Why is the AI so bad?

We live in 2022, the human race has come a long way in building AI. In the year 2022, we can build an AI that can beat all 8 billion humans simultaneously in this game… and Blizzard gives us this crappy AI?

For crying out loud, implement some machine learning in your games. Should have been done in 2010 at least.

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Yea, have blizzard manage to create machine learning better than dedicated companies to ai do it, and do it a decade sooner than they do it.

That sounds like an excellent idea proposed by someone who doesn’t know how this stuff works, but they’ll bicker that they don’t have it.

“They can put a man on the moon, but we can make a phone cord that doesn’t bunch up.”

The ai is as it is:

  1. so leaving the game isnt encouraged
  2. because some of the people involved on it left the company
  3. due to bad leadership plaguing the company for years
  4. since time travel doesn’t exist

There are specific interactions people can have with the ai, by design, but many players don’t actually know much of what is going on as is, let alone how to use leaver-ai, and otherwise fall into the same ruts of pretending that their generalized complaints will compensate for player ignorance — to which is does not.

Outside of maybe chess, many game-based ai have specific limitations and exploits, so to select populace of “skill” it’s all going to seem “bad” to any given person at a select time.

If people are not specifically trained for it, with a hefty budget and intentional design for the ai interactions, then it’s going to have conflicting priorities in how it functions.

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Main reason is the half-tuned heat map implementation. The AI lacks a “power through it” decision so instead will often waste a huge amount of time dodging abilities such as Deckards Cain’s Sealing Scrolls or Sonya’s Whirlwind. During this time they do not attack and can be damaged by other sources without consequence, often resulting in the AI dying.

On the other hand Deathwing’s Dragon Breath lacks heat map interaction at all resulting in the AI face tanking one of the highest damage abilities in the game. I swear no matter how much your allies throw it is impossible to lose against Elite AI as Deathwing due to this.

They could make it better. But if it’s too good, it becomes preferable to having an actual player. And the result of that is not something you’d want.

I was reading an interesting article about the advancement of different technologies and what people focus their time on.

Whilst in this day and age we can photoshop images with ease, this kind of technology didn’t exist in the 50s and 60s. This was because people with brains simply weren’t advancing photoshopping technology because they were too busy working on other stuff (like rocket science).

So it seems strange when back in the 60s people had the technology to get a person on the moon, but didn’t have the ability to fabricate a photo image to fake a moon landing.

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yep, film makers, myth busters – and others – have had interviews decrying moon-landing hoaxes on the reality that it was easier to actually go to the moon than it would have been to have faked it at that time. People have an incongruent anachronism to history and technology since people tend to assume that what they experience must be what any and all else experienced. Lot easier to pull a two-bit click and post some ‘whatabout-ism’ then to understand how things develop over time, which unfortunately, has lead to pronounced outcries of a number of information-deniers that essentially indicate they don’t want to learn in favor of reenacting the peasantry depicted in Beauty and the Beast adaptations.

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That shouldn’t be a problem. I usually play vs AI and it is possible to change the AI difficulty level, it’s possible to choose easier or harder AI, the selector is just a slider at the bottom right corner of the screen, alongside the talent build and the loadout buttons with the “Ready” button at the bottom center.
Personally it’s preferable for me to play VS AI because humans are too unpredictable for me, I never coordinate with them. AI on the other hand, I just have to ping them so they follow me and they will cooperate with me unquestioningly.

Haha. But therein lies the treasure. It’s like trying to dress a cat. They do not want to cooperate at all but if you’re successful, you’re rewarded with a cute little meow, meow.

Hell have no fury like an elite ai imperious at level twenty speced into cleave

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Ye it could have been better.

That’s what I’m saying. It’s not that they can’t improve the A.I. They can, they just don’t want to.

You don’t want things like people trying to bully people into leaving to get an A.I. instead.

If you’re speaking of the replacement AI when someone leaves a PVP game, then while you have a point it can be improved, it would be unfair to give it the ability to play (probably) better than many Plat and below.

If you’re a VS AI main, then you have my sympathies. I fully agree they should improve the VS AI experience for that (once) dedicated section of the playerbase, even if I don’t play that mode. The “fix” they made to AI, made VS AI mode unplayable and not enjoyable for many.

I think the devs just left AI to rot and also because its on a skeleton team now then nothing will be updated before MS takes over.

Let’s be honest here. After they broke the AI while trying to fix it, they put on exactly one poor (and friendly) Dev to fix the mess they made. They couldn’t just concede an error and roll back the changes, nope, never that.

I felt a great deal of sympathy for the Dev trying to fix it, he sounded like he genuinely put in real effort, but was taunted and dismissed by many saying in his thread “biology major, haha.” I got the impression he did his best to improve it and cared for his assignment, but mostly received ridicule when asking of feedback.

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I guess I exaggerated a bit when I said I never play with people, but besides of a few matches I actually almost never do.

I’m already there. Even if winning 50% of the time it feels like loosing all the time. Why? Because this game genere (MOBA) independant of the game (it may be DOTA or LOL or this very game HOTS) has the tendency to put people in a very peculiar situation. When you win everyone congratulates themselves, only if a teammate did something extraordinary they are the ones voted for and praised, otherwise nothing. But if you loose you are shunned, reported or insulted, it’s quite a toxic culture, and I just don’t like taking all that hate for loosing once every few games, I’m too old for that. That’s why I’m already playing mostly VS AI and almost never with other people. I hate to disappoint teammates, and I don’t like it when they have their own plans and I just don’t get what I should do to coordinate. So, VS Ai is the only way I can enjoy this game. And I don’t like how heavily oriented to eSports and crazy competitive videogames are becoming. For example, StarCraft 2, if Co-Op didn’t exist I would never play anything beyond campaign. Coop is what kept me playing it a little longer, but the bugs with some achievements made me give up on that already as well.

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The AI used to be better.

I think they made the simpler AI so they could more easily conceal their better AI work.
Now, I think they put AI in SL games without telling people.
It is just a suspicion though.
I think they do it so the game doesn’t outright die.

Not only do I agree with most of what Josue said, but it is sometimes more fun to lose sadly because some players are too toxic to want to work with.

I agree with you that they made the AI worse, but what would they have to gain by putting AI into Ranked games? I mean, they can’t even fix the patch loop bug, do you think they are really putting AI to pad out ranked, for what reason? That makes no sense on any level.

AI once was way better. But then they made them worse them to terrible beginner bots.

The worst change of all was when they changed them to return to spawn unless clicked. You are in the middle of a team fight, someone drops and your Raynor bot thinks “Hey, it might be a good idea to walk back into the spawn area until someone clicks on me”. It sucks. Often you don’t even know who should click a bot. You are all backline and your tank drops? Well too bad then, because a tank that sticks to a squishy mage, not engaging in frontline is useless. But if you move forward so your bot tank finally does something, then you put yourself at unnecessary risk.

Bots in this game are terrible. But even worse is if people droop during or after draft or basically 1 minute after the game started. Then you have to play with a bot the whole match. And this is in most of the cases just a waste of time because it is a defeat. It it not even a 4vs5 then but a 4vs6 because the bot normally is too stupid and feeds hard. He feeds the enemy XP quickly and makes it even harder for your team than it already is.

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AI as it is now is bad. Played a few elite games and my own team was doing nothing while enemy AI team was owning us.

Videogame AI is, and has always been, dumb. And will remain as such long after we’re gone. You’re foolish for expecting better. Videogame AI will never be as Good as an actual player. Not just HOTS but, every game there is.

In the end, one has to ask WHY you’re so pre-occupied with AI to begin with… is going up against real players too much for you?