intercept you. As the community has seen, any "fix" has consequences. So if we are able to set the AI to not roll light attack in those situations, it still has to do something. And what that something is might end up being even more frustrating.
There has been a group that has been working to address these issues already for months. We aren't taking it lightly, but I want to be reasonable about expectations here. We are committed to resolving these issues but it's probably the hardest thing to "fix" that the team has ever been faced with, because the system we are working with wasn't designed with any real intention for these situations that are very relevant to the modern MCoC experience.
Ok fine the AI doesn't know what a parry is, or what an intercept is, or doesn't know how to perform a light intercept. Its hard to think its random though when so many of us are experiencing it... Fine its random, what about recovery time? That is not "random".
He's not saying the AI randomly changes behavior. Rather, the AI is *always* randomly selecting what to do. This can be tricky because most people assume that if the AI is genuinely doing random things, it cannot possibly consistently do the same thing to everyone over and over. But that's where the complexity comes in.
Suppose the AI decides to randomly throw a light attack if you're in range. You aren't, so it doesn't. Maybe it just stands there twitching - gee, that sounds familiar. Now deep in the technical weeds, MCOC is just a powerpoint presentation. A very fast one, but it isn't doing things continuously: it does things one animation frame at a time, thirty times a second. Or is it? We *see* things happening thirty times a second because that's how fast it is drawing things to the screen. Is anything happening *in between* frames? Well, sure. The game is calculating things like where things should move to next, stuff like that.
So maybe the AI is sitting there trying to throw an attack, but it cannot because the game forbids that in frame 16, and then by frame 17 *you've* thrown an attack and hit the defender before it can act. Great. We see that, we might not know what is happening, but we can learn it by repetition. We always beat the AI to the punch, so to speak, because in frame 16 the game calculates us to be two inches out of range and in frame 17 it calculates us to be in range.
So then the game engine changes in some way. It adds some new features, it does more things, whatever. *Nothing* about the animations have changed, nothing about the hitboxes or attacks or anything else has changed. Nothing about the "AI" has changed as well. But maybe because it does different amounts of work at different times, those movement calculations change subtly. Now, according to the game engine, the AI *can* act in frame 16. So if it is sitting there randomly spazzing out and happens to roll double sixes on frame 16, it throws that attack and light intercepts you. Suddenly, it seems like the AI is lying in wait for you and holding an attack to intercept you with, when in fact it has been doing that all along for years.
How do you fix that?
Now, I'm not saying this specific thing is happening. This is an oversimplified example to illustrate the point. The AI can just be a random spazz bot, and yet *appear* to be smart because when you're random but *fast* you do whatever becomes possible, and if the game changes in a way to make certain impossible things possible those behaviors start to emerge, and when they do they do not look random. Because in a sense they aren't random, they are the natural consequence of the impossible becoming possible, and the random number generator just being fast enough to "find" them.
By the way, I think that's what "difficulty" is for the AI. When the AI is dialed to be harder, it just becomes faster. If you think about it, if you're a random spazz bot, the faster you are the smarter you're going to look, because you're more likely to find the right window to do the right thing that will catch the player in the face. Slow AI isn't just slower, it keeps missing the elevator doors. Fast AI finds more of the right opportunities to do bad things to the players.
How recovery time fits into this I'm not certain: whether that is an environmental situational thing or something embedded in the timing of the AI action engine itself. Possibly an interaction between the two. But these things aren't often directly tweakable because they involve timing not directives. The AI might not be told "recovery in X milliseconds" it might be told "recover as soon as possible" and "as soon as possible" changed for some reason in the engine.
You can't keep telling us its random or it has a limited ammount of responses because then we would be able to predict what it can do and right now we can't.
You could *if* you knew how the game engine worked. You don't, so you do not know what the precise timing of the engine is in version 45.1 verses 45.2 say. Or even how it might situationally vary in a single engine version. So you do not know what the AI was trying and failing to do in 45.1, and then suddenly is capable of doing in 45.2. And since timing is complex in Unity, you cannot assume that things will only change in very specific ways.
Years ago I was playing a game where players could not figure out why very specific attack chains had different DPS when used repeatedly, with nothing else changed. After studying the problem for a few months, I determined the problem was that there were at least two internal clocks in the game engine: a 1/30 animation clock, and a 1/8 combat action clock. These two did not line up perfectly, because eight does not divide 30 evenly. So there were timing "beats" as the two clocks came in and out of phase in a form of race condition issue. Sometimes attacks happened precisely on animation clock ticks, and sometimes they got offset by a fraction of a second. This caused very precise DPS measurements to seemingly rise and fall.
