Is it just me or did it become a lot harder recently? The enemy AI team now does a good job unleashing as many mercenary camps as they can get to. Including the high DPS bosses which can be a game changer if you’re not paying attention to the map. Sometimes I like to play and chill, watch TV at the same time, but now I’ve got to be alert at all times.
I just figured on beginner setting vs. the AI there shouldn’t be that type of stress on a player. There should be less of the AI opponents trying to unleash mercenary camps. I’m also trying to teach my twin nephews how to play Heroes of the Storm and it’s kind of hard to tell them to try and steal the mercenary camp. They’re good at focusing on lanes.
Anyways, I also played my first game vs. other humans with Kerrigan yesterday! My team won in the clutch from the Blackheart’s Bay battleground. but I wasn’t very good. LOL. Thank you to that awesome Diablo player who carried me to victory. I died like 8 times. It was so embarrassing. I felt like I let my team down but they were very helpful and encouraged me. Even told me “gg” at the end of the game.
I love this game! Heroes of the Storm is my favorite game at the moment. I just spent 10,000 gems buying a lot of goodies for this event. I may put in another $20 or $50 dollars worth of gems soon.
But tell the devs to make AI on beginner difficulty a lot easier like it was before. The AI enemy team should not be winning so many mercenary camps on beginner. Some of us are casual gamers that just want to chill and have fun. We’re not pro gamers looking for the highest ranks or difficulties.
LOL, but I guess it is what it is. It just means a few losses here and there. I’m not good at playing healers. I’m trying to learn how to play the beautiful Whitemane right now. I purchased her skin pack among other things. I love them but I wish I could become good at playing Whitemane. So far I’m very confused as to how to play her. Keep in mind I’m a long-time Diablo player. I’m good with most of the Diablo heroes in this game.
I first started playing Heroes of the Storm last November. Originally it was just to reach player level 12 to obtain my Diablo 3 portrait and pennant. Which I absolutely love by the way. I don’t know why I didn’t try for it sooner.
But anyways, I haven’t missed one day of playing, Trying to reach my one year anniversary in a few months. And for a while the ‘AI on beginner was fun and easy’ like it should be. When I put it on harder difficulties I expect more of a challenge.
It’s way different than what I had experienced for many months. I can tell when the AI experience changes because I mostly play versus AI on beginner mode. Except on Cassia and Xul. I can play on the harder difficulties with those two.
I’m 370-5 with Cassia - all 5 losses I had won the MVP. And 200-0 with Xul. I just won my 200th match with him a couple minutes ago which I’m extremely proud of. He’s my pride and joy and may surpass Cassia as my favorite hero in the game. No losses yet on the Necromancer. I don’t want to ever lose with him if I can manage.
I play Heroes of the Storm for the smiles and fun times. I’m just casually playing and enjoying the experience. I also support the game financially. It’s a very special game and I’m glad I gave it a chance last November.
I just wish the beginner AI could be a little more ‘stress free’ when it comes to the enemy AI capturing mercenary camps. On higher difficulties they can capture away and cause some havoc in my game, but on beginner the rate in which they capture camps should be a lot lower if not non-existent like it was for a while.
I’ll try to improve. I really want to learn how to play healers. They’re my krytponite in this game. No matter how many deaths and losses I may suffer with Whitemane, she is very beautiful and I’m going to learn how to master her sooner or later.
I have Whitemane up to level 4 now. Almost 5. I also bought five months worth of experience boosters so I hope to raise her up to level 15 or 20. We’ll see. I am struggling with Whitemane right now. If the enemy AI on beginner mode would stop capturing mercenary camps at an incredibly high rate maybe I’ll learn how to play her without feeling so stressed out.
Can’t speak for the Beginner AI, but I had a game against Elite Ai yesterday and I was actually impressed by the camp timing and the general macro game. They still suck in teamfights but atleast that aspect seems to have been improved.
The Ai have been improved on the camps part a lot.
Also elite Ai target squishies and healers more and chain stuns a lot.
But i can still see bugs like Lili walking behind a fort bugged until she dies.
they certainly updated the beginner AI to be a pain in the @$$ when you’re taking merc camps,
if you are playing a character that will take longer than 20 seconds to grab a merc camp be prepared for THE ENTIRE ENEMY TEAM to zerg you…
its a terrible mechanic.
but the AI is still dumb as a bag of bricks, i like playing Hammer for my dailies, you can literally nuke down a fort, keep and the core without the AI bothering you.
This is definitely a valid concern, thanks so much for bringing it up and for the feedback in general.
We did recently change all levels of AI to more correctly execute on map objectives and goals, which accounts for what you are seeing in your beginner games. So it is expected, if not ideal in this case.
Having a good experience no matter the level of AI you choose to play against is definitely important to the team though, so this concern is on our radar. We have some knobs in place for adjusting AI behavior at the different difficulty levels… I will see if any of these can be leveraged to help with this situation. We are currently focused on longer term, systemic issues we have with AI, so tuning all the difficulty levels correctly is further down our list of priorities, unfortunately.
I’m glad you’re having fun with the game but while vs AI is an enjoyable past time and a fun way to bring your body to a working temperature on cold mornings, it will never match the enjoyment and a plethora of other emotions you can feel while playing with actual people. It’s a good place to get used to heroes and learn the basics, but try to work through the embaressment and the stress of being new to the game and it will be a complete experience.
