D3 better step up & fix AI cheating ASAP

Unknown

Hey Josh Bot.....Ice and Hi Fi aren't going to comment on anything like this. Ice only wants to talk about character art. He will disappear when the players get "Hulk smash angry" Probably hiding behind Demiurge Al in the break room.

Unknown

I guess that makes the only one with the stupid AI for the Juggs heroic. I was starting to wonder if something was going on, the AI was being really dumb about using the AP if was generating...

Unknown

I get way more cascades than the AI.

I think some people just can't see the cascades that are right in front of their faces.

Polares

Phantron wrote:

Grizzlegom wrote:

I've definitely been seeing this personally but others I know haven't been seeing it on the scale I have. Early in the PVP, I basically tanked without trying, losing match after match to characters well below my level. In the PVE, I've been having to use boosts to beat some of the levels despite having a significant level advantage (50+, really mainly talking about the Hood/Jugg one).

The thing that's bugged me the most isn't even the ridiculous cascades the AI has been getting, but the general impossible board state I'm constantly in. It's been nearly impossible for me to target an AP to either collect or deny my opponents because I've been pretty consistently in a state where I have 1-2 possible matches each turn, almost always in either a color that's not red/green (1 purple, then 1 black, then 1 blue, etc). Also annoying that whenever the AI uses a move like Unstoppable Crash, it causes tons of cascades however when I use it as a team-up, I rarely get even one cascade.

All that being said, I have noticed that my overall luck in this game is cyclical. I'll have a two weeks where the AI seems to be on god-mode, I have all death brackets, and I don't pull ANYTHING from any tokens. Then I'll have one week of great luck, where the AI is ****, I get mediocre brackets, and I get great pulls.

For the heroic PvE, just because Thor is level 256 doesn't mean your team is actually any good. The enemy team composition in heroic Jugg far outclassed yours in terms of quality because they have all the right guys with the proper feeder/goon abilities. If you can run Muscle + The Hood + Jugg at level 100 with max covers, I'd feel pretty comfortable fighting a level 256 character + 2 166s too.

You nailed it. This is just what I was complaining in another thread. Now that we don't have Spidey or Mags it is very, very difficult to play against a 200 level Juggernaut or The Hood. Goons are even worse because they scale in a way that is very different to how characters scale (you just have to look at how XForce or Fury scale and how a lieutenant or any other goon scale). This is going to be a very big problem for the future if devs don't do anything about it.

Unknown

In a way, they are adding in more characters with fake healing as a counter-balance.
The x-force move tends to create more cascades just because of it's shape.
I did just see a Moonstone use a gravity warp to create a match-5 of red, but it was ahuge fluke.

Polares wrote:

You nailed it. This is just what I was complaining in another thread. Now that we don't have Spidey or Mags it is very, very difficult to play against a 200 level Juggernaut or The Hood. Goons are even worse because they scale in a way that is very different to how characters scale (you just have to look at how XForce or Fury scale and how a lieutenant or any other goon scale). This is going to be a very big problem for the future if devs don't do anything about it.

Here's a hint: stun him. Spiderman is still great for fighting juggernaut due to a low cost multi-turn stun with 'healing'
I think this fits Juggernaut's character. You go up against him with force, you're going to lose. He's the juggernaut, ****!

Grizzlegom wrote:

The thing that's bugged me the most isn't even the ridiculous cascades the AI has been getting, but the general impossible board state I'm constantly in. It's been nearly impossible for me to target an AP to either collect or deny my opponents because I've been pretty consistently in a state where I have 1-2 possible matches each turn, almost always in either a color that's not red/green (1 purple, then 1 black, then 1 blue, etc). Also annoying that whenever the AI uses a move like Unstoppable Crash, it causes tons of cascades however when I use it as a team-up, I rarely get even one cascade.