Unity doesn't work that way, exactly, as far as I know. But from what I understand, there are even higher order complexities in how it calculates when things happen when they are supposed to happen in between clock ticks. This is predictable in a sense, but only with perfect information about how the different processes in the game engine "race" each other.
It is easy to say, if things were as described we could predict what would happen. But when the game upgraded Unity to the version that fixed the iOS time calculation bug, I didn't see anyone out there predicting precisely what changed and how it changed, even though the only thing that changed was the game timing and not how the AI worked, even given many months. This is not a trivial problem to solve even with all the details: it is almost impossible for players looking from the outside to extrapolate the precise details of.
Also, in a sense players are in fact making some reasonable predictions of what the AI can and cannot do, since they are reporting very detailed observations of things the AI used to not do and now can do with regularity. Players can observe the changes and make reasonable deductions about what might have changed. What is very difficult is predicting how that could change in the future, or what might become possible that isn't possible now.
@kabam Crashed I know you are just responding and I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack but I believe the situation is dire. Everyone is talking about the ai. Even the CCP who typically side steps the ai or casually mentions it is complaining openly. Months to fix is something many of us have heard here on the forums many of times. It has become a point of frustration and easy to disregard as another false promise
Don't worry, I don't take it as a personal attack. I know you and others are frustrated, and you have a right to be.
The info DNA has shared in this thread is important, not because everybody needs to know how the AI works, but because I think players should know what we are actually talking about when we say "AI". "Fixing" it isn't easy, because it's not "broken", it's just different. In a rhythm fighting game, different is a problem. Players learned one thing, now it's at least in some cases another. And it was not an intentional change that caused this discrepancy. If we could simply set the AI to work like it did 2 years ago we would, but we can't.
And just to be clear, DNA basically said this already, but I want to reiterate. The AI doesn't know what a parry is, it doesn't know what a dex is, it doesn't know what an intercept is. So we can't just tell it "light intercept less" because it doesn't know what that means. It's a weighted random number generator that is happening to roll light attack at the moment it needs to to intercept you. As the community has seen, any "fix" has consequences. So if we are able to set the AI to not roll light attack in those situations, it still has to do something. And what that something is might end up being even more frustrating.
There has been a group that has been working to address these issues already for months. We aren't taking it lightly, but I want to be reasonable about expectations here. We are committed to resolving these issues but it's probably the hardest thing to "fix" that the team has ever been faced with, because the system we are working with wasn't designed with any real intention for these situations that are very relevant to the modern MCoC experience.
So what exactly is the solution? Have patience while you all are trying to find how to correct how the AI behaves? You mentioned that a group of people have been working on it for months and it’s been getting worse. So much to the point of community wide frustration. While the honesty and transparency about the issue is greatly appreciated, it still doesn’t solve the AI issues at hand. What is the community to do at this point? Have patience while the AI issues are resolved? Take a 6 month sabbatical from the game?
As much as I really love playing BGs, it’s borderline unplayable at this point. It highlights a troublesome period of the game, especially when fights rely on AI cooperation. Champs like Patriot are so undesirable because their kit relies on AI cooperation which isn’t at all reliable. I don’t say this to be sarcastic, mean, or threatening and I certainly don’t mean this as a personal comment or attack to you. They’re just genuine questions and concerns I think when playing this game. “When will the AI be cooperative? Am I going to have to bait a special for 1-2 minutes this fight? Do I even try to do an intercept and risk a shallow dodge and retaliation? Do I even try to punish this special even though usually in the past it’s been safe?” I just enjoy playing BGs so much and the fact that the AI is killing this game just honestly saddens me.