AI always follows specific patterns and most of the time they fall into certain loops they can’t break out of for either lack of quality assurance or other reasons. It becomes predictable and boring after a while to a point where most random groups of five players beat games in less than 5 minutes with minimal effort.
No disrespect to the developers but for most players the only thing diffentiating performance levels of AI on a slider is that the setting on far right is programmed to almost never miss their skillshot abilities, which they will perform with pixel perfect accuracy. This patch brought some nice improvements to the AI decision making, but it also brought even more bugs with their behavior.
Blue might want to check the bug report forums for detailed info on what’s wrong with newest implementation of AI. In the end you can only make AI appear so natural. Randomess in decision making does not work well with certain in game concepts such as soaking experience, mercenary camp timing and contesting of objectives. If you go overboard, playing bots will feel stressful because players won’t be able to match their reaction time, accuracy or team coordination.
I understand vs AI has its own niche and a number of players that participate in that game mode exclusively, but wouldn’t it be better for all of the playerbase if you instead found more ways to ease up their transition into PVP modes? Either through tutorial scenarios, scripted challenge scenario maps and such. Maybe even include an option to join random ranked games as a spectator, possibly even in groups so they can observe and comment between themselves. Something like replicating the streaming experience, but players could choose to skip to a different game if they don’t like the one they ended in…
…or even enable the ability to follow their friends into a game as a hidden observer (under this circumstance allow only vision of their friend’s team to avoid cheating). It would be a simple way to enable coaching of newer players and allow them to break down whatever mental barrier they have when it comes to playing other people with little to no experience of your own.
And then there is a elite AI I played against while testing Junkrat. Top hero damage ~20k, because AI was nowhere to be seen most of the game. It was actually terrible even for AI standards. Just saying.
Then turn those knobs back down to the way they were when you could see a clear difference between the AI levels. The AI levels for the player should also match the AI for the enemy side like they used to.
The player’s AI at various levels still herp derps around the battlefield wandering back & forth with no intent while the enemy acts as a well-coordinated machine. They also don’t want to respond to pings like they used to & generally act like the worst of novice players.
There’s no reason as to why the player’s AI is so poorly tuned.
As the OP mentioned, it’s great to bump the game down to learn new chars, or to reacquaint yourself with the game when you haven’t played in awhile or are introducing friends to the game.
Being steamrolled by the enemy AI has caused a couple of newbie friends to turn away from the game as it’s more stressful than they expected at beginner levels.
Im always interested into more specific details regarding the issues that you are trying to resolve, as AI is a complex subject to begin with. Are these strategic parts (for example that they defend the core again properly?), or more about teamfight oriented?
And i also think it could be a good thing if the AI on lower difficulties simply lose certain capabilities, rather than simply getting worse at macroplay. As one thing we notice a lot now is that the AI simply knows you take the camp and instantly go for stealing it (which makes them very predictable and easy to bait, but at the same time is also a very interesting thing to at least prepare mercing well). While on the lowest difficulties this should obviously never happen (you should reward mercing to players to promote them using it more often as process of learning).
This is actually a bug and was not intentional!
I didn’t have time to get it in for this patch, but it is fixed in the next one. Sorry about that!
As to your question about specific details, here is some info:
We have work to do on both the strategic layer and the tactical layer. In a game like Heroes, these two things are very connected as well, which complicates things, as you might imagine.
Strategy wise, your example of defending the core (and assaulting an enemy core) properly is high on our priority list, along with some other danger assessment issues.
There is some more work to do on the tactical front (teamfighting and micro assessment). Our agents use their abilities pretty well when they are actually committed to a fight or objective, but they currently don’t do so as reliably as we would like.
Additionally, there is some work to be done to fix issues with incorrect execution of some objective related actions like taking Blackheart’s chest and turning in coins.
They do! AI at lower difficulties are worse ad doing individual combos and worse as a team at chaining their abilities together. They also have worse aim and are worse at noticing hidden and stealthed heroes.
However, we wanted to maintain the integrity of the experience regardless of the difficulty, so we don’t outright disable abilities that might be hard to play against.
My personal gripe that desperately needs to be taken care of for AI, Is they seem to have no idea on how, or when, to defend the core, over taking an objective or a camp. This is on elite btw.
Can you make it so your allied AI is willing to do the same thing? Every map I’ve played since the patch has had the allied AI ignore turning in items (Coins for cannons, gems for webweavers), collecting items (seeds, tributes), or stacking for points of contention (temples, mech bay) while the enemy AI will drag their entire team from point to point which makes solo play near impossible since the allied AI is now ignoring ping commands.
They also have a horrible habit of leaving after they kill a merc boss, instead of staying to capture it, which leaves it to be captured by the enemy team that shows up after the camp has been cleared. Fixing that would be nice.
I agree. Since the last patch solo vs. AI is very frustrating and unplayable even in beginner and recruit. Allies don’t go for objectives (the coordinated enemy team AI clearly is capable to do it), don’t soak lanes either just spend the whole time wandering around doing nothing or feeding the enemy deathball. I can put them all on follow, but they don’t engage unless I do it, which is a terrible thing if I’m playing Probius or Murky for example.
