Oh leave that poor guy alone, he was nice, friendly and would participate in his AI thread. They just have a tiny team and no real PTR for these things. When they even let the shop launch broken and remain so for over a week, you know things are dire.
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I know right? At this point that joke is way overused and it’s not like its still their fault. If the other devs wanted to fix the AI then they would’ve done so already (and they have tweaked them a number of times iirc).
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Yes, it’s really unfair as the particular Dev was brought on after the previous Devs broke the AI. As you say, the joke is now really old and tiresome.
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It’s not really intentional, it’s just how talents that decrease death timers work. Let’s just wait and see if they will remove this talent from ARAM like they did to Rag lava wave (I still want a true ARAM where everything and everyone is available though).
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Source? Or just your imagination?
Kevin Gu started working on the AI in 2019, it was first broken sometime in 2018. It’s in the patch notes history. If you read his posts here:
You can see he was working on reverting changes that were made prior to his tenure. This is all in the patch notes somewhere. I honestly can’t be bothered looking for it, take my word on it or not. He wasn’t to blame for the major issues and doesn’t deserve ridicule regardless. The joke about the “biology major” was always redundant.
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What you posted has zero relevant information, it’s irrelevant when he started posting updates. He’s been with HOTS team since 2015. Below is directly from his linkedin profile (note the dates). Shall we trust him over your imagination?
And yeah, the jokes are well deserved.
Technical Designer - Heroes of the Storm
Dates Employed Feb 2017 – Feb 2018
Employment Duration 1 yr 1 mo
Primary designer for new AI behavior tree system, working closely with engineers."
did you read the talent…? Execute order should be SETTING his death timer to 30s, not REDUCE it by 30s, raynor is completely broken in aram, no idea why bugs like this are not patched after more than 3 weeks already
He has worked on the User Experience and Tech design teams before, but he only tackled the AI in late 2019-early 2020 together with the lead engineer Jeff Beaudoin.
I honestly have no idea if he is even working on the game anymore or whether he quit or they downsized the staff. There has been absolutely no development on AI for a long time now and no kind of messages from him for ages.
Guess? They no longer have budget to work on the AI and this work no longer continues.
That’s why the AI will remain this way.
The patch notes say the correct version, the ingame version says a false text (and number):
Reduce your Death Timer by 35 seconds. Upon death, cast Hyperion towards the nearest enemy Hero.
Wouldn’t be a problem if ARAM had normal death timers. If I recall, even at lvl 20 you don’t get the normal 63 seconds timer, you get like 40 or 45 seconds. Shaving 35 off that makes him respawn way too fast.
Makes you think, if this talent is just unsuitable for ARAM because of how death timers work there. And if it should be disabled like Lava Wave which doesn’t fit a one lane map either.
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It was a weird thing to mention without any context
Here is a biology major for designing the heroes of the storm artificial intelligence.
If they explained some more or layed some connections they didnt poke at him that much
I think the talent should just “reduce death timer by 50%” instead of messing with elementary arithmetic. That way QM Raynor will get intentional 30 seconds of DT and ARAM Raynor will get 15 seconds instead of 6.
It’s a typo ingame =p
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This is what I was aware of from the patch notes, whoever was working on the AI broke it before Keven Gu started working to fix the huge mess they left behind. I specifically remember it as it was “news” they had assigned Kevin as the AI went from functional in one patch, to completely broken in another.
Thanks for posting this AltRightFrog, I’m not someone who wants to look through all the patch notes to find “proof”, let alone scour the employment histories of these people.
Yes I agree, but I was pretty sure a company as large and as frugal as Blizzard wouldn’t have hired someone who lacked qualifications for the job. If this is their standard employment practice then please hire me next, I have a couple of degrees completely unrelated to programming or software engineering!
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I can make several connections with Bio mayors who work in logistics or the IT in a medical or livestock.
But not with the AI of heroes. But I think they need to mention what progress they booked rather then nothing they are doing now
They fixed that AI doesnt instantly picked up items . We saw no mention of that
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Some posters think I’m defending the AI, which I’m not, I just think if you’re going to call out an individual (which I don’t like) at least be certain you’re calling them out for something they did do.
I participated in the AI thread and Keven Gu was very friendly and receptive to ideas and problems posters pointed out. It wasn’t uncommon to see a problem with the AI someone had pointed out in the thread addressed in a future patch. The problem he seemed to have was when he fixed one broken AI thread, a dozen others would come unraveled.
Anyway, I appreciate that unlike many who worked on HOTS, KG was very active in his thread and interacting with the community, on the offical forums too! So very rare indeed, so he really just deserves some sort of kind word, not criticism because he is a “biology major.”
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No ofcourse but most posters aren’t reading what someone is writting, only a few lines. Which is sad but thats the attention spam of the average teen.
I would hope to see him interact more because I have problems with them but I am confident the dev’s don’t read the forums anymore.
First he was great yes, I wasn’t active then sadly. Would have liked to catch him
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AltRightFrog said he might not even be working on it anymore, which is quite possible as he started not too long before they decimated the HOTS team.
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Again, go to linkedin, look at Kevin Gu’s page, he has a year by year breakdown of what he’s been doing at Blizzard. Some post that “introduces” him which doesn’t say anywhere that he is taking over AI that someone else broke vs his own professional profile. Who should I believe? Hmm…
Again, from Kevin Gu’s own professional profile:
Feb 2017 – Feb 2018
Primary designer for new AI behavior tree system, working closely with engineers.
Do I need to make the “Primary designer” text bold? He started his AI work almost 2 years before they cut the team. AltRight has no clue what he’s talking about that’s all. That behavior tree is why the AI is so clueless at the moment.
Back to the topic.
The issue with Raynor is even much more severe.
Quoted from the HotS Wiki:
Execute Orders
Reduce Raynor’s death timer to 30 seconds. Upon death, the Hyperion is cast toward the closest enemy Hero.
- Does not require selecting Hyperion at level 10.
- Ability searches for the closest Hero globally, but the cast will still be initiated from Raynor’s location with its original range.
Multiple Hyperions may be active simultaneously.- Reduces Raynor’s death timer by 35 seconds. Level 20+ death timers being 65 seconds, it effectively sets the cooldown to 30 seconds on normal maps, but to 7 seconds on ARAM maps (as they use shorter death timers).
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