more 3*s champed means A.I. cheats more?

jerrymol1

Now that I have champed quite a few of my 3*s I have found that the A.I. is cheating more. Is this the norm? I have been finding that not only has my difficulty gone way up but the A.I. seems to be cheating more. Especially this last PVE (ISO-8 Brotherhood). I try to take this as just a game and that is how this has been developed but it's hard to enjoy something when you are getting torn a new one.

smkspy

How exactly is it cheating? Casacades?

I know when I left out of 2 star land, yeah, I noticed scaling was harder too, which made me notice enemy power usage and Casacades a lot more than before.

Doesn't mean that the AI is cheating though.

<Really is hard to ask this without coming across like an Internet **** lol.>

Phumade

Define what you mean by AI cheating?

In all likely hood what your seeing the that your enenmies health are scaling fast, and now they can survive a few rounds longer which means they can unload big salvos vs when you can fire your powers before them.

There is definitley a breeakover point when the AI has amassed enough AP to go Nuclear!

stowaway

"Iso-8 Lab: Colombia" is a particularly nasty combination of goons feeding Doom while Hood steals AP. I'm willing to bet that's at least part of where this is coming from.

Dragon_Nexus

Wish I bookmarked that developer commentary from ages ago.

Back during the first Puzzle Quest game (still the best IMO) the AI was designed to work about as well as a player in terms of making decisions. It would get cascades fairly often and a lot of reviewers thought the AI was cheating or just plain unfair.
Turns out during testing the devs were keeping a track on the number of cascades and found the number a player got was slightly higher on average to the number the AI got. Not by much, something like 55/10 for the player and 50/100 for AI.

They discovered the player needs, on average, 3 times as many lucky cascades in order to feel they're getting an equal amount to the AI.

The human mind doesn't understand probability as well as it thinks it does. In fact we're pretty bad at it. Music players were developed with random shuffle features, but people complained the programs would play the same song twice in a row, or it would play from the same band too much and never play this one specific song they liked. Turns out random isn't what people actually wanted. They wanted random with constraints. Out of a playlist of 300 songs, only play each song once until you've completed all 300. That kinda thing.

Polares

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

Wish I bookmarked that developer commentary from ages ago.

Back during the first Puzzle Quest game (still the best IMO) the AI was designed to work about as well as a player in terms of making decisions. It would get cascades fairly often and a lot of reviewers thought the AI was cheating or just plain unfair.
Turns out during testing the devs were keeping a track on the number of cascades and found the number a player got was slightly higher on average to the number the AI got. Not by much, something like 55/10 for the player and 50/100 for AI.

They discovered the player needs, on average, 3 times as many lucky cascades in order to feel they're getting an equal amount to the AI.

The human mind doesn't understand probability as well as it thinks it does. In fact we're pretty bad at it. Music players were developed with random shuffle features, but people complained the programs would play the same song twice in a row, or it would play from the same band too much and never play this one specific song they liked. Turns out random isn't what people actually wanted. They wanted random with constraints. Out of a playlist of 300 songs, only play each song once until you've completed all 300. That kinda thing.

Yeah you are right, but I have to add that in this game in particular I think it is even worse than 3 against 1, we would need like 5 or even 10 in our favor to think cascades are fair. This is because in this game losing a match has a tremendous impact! When the AI has a massive cascade and you lose because of it our brain remembers that quite vividly. When we win a match because we had a cascade in our favor, we quickly forget it, because we win 99% of our matches. But that one time that ruined our shield hop, or consumed our last 3 health packs, we remember those times.

aesthetocyst

jerrymol1 wrote:

Now that I have champed quite a few of my 3*s I have found that the A.I. is cheating more. Is this the norm?

Yes. Were you expecting any other answer? Why not just post this as a declarative, rather than as an interrogative?

You think it's bad now, just wait until you're champing 5*s. All the entertainment value in continuing to play MPQ comes in the form of seeing the increasingly outlandish lengths the AI will go to just to try and win a match. It's like trying to play the match-3 equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters! I hear tell it even trolls the highest level players with level 600+ goons and such.

Some people will tell you this is "scaling", but smart players are not so easily fooled. We know better.

SummerGlau

higher level enemies last longer...I'm still in 3 Land, getting close to 4 transition
I see some instances where the AI "cheats", but soon after get a board that makes another match much easier than it should

DapperChewie

The thing is, you never remember all the lucky cascades you get, but you remember each and every cascade the enemy gets. Nobody remembers the easy wins, just the losses and close matches.

Also, when a cascade happens, it's not uncommon to get 2 or 3 crits, and 4-6 matches in that cascade. A small cascade can get you 12AP, and a decent cascade can net you 25+ AP across various colors.