This is discussing the worsening AI after the recent update and I’ll be talking about more specific instances that have been getting more egregious so I hope this doesn’t get merged but we’ll see
So after the recent update that dropped last Monday, the AI behavior has somehow gotten even worse. I play a ton of BG and the current GC node makes you intercept and oh boy is that annoying af with the worsening AI
To start, the AI now loves to dash back and hold block. Like no matter what they just won’t go for your intercepts, they’ll just stand there and dash back, again and again. It’s so annoying and this definitely wasn’t happening as frequently pre-update
I’ll be waiting for ages for them to try and play into me for a light intercept but they’ll do one of two things now. They’ll either hold block and dash back or walk forward and use a light. This was kinda prevalent before but I noticed it’s even worse now
And guess what, they still won’t throw specials a lot of the time. This aspect isn’t as bad but there are so many times now where I’ll try and dash forward and hit their block and they’ll special intercept me. I swear this is happening constantly now. It happened in my last couple BG matches, go to hit their block, they instantly throw their special and nuke you. So much fun
I’ve been noticing some other stuff that YouTubers have experienced that I’ve also had happen. In Lags recent BG stream, the AI dexed his medium and parried his next attack. What even is this at this point? What exactly are we supposed to do?
I had a fight against domino last night where I dashed forward to tap her block because she wouldn’t throw her special. She sidestepped my dash perfectly and countered with a light, into a full combo, chained into a special attack
So now we have: - Constant special intercepting and refusal to throw it until you dash in - Dexing out of relics and combos that should have connected and somehow parrying - The worst one after the update is dashing back and holding block. Dear god this is the most annoying this I’ve ever had to deal with in this game. Dash forward and hit their block? Nah. Do it 3 more times? Still won’t budge. Light intercept? Nah they’ll still stand there. Medium intercept? Don’t try it, they’ll always counter it now - Perfect sidestepping into intercepts or parries
Thanks guys, very cool to confirm that the AI will somehow get even worse
Frankly, it's not even worth the grind anymore. I'm currently at a lil over 3k with regards to the realm contribution. Not complaining, just done.
@kabam Crashed I know you are just responding and I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack but I believe the situation is dire. Everyone is talking about the ai. Even the CCP who typically side steps the ai or casually mentions it is complaining openly. Months to fix is something many of us have heard here on the forums many of times. It has become a point of frustration and easy to disregard as another false promise
Don't worry, I don't take it as a personal attack. I know you and others are frustrated, and you have a right to be.
The info DNA has shared in this thread is important, not because everybody needs to know how the AI works, but because I think players should know what we are actually talking about when we say "AI". "Fixing" it isn't easy, because it's not "broken", it's just different. In a rhythm fighting game, different is a problem. Players learned one thing, now it's at least in some cases another. And it was not an intentional change that caused this discrepancy. If we could simply set the AI to work like it did 2 years ago we would, but we can't.
And just to be clear, DNA basically said this already, but I want to reiterate. The AI doesn't know what a parry is, it doesn't know what a dex is, it doesn't know what an intercept is. So we can't just tell it "light intercept less" because it doesn't know what that means. It's a weighted random number generator that is happening to roll light attack at the moment it needs to to intercept you. As the community has seen, any "fix" has consequences. So if we are able to set the AI to not roll light attack in those situations, it still has to do something. And what that something is might end up being even more frustrating.
There has been a group that has been working to address these issues already for months. We aren't taking it lightly, but I want to be reasonable about expectations here. We are committed to resolving these issues but it's probably the hardest thing to "fix" that the team has ever been faced with, because the system we are working with wasn't designed with any real intention for these situations that are very relevant to the modern MCoC experience.
Ok fine the AI doesn't know what a parry is, or what an intercept is, or doesn't know how to perform a light intercept. Its hard to think its random though when so many of us are experiencing it... Fine its random, what about recovery time? That is not "random".
He's not saying the AI randomly changes behavior. Rather, the AI is *always* randomly selecting what to do. This can be tricky because most people assume that if the AI is genuinely doing random things, it cannot possibly consistently do the same thing to everyone over and over. But that's where the complexity comes in.
Suppose the AI decides to randomly throw a light attack if you're in range. You aren't, so it doesn't. Maybe it just stands there twitching - gee, that sounds familiar. Now deep in the technical weeds, MCOC is just a powerpoint presentation. A very fast one, but it isn't doing things continuously: it does things one animation frame at a time, thirty times a second. Or is it? We *see* things happening thirty times a second because that's how fast it is drawing things to the screen. Is anything happening *in between* frames? Well, sure. The game is calculating things like where things should move to next, stuff like that.
So maybe the AI is sitting there trying to throw an attack, but it cannot because the game forbids that in frame 16, and then by frame 17 *you've* thrown an attack and hit the defender before it can act. Great. We see that, we might not know what is happening, but we can learn it by repetition. We always beat the AI to the punch, so to speak, because in frame 16 the game calculates us to be two inches out of range and in frame 17 it calculates us to be in range.
