The new patch's A.I. is terrible

General Discussion
1

Not sure if it was intentional, but it’s bad.

Playing exclusively on Elite (except when Matchmaker forces Adept / Veteran A.I. for some reason). I’m seeing a lot of weird, inconsistent and plain and simple dumb A.I. decision making all around.

Had a match on Warhead Junction where an enemy Sylvanas (Elite, they were all Elite) blindly just went back to one of the nukes to claim it while completely ignoring us in her way. Similarly to how A.I. Murky would “normally” (it’s been an issue with A.I. Murky for God knows how long by now) just try to go back to one specific spot to lay an Egg there after respawning (in a build where there’s fake Eggs) while ignoring absolutely all threat along the way.

So that Sylvanas did that. She died the first time 'cause I and a teammate got there, she was already claiming it but we interrupted her. Prior to the patch they themselves would be disengaging the claiming process and LEAVE THE F- OUT if too much threat was detected nearby. But that time, she just kept on trying to claim it for 2 or 3 seconds (like a HUGE delay happened in decision making) and by the time she was almost dead THEN she disengaged the nuke claiming process and trying to escape, but died.

As all that happened other enemy A.I.s shows up (including a Genji and an Illidan), we fought a bit and that gave Sylvanas time to come back. By the time she arrived their Illidan was dead, losing too much time kitting around in small circles making it super easy to kill him, and Genji was just acting without purpose sometimes approaching us, sometimes kiting minions near the lane… sometimes approaching the nuke but then moving away. We played cat-and-mouse games with those two… and then Sylvanas shows up, giving me and my teammates a smile as she nonechalently goes for the nuke “Oh hey guys, if you don’t mind I’ll take this ok?” Well how about a big NO!?

So we killed her. Also the enemy Chromie would miss her shots MUCH more often than before. It’s very easy to notice now compared to how much of a living nightmare she was prior to this patch. Not only that, but there’s a lot of delay for decision making in general. Like she stands there moving a bit before FINALLY throwing a sand ball at someone. Prior to the patch she’d have thrown 30 at that point.

So I’m no coder, but I do play Versus A.I. 99.99% of the time and it’s been 3 years for me like that by now. I don’t have the technical terms to express what’s actually going on but I can see game-play wise and behavior wise (which is stuff you as a gamer usually start to memorize after a while) that a LOT of things went wrong with this patch’s so called attempt at improving A.I. behavior.

Not sure what was “improved”. But if it WAS intentional then the direct result is a complete dumbing down of the A.I. even on Elite, making everything easier and now very boring; there’s barely any challenge now. It literally feels like the A.I. has been set on Beginner and is overwriting all other difficulty settings. Maybe THAT is actually what’s going on. Maybe it’s a difficulty-related bug. Then again we’ve had a PTR last week for this, yeah? No one ever noticed? No one tried VAI during PTR?

Anyway. Please, HOTS team, fix that crap.

Thanks.

19 Likes
2

Its not the matchmaker picking the lower skill level bots, its your teammates. If you have 5 humans in a coop match it picks the bot based on their settings as well as yours just to start a game. so if you picked elite you get elite If i picked adapt, then there is an adept bot on the enemy team.

2 Likes
3

wow long read :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: While i only ussualy play on Veteran. I also noticed that it seemed easier. Bots were staying in longer then they normaly do. grouping up as a mob more (sometimes to good effect though when the vikings and all of them were hammering our wall) but they seemed slow to react to players like you have said

1 Like
4

New and Improved™ A.I.

3 Likes
5

It is not intentional.
QA knows of it.
Fix time is unknown… but is is known that AI is being really weird.

Had a Butcher AI trying to “dodge” the Seeker Missile from the camp on Warhead.
Had a D. Va AI that didn’t know how to, or just didn’t use Self Destruct.

The first was kinda funny, as the game was lost long before that point… But the second was not. D.va left or had internet trouble, and I think we had a good shot of winning if the AI knew how to use self destruct. :expressionless:

6

I pretty much play exclusively AI and some dumb/disagreeable things I noticed were

-Enemy heroes would not advance very far from their cannons in the early part of the match.

-In Alterac Pass, enemy heroes would ignore players and try to take back the prison camps, sometimes while being severely outnumbered.

2 Likes
7

please, in PVP game modes, an option to force a disconnected player to stay at the Nexus spawn, the AI is a disaster, disconnected player taken over by it will usually not contribute to team fights in any way and is just a liability, also stop them from picking talents automatically >.<

2 Likes
8

Well that, in and of itself, is wrong. If I pick Elite, it’s because I… well you know, because I want to play against Elite A.I., not Adept or Veteran.

I don’t mind waiting the extra 1 or 2 minutes if it means having to wait until matchmaking can find people who picked up the same setting as I did. I prefer that over steamrolling Adepts.

Anyway. That’s another subject overall. The main one here at hand is how this latest patch has basically done something absolutely wrong with A.I. overall. It’s not just specific with some characters. It’s just overall. I’ve had two other matches a moment ago. I’m seeing weird and dumb A.I. decisions and SUPER slow and occasional NO reactions whatsoever to danger and threat detection.