You live by the red/green sword, you die by the red/green sword. Your team composition is probably such that 80% of the time you can end matches quickly, but you get screwed over by the times when AI is chasing red/green at the same time you are. It's one of the biggest problems running teams like wolverine/daken, which can be subject to bad luck in a juggernaut node.

GrimSkald

The AI is very good at finding the match that makes another match - this kind of naturally lends itself toward making cascades. What irks me is that it sometimes seems to be able to find that match that leads to another match from above the top row but that could just be observation bias. If I take more time for each match, I can generally do almost as well, but not quite.

Weird, ennit? The AI is good at finding multiple matches, but doesn't know that an "L" match is better than a "4-of-a-kind" match in the same area.

I haven't noticed anything particularly different since the last update, though.

Unknown

I was told i was crazy when i started this thread viewtopic.php?f=7&t=15588 , to add to the conspiracy theory, have you noticed that the "random" tile placements with ai Thor and such always wipe out your special tiles. Mjolinir might always puts yellow next to sentry strike, daken green always take out patch green strike and so on. there are many others too, keep watching you'll notice.

Unknown

For the last Jug Heroic, I went exclusively w/ a lthor/astwolf/obw combo against the essential nodes, and even boosted in the last hour. I've experienced some instances of Jug getting lucky red matches, and constantly launching painful headbutts. The board not being kind w/ colors and limiting me to 1-2 possible matches per turn sure didn't help either. It became critical for me to field a rainbow color team for this reason. And starting the game w/ 6 aps in purple and blue allowed me to use obw to control Jug just a bit.

Unknown

AmusedObserver wrote:

For the last Jug Heroic, I went exclusively w/ a lthor/astwolf/obw combo against the essential nodes, and even boosted in the last hour. I've experienced some instances of Jug getting lucky red matches, and constantly launching painful headbutts. The board not being kind w/ colors and limiting me to 1-2 possible matches per turn sure didn't help either. It became critical for me to field a rainbow color team for this reason. And starting the game w/ 6 aps in purple and blue allowed me to use obw to control Jug just a bit.

While the verdict is still out there, I have to say something just seems fishy about Jugg having to be able to constantly throw his 'unstoppable crash' at me, true to its name, it was clearly unstoppable as it came coming one after the next. How does he keep ending up with 6 green right after he triggers one? Sure RNG again?

also I swear saw Daken throw his Chemical reaction at me in the first round. Come on, first round? something isnt right here.

Unknown

silverrex wrote:

While the verdict is still out there, I have to say something just seems fishy about Jugg having to be able to constantly throw his 'unstoppable crash' at me, true to its name, it was clearly unstoppable as it came coming one after the next. How does he keep ending up with 6 green right after he triggers one? Sure RNG again?

In some of the nodes (the two on the left side of the page), Jug was matched with one or even TWO green AP producing goons. That's how he was able to crash like every other turn. Thankfully, the enemy level wasn't very high, and I just used Hulk to soak up damage while I worked on his comrades.

Polares

daibar wrote:

Polares wrote:

You nailed it. This is just what I was complaining in another thread. Now that we don't have Spidey or Mags it is very, very difficult to play against a 200 level Juggernaut or The Hood. Goons are even worse because they scale in a way that is very different to how characters scale (you just have to look at how XForce or Fury scale and how a lieutenant or any other goon scale). This is going to be a very big problem for the future if devs don't do anything about it.

Here's a hint: stun him. Spiderman is still great for fighting juggernaut due to a low cost multi-turn stun with 'healing'
I think this fits Juggernaut's character. You go up against him with force, you're going to lose. He's the juggernaut, ****!

But I think using Spiderman stun is not a sustainable tactic, you need 5 blue each time you want to stun him. And maybe you will be able to stun him for a while, but then the other members of the team or the goons will crush you because you have to be matching blue to keep Juggs stunned.