So then the game engine changes in some way. It adds some new features, it does more things, whatever. *Nothing* about the animations have changed, nothing about the hitboxes or attacks or anything else has changed. Nothing about the "AI" has changed as well. But maybe because it does different amounts of work at different times, those movement calculations change subtly. Now, according to the game engine, the AI *can* act in frame 16. So if it is sitting there randomly spazzing out and happens to roll double sixes on frame 16, it throws that attack and light intercepts you. Suddenly, it seems like the AI is lying in wait for you and holding an attack to intercept you with, when in fact it has been doing that all along for years.
How do you fix that?
Now, I'm not saying this specific thing is happening. This is an oversimplified example to illustrate the point. The AI can just be a random spazz bot, and yet *appear* to be smart because when you're random but *fast* you do whatever becomes possible, and if the game changes in a way to make certain impossible things possible those behaviors start to emerge, and when they do they do not look random. Because in a sense they aren't random, they are the natural consequence of the impossible becoming possible, and the random number generator just being fast enough to "find" them.
By the way, I think that's what "difficulty" is for the AI. When the AI is dialed to be harder, it just becomes faster. If you think about it, if you're a random spazz bot, the faster you are the smarter you're going to look, because you're more likely to find the right window to do the right thing that will catch the player in the face. Slow AI isn't just slower, it keeps missing the elevator doors. Fast AI finds more of the right opportunities to do bad things to the players.
How recovery time fits into this I'm not certain: whether that is an environmental situational thing or something embedded in the timing of the AI action engine itself. Possibly an interaction between the two. But these things aren't often directly tweakable because they involve timing not directives. The AI might not be told "recovery in X milliseconds" it might be told "recover as soon as possible" and "as soon as possible" changed for some reason in the engine.
This was all really useful and interesting to understand but what my brain ended up reading was…
It’s good to hear that it’s finally being looked at because broken or not it’s become detrimental to the enjoyment of the game.
This community already we already discussed by years about the AI, now they gave a very ambiguous statement that we need to have patience more with them??? And less expectation with them? I really don’t understand what is the situation here! First, go directly to answer our question can you either fix or revert the AI back or not? Even though you try to create the Jack Bliz event in BG to push players have more engagement with the game, this is a very short term and cheap move in marketing, the long term if you still keep the AI like this, people will just leave because of frustration anyway Looks like we need more pressure community, someone is already lost their job…
This community already we already discussed by years about the AI, now they gave a very ambiguous statement that we need to have patience more with them??? And less expectation with them? I really don’t understand what is the situation here! First, go directly to answer our question can you either fix or revert the AI back or not?
If you need a direct answer, the answer is no. No, the AI cannot be fixed, because no actual AI exists that is there to be fixed. No, they cannot revert the AI back, because the AI hasn't been changed. The game itself has changed in subtle ways that have significant impact on the AI behavior, and that also cannot be reverted.
There might be a specific mitigation for the recovery window issue, but even that will likely require changes less to the AI itself, and more to the way the game processes those activities.
The long term solution to prevent these kinds of issues from cropping up again will be to build an actual deterministic AI system from scratch. Until that happens, these kinds of issues will crop up again, and they will always be difficult to mitigate, and they will never be sufficiently predictable to be preventable.
If that answer is not good enough for you, it is the only one that exists. There's nothing ambiguous about it. It is what it is, and there is nothing anyone anywhere can do to change it.
Looks like we need more pressure community, someone is already lost their job…
That's an empty threat, but feel free. Who exactly are you going to pressure, and what are you going to pressure them into doing that isn't already being done? The absolute best you could possibly due is maybe, just maybe, complain enough to get the devs to stop reading the forums. Which might increase the speed at which they solve the problems by some non-zero amount, although I doubt if Crashed does a lot of Unity coding.
Are there any temporary changes the devs would consider as a stopgap until a solution is found?
For example, disabling defender ability to parry stun in aw and bgs.
Would that be fair to the players who use defenders that rely upon such effects to be good defenders?
Changing content is a separate discussion, but when you talk about player defenders in competitive modes, you are not helping players by inactivating defenders, you're choosing sides between two players.
This community already we already discussed by years about the AI, now they gave a very ambiguous statement that we need to have patience more with them??? And less expectation with them? I really don’t understand what is the situation here! First, go directly to answer our question can you either fix or revert the AI back or not?
