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Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
We have not set an end-date for the new period, but we will update this banner when we have more information.
Kabam: Please Shed Some Light: Am I Really Only Playing a Bot in Versus PVP?
IceSouLatioN
Posts: 21 ★
How does the Versus mode actually work? 
Are we playing against other players heroes but rather than them actually behind the controls it's just bots?
Or are we playing the game live with real people around the world?
If it's indeed live people, then how can I pause the game, go to work, come back, play the same summoner like those 8-hours didn't just happen? I don't expect my opponent is on the other end waiting for me to finish my shift, yet I play them at my leisure. I also don't believe anyone has ever received a "paused" message on their screen, yet you can pause your match at any time.
Hence, my over-analytical mind is wondering why it feels like I'm playing against real humans, but the aforementioned game dynamics make it impossible for my mind to conceive someone is actually on the other end after a prolonged pause.
What's the trick? Any body know or can Kabam shed light and illuminate MCOC's own caramel secret?
How do you get the summoners into the versus? LOL!
Are we playing against other players heroes but rather than them actually behind the controls it's just bots?
Or are we playing the game live with real people around the world?
If it's indeed live people, then how can I pause the game, go to work, come back, play the same summoner like those 8-hours didn't just happen? I don't expect my opponent is on the other end waiting for me to finish my shift, yet I play them at my leisure. I also don't believe anyone has ever received a "paused" message on their screen, yet you can pause your match at any time.
Hence, my over-analytical mind is wondering why it feels like I'm playing against real humans, but the aforementioned game dynamics make it impossible for my mind to conceive someone is actually on the other end after a prolonged pause.
What's the trick? Any body know or can Kabam shed light and illuminate MCOC's own caramel secret?
How do you get the summoners into the versus? LOL!
26
Comments
I'm actually trying to figure out why you even think you're playing against humans. The AI opponents in the arena do not play anything like actual human beings.
I think retrofitting this would be a nightmare. There's basically two main solutions to the problems introduced with wide area PvP in a real time fighting game like this. You can do peer to peer predictive backstepping, or you can do central authoritative servers. The latter is expensive and complicated, and the former is tricky and often unsatisfying. And any game that hangs when you push a help button is not a game I would want to do either of those things to.
The names are real players: the game servers pick teams from actual players' rosters. However, in some situations the game cannot satisfy the parameters of the kinds of teams it wants to deploy by picking from players: in that case it creates teams of random assemblages of champions. If you see the name of a player, the three champs you face come from that specific players' roster. If you're fighting against Team Thanos of Team Kang you're fighting more random teams. One way to tell that Team Thanos and Team Kang are not real players' rosters is that the team of three champions you face can including impossible duplication: for example, a 4/40 and 5/50 of the same 4* champion. Another way you can tell is that each champion in a Team Thanos or Team Kang team can appear to have different masteries: teams of three from the same person's roster will have identical masteries.
Do Kang/Thanos teams even have masteries? Don't think they do. But it isn't because the game can't satisfy the parameters. You'll get Kang/Thanos from fight 4-14 on your way to the infinite streak if your team is ranked high enough. After that it's all actual player teams again played by the AI.
You're playing the selected champs of actual summoners complete with masteries and such, set to autofight. Not misleading at all.
And once and for all, folks need to stop chirping about "skill" winning in AW, WE'RE ALL PLAYING AGAINST AN INCONSISTENT AI ON VARIABLE DEVICES AND CONNECTIONS, THERE IS NO TRUE UNIFORMITY OF FIGHTS.
Thank goodness, right?
Isn't "if your team is ranked high enough" essentially synonymous with "if game can't satisfy a [unspecified] parameter?"
If the AI literally played like the human players of the game, then it would follow logically that most of us would be unable to win more than half the matches statistically.
No, I don't think it is. It's by design as part of the infinite streak thing. It isn't as though the system can't find regular teams as the same teams that get Kang/Thanos from 4-14 will never get Kang/Thanos from 15-infinity.
I don't believe infinite streak is an actual thing in the game code. I think it is an artifact of the way the game chooses arena opponents. There's evidence to suggest that there isn't any formula that says if streak counter = X and if player team PI = Y then choose arena opponent with PI = Z. For one thing, I can have the same identical team on the same identical streak count generate wildly different but *predictably* different opponents by manipulating the fights immediately prior. That immediately disproves the notion that the team you face is only a function of the team you bring and the streak counter you have.
To put it another way, I believe I can produce teams that *always* avoid Kang teams when played as part of a certain sequence of fights, and *always* generate Kang teams as part of a different sequence of fights starting from streak counter zero. It is a bit complicated, but I have a simpler experiment that works often just not 100% of the time. Start in the featured 5* arena and get to 20 any way you want. Then, start with your highest 5* champs and go downward until you get to teams of about 9.5k. Let everything reset, and go again. This time, *alternate* 5* teams with 4* teams again in descending PI order. In my experiments, the same 9.5k team that did not trigger the death match in the all 5* descending sequence generated death matches in over 50% of the streaks formed with alternating 5* and 4* teams, even when the 4* teams were above 12k consistently and did not trigger death matches themselves.
It is tricky to experiment across players because masteries affect things (or rather do not affect things, which causes different PI for different players to act the same way) and there are small differences in how the arena works from week to week. But I'm pretty sure about what I'm seeing, enough to avoid death matches consistently when I choose to do so, and trigger them quickly enough with identical teams if I actually try to do so, or make a dumb mistake (on busy days, my roster arena recharge can get all jumbled up because I'm not in the arena with any consistency, and then I accidentally trigger the wrong jumble of arena teams too low in PI, and in retrospect it always happens due to the same error).
Fear the God. Think abt the mighty servers of Kabam. Lol
Kabam don't own any servers (or servers on which game sits). It is outsourced to third party. So, there is hope.
I'm not sure how to answer that question. Technically everything is part of the design, and I don't think any property of the arena match ups is generated by coincidence. But if you're asking if there's something about fight #15 that changes the way difficulty is selected, and that both affects when named Kang and Thanos teams show up and the PI required to prevent a sudden jump in difficulty, that's almost certainly true. However, I do not believe the arena has an explicit "and then you enter infinite streak territory" switch that kicks in at match 15. In part because I don't see a binary switch at 15: the arena behavior actually changes at match 14 in a subtle way that makes difficulty drop slightly, before it drops more in match 15. That can't be the result of a binary switch, it is more likely to be formulaic in nature (I'm speaking here about the 5* featured: it is even blurrier in lower arenas).