MPQ AI - A Worthy Opponent

Deilinvega

Making AI better will not stop it's godly luck. It will no longer make mistakes AND will be getting cascades of 3-5 Crits every turn followed by all abilities spam. Rinse and repeat until your team is dead by fifth or sixth turn (If your lucky to last that long).

PeterGibbons316

Deilinvega wrote:

Making AI better will not stop it's godly luck. It will no longer make mistakes AND will be getting cascades of 3-5 Crits every turn followed by all abilities spam. Rinse and repeat until your team is dead by fifth or sixth turn (If your lucky to last that long).

You didn't read the article did you?

Deilinvega

Maybe not every post. What did I miss?

GuntherBlobel

Last night I climbed from 0 to 1K in PvP fighting teams similar in level to my own each game. In ~25 matches, I lost just once.

The game I lost was typical of complaints about the AI: an insane cascade followed by improbable crit matches leading to additional improbable crits. It sucked. I couldn't believe how many good moves were being played out by this stupid AI. It was like a real person jumped in for a few moves. I won't forget that match.

Players think the AI cheats because it's stupid and because it's designed to not win. There's an "unintended consequence" right there.

user311

If this is true, then how come the computer seems to deliberately avoid strongest colors after using XPools Purple ability?

Make a list of all valid swaps available on the visible board
Assign a score to each swap
Sort the list by the score
Pick the best swap, or randomly from the top swaps if there's a tie

Xenoberyll

Changing the ai would require a ton of not so fine tuning to the game. ie. Scaling would have to stop much earlier...If the computer plays perfect (= better than humans) it should not have better characters as well. Also playing perfect 100% of the time would be demotivating as well imho. Some Characters would have to be nerfed...etc.

Match 3 implies a relatively simple gameplay and people expect to win more often than not. It's a game you play while watching tv etc. I think a lot of people would lose motivation to play if it required full concentration.

I think cascades happen so often because stuff isn't really random. It's pretty hard on the processor to create true random numbers so programmers usually use a different method that is "kinda random" Maybe they should implement a limit to how many tiles of the same color are allowed to fall in succession to reduce the times where match 5s come falling from the sky and reducing player frustration. It's nice if it happens FOR you, but as the blog rightly stated it's just that much worse if it happens TO you.

DukeUpdate

Thanks for the very informative blog post.

One thought on the enhanced AI possibilities is that the AI could be improved when certain characters were on the team.

For example, if Beast was on the team, the AI would not match its own strike/attack/protect tiles, or if DocOc was on the team, the AI would actively seek out every five-of-a-kind match. Not a character who does everything the 'hard AI' does, but one-off passive abilities that would affect the team.

It would be a new way of differentiating the characters with the 'smart' ones getting these abilities instead of straight up damage that a 'physically strong' character might deal.

It could add a new dimension to the game by improving some underpowered characters, and making a more interesting decision for PVP defense .

Unknown

GuntherBlobel wrote:

It must be disappointing for them to release interesting new characters just to hear "Vision sucks! Quicksilver sucks! Starlord sucks! GSBW sucks!" when it's really the AI that sucks.

It DOES have to suck when they hear that, however, its not the AI that makes most of the sucky characters suck, would it change GSBW? Sure, the rest of those characters flat out have design issues.

What does shock me though, in a game like this, it can't be that difficult ro re-align powers to rebalance characters. Someone like Quicksilver needs adjustments to make playable (like reducing the lock tiles by one), sure it can skew something else, but its not *that difficult* to sort out, and with them walking into 4* territory, who have super high cost, people can't afford to pump money into those 'untuned' characters.
- Unreall

scottee

I like how in a thread that has a developer definitively prove that the AI doesn't cheat...we have people who are sure the AI still cheats.

Unknown

I would be for a smarter AI as a way to increase difficulty on nodes. Instead of overscaling levels, it would be a steady scaling of how smart the AI is.