If you need a direct answer, the answer is no. No, the AI cannot be fixed, because no actual AI exists that is there to be fixed. No, they cannot revert the AI back, because the AI hasn't been changed. The game itself has changed in subtle ways that have significant impact on the AI behavior, and that also cannot be reverted.
There might be a specific mitigation for the recovery window issue, but even that will likely require changes less to the AI itself, and more to the way the game processes those activities.
The long term solution to prevent these kinds of issues from cropping up again will be to build an actual deterministic AI system from scratch. Until that happens, these kinds of issues will crop up again, and they will always be difficult to mitigate, and they will never be sufficiently predictable to be preventable.
If that answer is not good enough for you, it is the only one that exists. There's nothing ambiguous about it. It is what it is, and there is nothing anyone anywhere can do to change it.
Looks like we need more pressure community, someone is already lost their job…
That's an empty threat, but feel free. Who exactly are you going to pressure, and what are you going to pressure them into doing that isn't already being done? The absolute best you could possibly due is maybe, just maybe, complain enough to get the devs to stop reading the forums. Which might increase the speed at which they solve the problems by some non-zero amount, although I doubt if Crashed does a lot of Unity coding.
I like this short and concise comment from you and this should be the answer from Kabam. And it would be better and more transparent if Kabam can make an official statement post as a conclusion about this AI issue after years of investigation. Tbh, I don’t have time to read other comments from you because it’s too long and also very boring with many explanation post from Kabam.
It’s not a threat, it’s just a fact that whenever a problem comes and not solved, someone has to take responsibility for it, even though this is a game. However, it depends on how our community react to this, which is the measurement for how serious of this AI issue. I believe whoever create the Jack BG Bliz also have same perspective with me, let’s see whether the juicy reward in BG milestone in this event is enough attractive to make the players ignore the AI or not.
I don't think I know as much about unity as DNA3000 but I feel like they are missing some points about the gameplay and coding.
This isn't something completely controlled by the game engine. Kabam has a lot of not most of the control of it. The issue is it's an old game and I doubt anyone who originally developed the game is still there.
Even if they are they only have part of it all under their umbrella. I think the issue lies more on the legacy system it was built on and fixing it was like shooting a bandaid with a slingshot which is very hard if you've never tried it. But in the news and announcements, Kabam has said they rebuilt the "AI" and I think that now they can apply bandaids directly to the boo boos. It's still not easy. It still affects 9000 things that aren't anticipated.
But now Kabam can actually work on it. Which they could only blindly so before without causing bugs and making everything worse for awhile. They already are working months ahead of time and the issue before was trying to add fixes inside of that. I have hope for the future.
I was going to say earlier that bandaids are the worst way to do things and rebuilding is ultimately better (I've dealt with other programmers and fixing a mess works, but correcting it and modernizing it is much better) and that is what they have done. So... Deal with the pain for now, it shouldn't last long.
Comments
The info DNA has shared in this thread is important, not because everybody needs to know how the AI works, but because I think players should know what we are actually talking about when we say "AI". "Fixing" it isn't easy, because it's not "broken", it's just different. In a rhythm fighting game, different is a problem. Players learned one thing, now it's at least in some cases another. And it was not an intentional change that caused this discrepancy. If we could simply set the AI to work like it did 2 years ago we would, but we can't.
And just to be clear, DNA basically said this already, but I want to reiterate. The AI doesn't know what a parry is, it doesn't know what a dex is, it doesn't know what an intercept is. So we can't just tell it "light intercept less" because it doesn't know what that means. It's a weighted random number generator that is happening to roll light attack at the moment it needs to to intercept you. As the community has seen, any "fix" has consequences. So if we are able to set the AI to not roll light attack in those situations, it still has to do something. And what that something is might end up being even more frustrating.
There has been a group that has been working to address these issues already for months. We aren't taking it lightly, but I want to be reasonable about expectations here. We are committed to resolving these issues but it's probably the hardest thing to "fix" that the team has ever been faced with, because the system we are working with wasn't designed with any real intention for these situations that are very relevant to the modern MCoC experience.
Fine its random, what about recovery time? That is not "random".
But instead of taking the state of the players character, it randomly chooses an action at any time period.
If it is completely random, that would be very simple and less data intensive to develop, but with a very inconsistent result. but i hope that the model does take in some data from what the players character does
You dash in with a medium:
- 25% chance defender blocks
- 25% chance defender dashes back
- 5% chance defender light attacks
- 5% chance defender medium attacks
- etc.
