My NGS team had a scrim scheduled last night, and one of the players was running late. Out of curiosity, we added an AI to the team that was short a player, just to see what it would do in a custom draft situation, and gave it the ban hat. For science!
To everyone’s surprise, it drafted in a timely manner, and even more surprising, it banned reasonable heroes for the map! We were on Braxis Holdout, and it banned Jaina and Diablo in the first round, picked Tychus first, and banned Stukov in the second ban phase.
If only the bots would play as intelligently as they draft…
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I didnt know you could give a bot the ban hat
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We didn’t either, and were shocked it actually worked!
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The bans could just have been random though.
That’s pretty dang cool! And yeah I wish it stayed that smart for the rest of the match 
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Same. Played the game for almost a decade and did not know AI can act as a ban picker.
Oh, I am not suggesting it actually calculated what to ban and pick, just our surprise at how well it did. The 9 meat people playing were chatting in the draft lobby, and were shocked when the first ban on Jaina came out. People were calling out what we expected to be banned randomly, like Butcher.
We didn’t actually play out to the match to see how it did, as the last person logged on right around then.
Yeah, I wonder if there is a really rudimentary algorithm or it was truly random.
There have been a few times early on when I was first starting HL where I was afk and the random picks it gave me were not the right heroes or roles I wanted to pick. I got Chen one time as main tank, and then Azmodan with no healer. My teammates flamed me hard, and to some extent, totally understandable. Won both those games. Those moments sort of just showed me that drafting is important, but it isn’t destiny.
Bots were better in the past, there is something broken to fix. Good they make a good draft, but in game they are garbage overall.
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That person should have been banned for spoiling the fun of 9 people!
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All I know is sometime before all the devs were pull off this game a biology major got put in charge of the game’s AI system and that information lives rent free in my head.
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The biology major thing is a bit of a meme. To cut him some slack, he did listen to player suggestions in this AI thread, he was quite friendly, in the face of a lot of ridicule.
It’s also worth noting that he wasn’t the one who broke the AI, as far as I’m aware, he was assigned to “fix” it after it was revamped. Changing the AI so an afk player bot will just sit in spawn wasn’t a terrible idea. The trouble is, it now follows more limited commands, the “correct” player needs to ping the AI, the bots suffer when they are bound to an incompatible hero, due to the leash range and melee vs ranged heroes.
When people actually know how to ping the AI, if that player dies in the middle of the battle, the bot will immediately start to hearth, so someone has to scramble and ping it. With a few exceptions, I think the AI was far better before they “improved” it.
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This.
Even if that guy didn’t get much done before corporate pulled the financial plug on this game, he did make some crucial changes that make HotS better today.
Namely, he programmed the AI bots to stay in spawn unless asked to follow.
In the previous system they would run around the map and feed the enemy tons of exp, making the game even harder to win.
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Btw does tha AI knows about fog of war?
I seem to recall either a blog post or interview where they said the bots can see through the fog of war, but are programmed to react as if they can’t, for the most part. There are some abilities that I am convinced are exceptions, as anyone who has been sniped by a bot Eye of Horus Ana will attest.
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Tyrande’s hoot-owl and Kel’Thuzad also lend credence that the A.I having x-ray vision.
Not new for A.I to see through the fog of war. That has been a thing in RTS games for decades.
I’d imagine it is the same with stealth as well which can be seen by adjusting A.I difficulty. Adept and lower will ignore stealthed heroes moving around but at Veteran and Elite they may as well be visible as the A.I will use abilities on them the moment they get close enough to do so.
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