Trivial - underleveled, easy AI/Easy - about or at full level 2* or under leveled 3*, easy AI/Normal - about or at full level 3* or underleveled 4*, easy or medium AI/Hard - about or at full level, smart AI/Deadly - full level and smart AI

Just as an example in very rough draft. Things would need to be shifted to make the flow and difficulty make sense, but I think it gets the point across.

Lidolas

scottee wrote:

I like how in a thread that has a developer definitively prove that the AI doesn't cheat...we have people who are sure the AI still cheats.

Just for argument's sake, the blog doesn't "prove" anything. They can write whatever they want in the blog. Maybe next month will be about how Deadpool brought chimichangas into the office for all the devs.

scottee

Lidolas wrote:

scottee wrote:

I like how in a thread that has a developer definitively prove that the AI doesn't cheat...we have people who are sure the AI still cheats.

Just for argument's sake, the blog doesn't "prove" anything. They can write whatever they want in the blog. Maybe next month will be about how Deadpool brought chimichangas into the office for all the devs.

You're right. I guess posting source code is about as close as they can get. They can't post non-existent code. It's like trying to prove Bigfoot doesn't exist.

simonsez

GuntherBlobel wrote:

It must be disappointing for them to release interesting new characters just to hear "Vision sucks! Quicksilver sucks! Starlord sucks! GSBW sucks!" when it's really the AI that sucks.

Don't blame the AI for the suckage of Vision and QS

CrookedKnight

The part about the AI not seeing the difference between a match-four and a linear match-five puzzles me, because I have never seen the AI take the match-four in that situation.

Vhailorx

user311 wrote:

If this is true, then how come the computer seems to deliberately avoid strongest colors after using XPools Purple ability?

that's just it. the ai SEEMS to deliberately avoid the strongest color. The problem isn't with the ai per se (though the ai is dumb as a bag of rocks), the problem is with you and your perception.

Buret0

I would LOVE to have certain game modes where the AI that Justin wrote was in place. I don't think that it should ever become the default AI, but maybe the more difficult AI would be the answer to:

(a) snipers. If you are attacking someone for more than 65 points, you do so while facing the more difficult AI.
(b) repeat targeting. If you attack the same player more than twice in a single PvP event, the AI becomes more difficult in the third battle.
(c) grinding. The more you grind the same node, the more AI rules get turned on to make the node harder. Can replace level scaling to some degree.
(d) special events. Perhaps something like a boss battle in a non-competitive event like the Gauntlet or for special final nodes. The stronger AI would need to be advertised for that fight so that you know that it isn't going to behave the normal way.
(e) survival mode. A stronger AI would make getting to round 100 of a monthly survival node incredibly difficult.

Frustration leads to happiness when a difficult battle is overcome. I think that there are some players who would welcome the challenge.

JVReal

I have no problem with the AI getting progressively smarter as the nodes get more and more difficult, but it would have to be a trade off. You would have to not have overscaled nodes anymore. Characters limited to player maxes, both level and covers. No more level 395 matches with 15 covers. If player is capped, the AI is capped.

Unknown

whatever u do dont buff the AI, just decrease the grind

theo199

Thank you for this interesting article.

Unknown

scottee wrote:

Lidolas wrote:

scottee wrote:

I like how in a thread that has a developer definitively prove that the AI doesn't cheat...we have people who are sure the AI still cheats.

Just for argument's sake, the blog doesn't "prove" anything. They can write whatever they want in the blog. Maybe next month will be about how Deadpool brought chimichangas into the office for all the devs.

You're right. I guess posting source code is about as close as they can get. They can't post non-existent code. It's like trying to prove Bigfoot doesn't exist.

The staff lied before tho. They can post untrue information just to have the players think it is how it works and try to stop those kind of threads. Yeah it sounds conspiracy theoty but one shouldnt believe everything they read on internet, specially when we have seen information biased by the staff (and Im talking about the 'how scaling works' we have seen sometime ago and clearly did not match the real outcome of roster impact).