And if you hold block, the numbers change and the defender will more likely through a heavy.And there are probably hundreds if not a few thousand lines based on the generic, regular ol' fights. Then add in special skills like doom being able to stun you if you are shocked in striking range while charging heavy. As someone said previously, adjusting this code is like putting a band-aid on over and over. And that leads to a mummy. And mummies are terrifying but also fragile. That's why it takes so long to fix. The worst part about all of this is we will probably get used to it and then the fix will come out and everyone can start complaining again.
Is she really an AI in the sense that she can learn new things? What makes her behavior change without changing the code? Is it some kind of bug or is she supposed to be that way and it got out of control?
I don't know how this game works, but some others have behavior patterns, as if there were a number of behavior patterns and each champion has a pre-defined pattern.
RoL's AI is different from AW's AI, which is also different from BG's AI.
When you change the AI, do you change which one exactly? This is all a bit confusing, if there is a simple way to explain it that would be great, many people in the community would like to understand and I think they would be more relaxed about it.
Suppose the AI decides to randomly throw a light attack if you're in range. You aren't, so it doesn't. Maybe it just stands there twitching - gee, that sounds familiar. Now deep in the technical weeds, MCOC is just a powerpoint presentation. A very fast one, but it isn't doing things continuously: it does things one animation frame at a time, thirty times a second. Or is it? We *see* things happening thirty times a second because that's how fast it is drawing things to the screen. Is anything happening *in between* frames? Well, sure. The game is calculating things like where things should move to next, stuff like that.
So maybe the AI is sitting there trying to throw an attack, but it cannot because the game forbids that in frame 16, and then by frame 17 *you've* thrown an attack and hit the defender before it can act. Great. We see that, we might not know what is happening, but we can learn it by repetition. We always beat the AI to the punch, so to speak, because in frame 16 the game calculates us to be two inches out of range and in frame 17 it calculates us to be in range.
So then the game engine changes in some way. It adds some new features, it does more things, whatever. *Nothing* about the animations have changed, nothing about the hitboxes or attacks or anything else has changed. Nothing about the "AI" has changed as well. But maybe because it does different amounts of work at different times, those movement calculations change subtly. Now, according to the game engine, the AI *can* act in frame 16. So if it is sitting there randomly spazzing out and happens to roll double sixes on frame 16, it throws that attack and light intercepts you. Suddenly, it seems like the AI is lying in wait for you and holding an attack to intercept you with, when in fact it has been doing that all along for years.
How do you fix that?
Now, I'm not saying this specific thing is happening. This is an oversimplified example to illustrate the point. The AI can just be a random spazz bot, and yet *appear* to be smart because when you're random but *fast* you do whatever becomes possible, and if the game changes in a way to make certain impossible things possible those behaviors start to emerge, and when they do they do not look random. Because in a sense they aren't random, they are the natural consequence of the impossible becoming possible, and the random number generator just being fast enough to "find" them.
By the way, I think that's what "difficulty" is for the AI. When the AI is dialed to be harder, it just becomes faster. If you think about it, if you're a random spazz bot, the faster you are the smarter you're going to look, because you're more likely to find the right window to do the right thing that will catch the player in the face. Slow AI isn't just slower, it keeps missing the elevator doors. Fast AI finds more of the right opportunities to do bad things to the players.
How recovery time fits into this I'm not certain: whether that is an environmental situational thing or something embedded in the timing of the AI action engine itself. Possibly an interaction between the two. But these things aren't often directly tweakable because they involve timing not directives. The AI might not be told "recovery in X milliseconds" it might be told "recover as soon as possible" and "as soon as possible" changed for some reason in the engine.
Years ago I was playing a game where players could not figure out why very specific attack chains had different DPS when used repeatedly, with nothing else changed. After studying the problem for a few months, I determined the problem was that there were at least two internal clocks in the game engine: a 1/30 animation clock, and a 1/8 combat action clock. These two did not line up perfectly, because eight does not divide 30 evenly. So there were timing "beats" as the two clocks came in and out of phase in a form of race condition issue. Sometimes attacks happened precisely on animation clock ticks, and sometimes they got offset by a fraction of a second. This caused very precise DPS measurements to seemingly rise and fall.