They rushed it, didn’t test it properly. It’s clear enough. The problem is, we Versus A.I. players will have to wait until whenever they feel like calling back their A.I. coders to fix the whole mess. That could well take a full month for all we know since their team now has been cut in half with their recent internal changes.

I’ll just go play something else in the meantime. There’s no point right now, A.I. acts exactly like it does in Training mode and on Beginner. It’s embarrassing.

9

I did notice a few change in my AI games today.

They now take camps and seems to be able to group for objective and camps on the map. I think splitpusher are also more aggressive.

For the rest, it’s mostly the same. They have sometimes pathing issues or will prefer to walk away toward their fort instead of fighting 1v1 they could win.

10

Pretty sure they wait something like 3-4 levels until they pick the talent. I’ve had plenty of re-connections where i’ll drop at 9, and reconnect at level 11 or 12, and I’ll still have my choice of ultimate.

I don’t know how the systems that are behind it have changed recently.

11

I’ve also noticed some pretty terrible behavior. I was in a match in Blackhearts Bay and the enemy Kharazim would go to a doubloon camp and just stand there doing absolutely nothing until attacked. I’ve also heard that they have a new tendency to not defend against the protector or immortal like they used to prior to this “improved AI” where they all would show up to defend.

1 Like
12

Do you have a source? I believe you, I’m just curious to see the wording and explanation.

13

I Noticed they seem worse as well. Had a match on BHB and the AI went to the dabloon camp and litterally did nothing.

14

More bad things Elite AI does. Take enemy camps way too early with all walls up then die trying to escape. They seem to avoid team fights like the plague. Games are 5-10 minutes shorter now it’s so much different. Have not tried lower levels to differentiate.

15

someone(s) on HotS QA team.

16

There is a lot of bad behavior with the new AI within this new patch for games where it’s in AI mode or people playing against entire AI team. They place a very high priority on getting mercenary camps. It’s as if they are now programed to ignore certain priorities in order to fulfill doing that task and overriding other important aspects of the play within the game. They engage for camps early and often. My hypothesis is that it’s to mimic what certain players do. However the Like Trinket said:

and in doing so it negates the reason why and when you should be taking a camp. They’re just doing it just because and often don’t know that they’re gaining little to no value from it. This is a very important detail because games are not meant to be static. They should be dynamic and though certain aspects of a game are evergreen it should revolve around what the players deem most important to do verses the current landscape and situation of game.

Also to confirm what Rayz said

My first hand account on both maps where there is an objective that pushes with a team like BOE or Volskaya and it’s true. I had a game where we are in possession of top objective on Volskaya and 2 of the AI did not bother showing up. The Ana and Sylvanas were busy on bot trying to take our fort. We ended up getting the top fort plus the keep while they completely ignored us for the entire duration while the Protector was up. Same thing on BOE, however this time it was the towards the end of the game. There was several team members of the AI that was working on a top fort of ours while we pushed past their bot keep. The Azmodan, Stukov and Sylvanas. While the objective was up the Azmodan and Stukov was working on the top camp ignoring the objective all together. The Sylvanas after a bad engagement near gates of the bot keep with our team, left and raced to join them and did not back to their core to defend. While the Chromie who died recently rez’d and defended the core with a Muridan who was retreating there. I would claim with what I’ve seen, that if the Muridan and/or Chromie for whatever reason did not have to be present at their core; they would most likely join their other AI teammates top or try to get another camp if available.

Contrary to the current AI the old AI in AI games worked well together and attacked and defended like an actual team. It took in all the necessary components that made it fun to play against. They would lane/soak, take camps, go to objective on time and rotate for ganks or be apart of team fights. I would love to see that again. And as a sidenote, going further back the “older” AI was kind of ridiculous. When Kel’Thuzad was released he was able to Shadow Fissure globally hitting target(s) on a very consistent basis without vision or the very least was closely accurate to position of a low health target without vision. And it tried often, making it incredibly dangerous and thrilling to be around low health on your side of the map.

6 Likes
17

I cannot recall the exact wording I got, but it wasn’t that it was without vision.

But rather that the AI would “instantly see you” the moment you popped into vision on higher difficulties.

Basically the AI always saw/sees the entire map that is not in fog. Which meant that even a single frame of being barely visible “lets” the AI figure out where you are and target.

The AI has 100% gotten worse… Just wanted to explain why it was hitting those kind of skills.

[And great post!]

18

The worst part is that these ais replace afk players in pvp.

Each time they say they improve the AI, it makes it worse.

7 Likes
20

AI changes are freaking ridiculous and darn stupid. Games now take 50% of the time and there is no way in hell we can even reach level 20.

Playing vs Elite is now feels exactly like playing vs Beginner.

Rollback this stupid sh*t!

7 Likes
21

Fizzbin is correct. If the game has trouble finding enough players for elite ai, it will search for people to fill who are queued in lower ai tiers, which is why you sometimes get 1-2 veteran and adept ai.