Is the AI cheating? No, not really. It just appears that way because you never remember the times where you got 26AP on one turn and the other team got 3. You only remember it when it's the other way around.

DFiPL

smkspy wrote:

How exactly is it cheating? Casacades?

I know when I left out of 2 star land, yeah, I noticed scaling was harder too, which made me notice enemy power usage and Casacades a lot more than before.

Doesn't mean that the AI is cheating though.

<Really is hard to ask this without coming across like an Internet **** lol.>

The problem is that on a certain level, perception is reality. It doesn't mean that the devs programmed the AI to cheat, that it "sees" what's coming or anything of that nature. But it might feel that way, when the AI-controlled Juggernaut or Storm manage to nuke all your special tiles with their board shake while leaving theirs intact. Or when the AI waits until you have to make a match with your weakest character to put strike tiles on the board and then makes a match that triggers multiple match-4+ cascades that, combined with those strikes, just whittles your character from full health to dead in a single move.

It's random chance, but that's not how the user will perceive it. And if it happens often enough, it goes from expletives muttered under one's breath to a fatalistic expectation of "how am I going to get hosed this time?"

I have a friend like that; he likes the game, or at least the idea of the game, but my efforts to draw him into it more fully (one of us! one of us!) keep running into that brick wall, where he'll have a fight where the AI apparently pulls magical cascades out of its nether regions, or somehow manages to starve the board of exactly the color he needs while providing its own in copious quantities, and so forth. Nothing nefarious going on, but that isn't how it feels to him, so he has those sort of pre-determined expectations when he goes in.

And I'm not sure how you break that.

jerrymol1

I have noticed more frequently that the A.I. is using their ability with less AP then required. Getting a critical 5 match counted on a match 4. I have noticed AP disappearing off the board on one side of it when the A.I. gets a match 3 or such on the another. And the non-stop cascades that the A.I. gets more times then not is getting on my nerves. Then there are the multiple turns the A.I. takes. That I can not stand for the life of me.

Phumade

jerrymol1 wrote:

I have noticed more frequently that the A.I. is using their ability with less AP then required. Getting a critical 5 match counted on a match 4. I have noticed AP disappearing off the board on one side of it when the A.I. gets a match 3 or such on the another. And the non-stop cascades that the A.I. gets more times then not is getting on my nerves. Then there are the multiple turns the A.I. takes. That I can not stand for the life of me.

LOLOLOLOLOL I sincerely empathize and understand your frustrations. That said its probably not AI cheating. You may not have realized this, but the game can instantly resolve out all actions about .1 secs after you finish your move. The things you see on the actually screen are delayed representations of what the AI has already resolved.

That distinction may not mean much to you at first glace, but there was a glitch that accidently shuffled the display orders of animations. The actual AP, damage, etc was being calulated correctly, but the game would display the end game banner at the start of the turn and then show all the resulting animations/ cascades that actually occured.

In anycase, I don't doubt your feelings and observations, but if you were to post a match video, I'm pretty sure I could manually count out the AP in the animations to correlate with the powers that actually fired.

Android phones generally have a screen record feature somewhere. Post a video of the match from start to finish, and someone will go manually calcualte out the AP to verify that powers are firing at the correct time.

vinsensual

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

Wish I bookmarked that developer commentary from ages ago.

Back during the first Puzzle Quest game (still the best IMO) the AI was designed to work about as well as a player in terms of making decisions. It would get cascades fairly often and a lot of reviewers thought the AI was cheating or just plain unfair.
Turns out during testing the devs were keeping a track on the number of cascades and found the number a player got was slightly higher on average to the number the AI got. Not by much, something like 55/10 for the player and 50/100 for AI.

They discovered the player needs, on average, 3 times as many lucky cascades in order to feel they're getting an equal amount to the AI.

The human mind doesn't understand probability as well as it thinks it does. In fact we're pretty bad at it. Music players were developed with random shuffle features, but people complained the programs would play the same song twice in a row, or it would play from the same band too much and never play this one specific song they liked. Turns out random isn't what people actually wanted. They wanted random with constraints. Out of a playlist of 300 songs, only play each song once until you've completed all 300. That kinda thing.

Has the AI changed since that was posted? I ask because the AI currently only recognizes one type of match-5, the straight line. So at least just counting the match-5 based cascades, it's pretty crazy that the 50/100 is so close to the player's 55/100 when the player has 3 ways to line up a match-5.

Ducky

The AI does not cheat. If you feel something went awry during your match, document it as best you can and put in a ticket regarding the issue. Thanks!