I do not fear the dark side as you do.
We are the shield against the darkness !
-Yrel
Darkness called.
Hi DreamTeam!
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.
Thanks!
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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.
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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.
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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).
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i do wish this just wasn’t a thing. i really dislike it when a game is supposed to be even, but AI follow different rules than players do
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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.
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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.
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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.
Yes last patch AI definitely received an improvement and it’s very good., At least from an AI enemy perspective. However, allied AI should be just as competent.
Even in elite now you get punished for poor position and engage and the AI doesn’t just cluster together and gank/sit on obj.
Playing the event quests in AI elite with randoes really shows how poor some players skill levels really are with the updated AI.
Thanks devs for staying active on the game
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Please, don’t lower ai’s difficulty without creating more options. If they find it too hard, create more ai difficulty so they have an easier option.
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It’s not the enemy AI that’s the problem per se, but that the allied AI is completely worthless. Fighting a 5 v 1 match is only doable on certain maps, and if you have the right characters on rotation, but that’s what you’re playing every map if you’re running vs. AI because the enemy team plays on point while your allies are off taking a leak in the bushes.
And I’m not exaggerating about how useless the allied AI is. I had a Terrors match last night where the entire team went to collect the bruiser camp; Vala was autoattacking, Muradin was next to her and only thunderclapped if the mobs got close, Malthiel strolled back and forth between them until he died, and Malfurion cast rejuvenation one time. This was while a seed was spawning half a screen up from where they were effectively idling, so not only were they actively not capturing a merc camp, they were also letting the enemy team take the objective.
I’m all for efforts to have the enemy AI better reflect playing against people, but it consistently breaks the AI for the player’s team every time they make these “improvements”. If they’re going to fix one they should be implementing the fix for both teams, at a minimum, or leave it alone until they can because the wild difficulty swings created by breaking the player aligned AI are not fun, and they’re not genuine difficulty.
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It’s quite a surprise to me spamming some games for the quest that the AI of 2 years ago was superior in every respect, prior to whatever intended improvements they made.
Sometimes less really is more and perhaps they should have let well enough alone, or rolled back the changes when it was clear it had made AI behaviour worse, not better.
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As someone who sticks 99.9% to vs Elite AI, the AI now seems to coordinate better than it did before 2.0 released. It’s not obvious if the human team works well, but they tend to do a lot better against teams that don’t coordinate and/or play mechanically bad.
Pre-2.0 the main concern against Elite AI was avoiding skill shots and keeping the lanes pushed. Now they understand camps and enemy abilities much better.
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From my experience the (Elite) AI is doing good (xp, kills, coordination, camps) until falls back in xp. From that point it seems like they totally lose “it”. Like they dont know what to do now, and they just dont understand how they can be fallen back lol.
There are a lot more steps the AI took after 2.0.
- Initialy before 2.0 they indeed were bad
- The best change was that they learned to more agressively go for mercs and roate (except for beginner AI). This made the AI a lot harder to predict, except initialy where they did it constantly.
- They then finetuned the AI to at least go into a more stable pattern where lane changes werent as often. At the same time, because they now were grouped together more often. They became better at teamfights. Tacticaly they still felt weaker than 2.0, but that was because before 2.0, they were that aggressive at pushing a lane, it weakend their other aspects.
- Then slowly they improved the interactions of the AI and they created some very deadly combo’s. The AI at this point was beating the old Elite AI massively.
- And suddenly, the messed up the AI and their whole prioritizing became wrong and the macroplay was destroyed entirely. And with it, even teamfight wise they felt weaker. For individual 1v1 fights, the AI however was still a lot stronger than it used to be. And when they ended up as a group and you took the fight. As long as you werent ahead in level, they were often devestating.
- And slowly (and especialy recently when they were stealing your merc camps more often), its improving again on the macro. Currently it feels a bit like cheating, but at least its starting to become a bit more chalenging again. Sure, it might not be ideal, but at least it works.
Cheating AI’s is only bad when an AI is helping players in a PvP game. In PvE its generaly not an issue.
Even if the Elite AI would eventualy be fixed to become decent. I wouldnt mind having a mode where the AI is able to cheat and hinder your macroplay with it. Its diffirent compared to PvP in this case. But for those who dont care about PvP, it doesnt matter.