The problem is that Juggs abilities are way underpriced when are used by AI (AI doesn't care if you get 3000 in damage when you are doing 6000, and when you play against him again he will be with his full health), or characters like The Hood that when they are buffed to the 200+ level they are very difficult to kill. And of course if these 200+ level enemies get a cascade they are going to do a 3000+ hps in damage.

Unknown

My favorite is the multiple HeadButts, followed by an Unstoppable Crash, a few cascades.. and death.

I agree the AI has gotten much more "lucky" since the last patch. It's pretty frustrating when you have a max LThor and Hulk, and throw in Wolverine 2*, or OBW or Falcon and get wiped out by level 90-100 guys in 2-3 matches and use all your health Packs. This was the most frustrating PVE I've ever done. The worst part is I still spent quite a few hours grinding PVE all to end up with only the alliance PVE award and some **** Ares cover (or whatever it was).

Unknown

Alright - I am not going to get into the whole cascades more now than before mess.

I am going to step up and say this however... The AI IS using cheaper abilities or not having full AP cost abilities...

Last night, Yelena - who always seems to be able to get off abilities against me, but never when I play with her; but thats a different argument altogether...

Back to it, last night (ending hours of heroic), Yelena hit me with back to back "Lethal Recon".

I am willing to give the game benefit of doubt. Lets pretend the AI had 30 Purple AP at turn 5...

Unleash Lethal Recon (30 - 19 = 11 AP) and she steal 4 Purple back... Lets say for arguments sake, she now back at 15 AP. Lets again pretend for a second, that she made a 3 purple match (which she didn't) and picked up 3 more AP - no cascades, no multi-matches nothing.

On the AIs very next turn -> Bam! Lethal Recon again! At most - I can believe the AI had 19 AP and I was not paying attention fine.

Here is my question to you the devs and the community as a whole... Have you ever seen the AI hoard to 30AP? And not use an ability as soon as it's ready? Me neither...

Come on Devs... Cheapening AP cost or cheating AI? You pick. We'll address the cascades later.

Professa D

I wouldn't say that I've noticed that the AI is getting more cascades, but I would say that I feel like my special tiles seem to be targeted a bit more than before. That could just be confirmation bias though, because there's nothing more painful than having the AI snipe your sacrifice tile after a lucky cascade or board shaking ability. Those tend to stand out in my mind more so than say, the 80-90% percent of the other times when they DON'T wipe it out. Cause hey - we all expect to win every time we play, right? It's when things DON'T go according to plan that it sticks to your memory. If you've ever played poker before (specifically no limit hold em), then you would be all too familiar with this phenomenon.

The devs have stated in the past that they have the ability to make the AI tougher, but in testing it was so frustrating that people were losing too often and hence were turned off from playing completely. Would be nice to see a true PvP mode though where you could play a set of matches against another human being with a "shot clock" type timer (similar to chess or online poker) where if time ran out you either got your turn skipped (prolly too harsh), or if it ran out it went with the otherwise programmed AI-selected move. Could make for some fun tourney structures.

But that would require an actual new gameplay mode, so don't bet your on it

GuntherBlobel

I don't know that cascades are more likely since the patch, or if the AI is now more effective than before, but I do know that Magneto's infinite blue is gone. If you used Magneto and got used to it, then the game just got a lot harder. The AI is matching more than it used to, so there are more chances for crazy cascades than before.

Demiurge_Will

New tiles are generated in exactly the same way when the AI makes a match as they are when you make a match. There are a few battles in the first chapter of the prologue, before Team-Up tiles are introduced, where tile drop rates are different than usual; outside of that, each of the 7 basic tile types always has an equal chance of dropping.

The AI in Marvel Puzzle Quest is very very simple. It doesn't plan ahead, not even to the extent of preferring matches that result in a cascade that you can see on the board. We see this reflected in our stats: players get more cascades than the AI does.

There haven't been any changes to this part of the game in 2014.