Unity doesn't work that way, exactly, as far as I know. But from what I understand, there are even higher order complexities in how it calculates when things happen when they are supposed to happen in between clock ticks. This is predictable in a sense, but only with perfect information about how the different processes in the game engine "race" each other.
It is easy to say, if things were as described we could predict what would happen. But when the game upgraded Unity to the version that fixed the iOS time calculation bug, I didn't see anyone out there predicting precisely what changed and how it changed, even though the only thing that changed was the game timing and not how the AI worked, even given many months. This is not a trivial problem to solve even with all the details: it is almost impossible for players looking from the outside to extrapolate the precise details of.
Also, in a sense players are in fact making some reasonable predictions of what the AI can and cannot do, since they are reporting very detailed observations of things the AI used to not do and now can do with regularity. Players can observe the changes and make reasonable deductions about what might have changed. What is very difficult is predicting how that could change in the future, or what might become possible that isn't possible now.
As much as I really love playing BGs, it’s borderline unplayable at this point. It highlights a troublesome period of the game, especially when fights rely on AI cooperation. Champs like Patriot are so undesirable because their kit relies on AI cooperation which isn’t at all reliable. I don’t say this to be sarcastic, mean, or threatening and I certainly don’t mean this as a personal comment or attack to you. They’re just genuine questions and concerns I think when playing this game. “When will the AI be cooperative? Am I going to have to bait a special for 1-2 minutes this fight? Do I even try to do an intercept and risk a shallow dodge and retaliation? Do I even try to punish this special even though usually in the past it’s been safe?” I just enjoy playing BGs so much and the fact that the AI is killing this game just honestly saddens me.
It’s good to hear that it’s finally being looked at because broken or not it’s become detrimental to the enjoyment of the game.
First, go directly to answer our question can you either fix or revert the AI back or not?
Even though you try to create the Jack Bliz event in BG to push players have more engagement with the game, this is a very short term and cheap move in marketing, the long term if you still keep the AI like this, people will just leave because of frustration anyway
Looks like we need more pressure community, someone is already lost their job…
There might be a specific mitigation for the recovery window issue, but even that will likely require changes less to the AI itself, and more to the way the game processes those activities.
The long term solution to prevent these kinds of issues from cropping up again will be to build an actual deterministic AI system from scratch. Until that happens, these kinds of issues will crop up again, and they will always be difficult to mitigate, and they will never be sufficiently predictable to be preventable.
If that answer is not good enough for you, it is the only one that exists. There's nothing ambiguous about it. It is what it is, and there is nothing anyone anywhere can do to change it. That's an empty threat, but feel free. Who exactly are you going to pressure, and what are you going to pressure them into doing that isn't already being done? The absolute best you could possibly due is maybe, just maybe, complain enough to get the devs to stop reading the forums. Which might increase the speed at which they solve the problems by some non-zero amount, although I doubt if Crashed does a lot of Unity coding.
For example, disabling defender ability to parry stun in aw and bgs.
Changing content is a separate discussion, but when you talk about player defenders in competitive modes, you are not helping players by inactivating defenders, you're choosing sides between two players.
It’s not a threat, it’s just a fact that whenever a problem comes and not solved, someone has to take responsibility for it, even though this is a game. However, it depends on how our community react to this, which is the measurement for how serious of this AI issue. I believe whoever create the Jack BG Bliz also have same perspective with me, let’s see whether the juicy reward in BG milestone in this event is enough attractive to make the players ignore the AI or not.
This isn't something completely controlled by the game engine. Kabam has a lot of not most of the control of it. The issue is it's an old game and I doubt anyone who originally developed the game is still there.
Even if they are they only have part of it all under their umbrella. I think the issue lies more on the legacy system it was built on and fixing it was like shooting a bandaid with a slingshot which is very hard if you've never tried it. But in the news and announcements, Kabam has said they rebuilt the "AI" and I think that now they can apply bandaids directly to the boo boos. It's still not easy. It still affects 9000 things that aren't anticipated.
But now Kabam can actually work on it. Which they could only blindly so before without causing bugs and making everything worse for awhile. They already are working months ahead of time and the issue before was trying to add fixes inside of that. I have hope for the future.
I was going to say earlier that bandaids are the worst way to do things and rebuilding is ultimately better (I've dealt with other programmers and fixing a mess works, but correcting it and modernizing it is much better) and that is what they have done. So... Deal with the pain for now, it shouldn't last long.