I have a confession: I was a member of the same tinfoil hat club when I played the original Puzzle Quest. It wasn't until I got my hands on the actual source code as part of this gig and looked for myself that I believed that the AI wasn't any luckier than I was. I'm subject to the same biases everyone is, and remember bad events (lucky AI cascades) more clearly than good events (lucky cascades for me). The only discussions we've ever had around here about skewing the tile drop rates for players vs. AI were ideas to address this feeling by trying to make the AI extra unlucky. After looking into a bunch of ideas of that sort, it's my opinion that, ultimately, the risk of a system like that making things worse for players in some particular situation is too high, and it's better to keep things simple, fair, and random. Which means that sometimes I get stupid unlucky and throw my phone.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

New tiles are generated in exactly the same way when the AI makes a match as they are when you make a match. There are a few battles in the first chapter of the prologue, before Team-Up tiles are introduced, where tile drop rates are different than usual; outside of that, each of the 7 basic tile types always has an equal chance of dropping.

The AI in Marvel Puzzle Quest is very very simple. It doesn't plan ahead, not even to the extent of preferring matches that result in a cascade that you can see on the board. We see this reflected in our stats: players get more cascades than the AI does.

There haven't been any changes to this part of the game in 2014.

I have a confession: I was a member of the same tinfoil hat club when I played the original Puzzle Quest. It wasn't until I got my hands on the actual source code as part of this gig and looked for myself that I believed that the AI wasn't any luckier than I was. I'm subject to the same biases everyone is, and remember bad events (lucky AI cascades) more clearly than good events (lucky cascades for me). The only discussions we've ever had around here about skewing the tile drop rates for players vs. AI were ideas to address this feeling by trying to make the AI extra unlucky. After looking into a bunch of ideas of that sort, it's my opinion that, ultimately, the risk of a system like that making things worse for players in some particular situation is too high, and it's better to keep things simple, fair, and random. Which means that sometimes I get stupid unlucky and throw my phone.

Players statistically get more cascades...but statistically who gets better cascades? I see the AI regularly get unbelievable cascades that I seldom see my team getting.

Also no changes to "this part of the game in 2014," were there changes to how the AI decides which colors to match or starting board color patterns? Because there seems to have been some modifications http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=15819.

Trisul

"Better cascades" is too difficult to quantify. Is it just total AP generated? Is it "important" AP generated?

That thread is full of anecdotal evidence. Unless a dev shows up and tells us directly that the AI has improved, I'm going to chalk all the complaints up to a relatively high-difficulty PvE event (especially with a better 2* Daken) combined with mass amounts of Juggernaut crashes, which have always cascaded ridiculously.

daveomite

Trisul wrote:

"Better cascades" is too difficult to quantify. Is it just total AP generated? Is it "important" AP generated?

That thread is full of anecdotal evidence. Unless a dev shows up and tells us directly that the AI has improved, I'm going to chalk all the complaints up to a relatively high-difficulty PvE event (especially with a better 2* Daken) combined with mass amounts of Juggernaut crashes, which have always cascaded ridiculously.

Actually, I think that thread is full of various comments from longer term players who have played quite often, in a lot of events, and notice the difference in the system.

Trisul

daveomite wrote:

Actually, I think that thread is full of various comments from longer term players who have played quite often, in a lot of events, and notice the difference in the system.

- Recent PvE's have been fairly easy, especially for players with pre-nerf Magneto (who basically ended a match after a certain point).
- Juggernaut has always been a pain, with frequent cascades. I still remember the trouble I had with Juggernaut nodes in the prologue when I was just starting the game.
- This is the first event with upgraded 2* Daken nodes.
- Limited heroic rosters mean over-reliance on buffed characters. Heroic Venom had Patch, where he could basically regen through any AI cascades. Here, Thor being slow overall with no regen and limited combo potential with any other character meant that games lasted much longer, giving more opportunities for cascades overall, endless Juggernaut combos, etc.

Considering these points, it's not far-fetched to suggest that the devs are telling the truth. Besides the fact that they are, you know, devs.