Why is the AI so bad?

General Discussion
41

Your experience is your experience, but I just don’t get that at all. Maybe it’s because I mainly play QM, but the few times I do tell people to rotate, it’s either met with apathy, people rotate, or people don’t, we get behind, and eventually rotate, and the least likely outcome where people never ever rotate which happens, but is in extreme minority of my games.

I do not get why healers and tanks get so invested in soaking to the point they would quit like Queen. To take up those duties yourself and then get mad at THEM for rightfully calling you out for doing their job inefficiently so they can die faster isn’t the better solution. And even if those situations are not ideal, that’s just being a bad tank and healer.

Sure, I get annoyed if people don’t rotate after many waves. But honestly if people want to spend time in mid, as a healer, a role that highlights your strengths in team fights, that’s like playing into my hands. More often than not we just dominate the mid lane. Then, all you have to do is ping the empty lanes. And more often than not, people eventually disperse.

Like when Queen says something like this, I just do not believe them. If anything, people are much more tolerant of crappy healing because most people are really bad at it and just give you the benefit of the doubt. A person that’s dying 10+ times? That will brutally get called out by the whole team.

42

I’m a little tired today, my comments were in general and not speaking to specifically playing a tank or a healer. Of course if you’re a healer or tank it is almost always better to be with your team than going off solo to soak, or have a sulk.

I think perhaps I’ve had one too many games on the two lane maps in particular where the hero most suited to taking the solo lane won’t and worse, sometimes the lane is left completely empty. A match like this can often snowball into an outright rout if the hero in top lane is a powerful lane bully like Zagara.

I can understand where Froggy is coming from, some matches can be frustrating when on heals or tank, there is really nothing you can do if someone fails to take the solo lane, or your team is very slow to rotate. This is probably why I’m more often playing bruisers in QM these days. You are in a higher MMR bracket than I am, so I would expect you don’t encounter the problems that I do on the regular.

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43

It’s Blizzard. Competent developers work for FAANG and not for Bobbies Blizzard. The company has zero passion and ambitions since a long time.

44

When you got 3 trolls on your team doing nothing who you think gonna step up and take responsibilty ? Sounds like you are just blaming instead of placing yourself in my shoes.

When you start puting yourself in my shoes then you might get another opinion about it when you experince it first hand instead of blaming people that experince it.

I have experince enough in this game to know what I’m talking about.

You properly think if I see 3 trolls doing nothing then I should just stick with them and do nothing like them while all the lanes gets destoyed. Bet that is what you think I should do.

My purpose as a tank/healer in this game ends in a void when you have 3 dmg dealers doing nothing. If people are not going to play properly then I wont either. I dont owe random troll on my team anything. People like them can play thier 5vs5 dps games while us healer/tank players join a team that actually has a working brain.

If your dmg dealers wont take responsibility then no one wil. Remember that when you blame people on the forum for speaking out and have no clue about how thier experince of the game is nor have been in thier situation.

But keep blaming. You very good at it from past topics. Blaming is all you can. You got no empathy and properly never will.

2 Likes
45

Do you think running off to soak so they can die is better? Do you think mercing as a healer is efficient?

There are OF COURSE bad damage dealers that won’t be responsible for their actions. But becoming a bad tank or healer because they’re bad isn’t going to make your situation better. And then getting mad at them for calling you out for a choice YOU made is like, what do you expect? If my healer did that, I would do the same.

You have experience with the game, I just think you get triggered unnecessarily and have a distorted perception about the frequency of these issues. If I didn’t have empathy, I wouldn’t be able to be a healer main.

I can understand the frustration on any single game basis. I can’t on an overall game basis to the point my perception is twisted enough to make such big proclamations that trolls like pinging healers more than people who die 10+ times. That’s probably just selective outrage or the way they’re playing that causes them to be pinged.

It’s not to say I don’t experience people being unreasonable and pinging me when I’m healing. I had a terrible Diablo do just that recently. But it’s not common in my experience.

QM MMR is so crazy, and always expands so fast, I don’t even know if a high MMR (if I even have one) really matters all that much in that game mode.

46

His actual work broke the AI.

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47

As someone who designs large systems deeply intertwined with deep learning and ML in general - I have to say you have no idea… To start with, you might want to revisit the very first paragraph of the book for the course that you took which likely defines what AI is - might be surprised that AI in games is still AI… hence why they call it … AI.

You are ignoring the fact that initial AI in HOTS was significantly better, so the reason I am “complaining” about guy’s work is that he literally broke what was there already.

Alphastar wasn’t overhyped it was just a small research project that had no monetary goal in mind, neither did it take very significant resources. The “cons” of the Alphastar that you listed are only half true, e.g. it doesn’t not have global vision, it’s vision is limited to the units it controls (yes this is “advantage” over a human who looks at a screen and has to move around to observe all the units, but it’s not a global vision advantage type you are making it to be). However, you are forgetting to mention the nerfs that were done to it, like limiting the APM of the AI to somewhat match the humans it were competing with to make it at least somewhat fair. Significantly simpler AI would still be very competitive if you remove the APM limit. Then you are also ignoring things like - in SC2 in any game you can have all available units in multiple quantities. In HOTS you only control one hero so the space is actually not nearly as big as you make it out to be.

Then again, the goal is not to design the state-of-the-art AI , which you are talking about and which indeed can take semi-large amount of computing although nothing really as major as you make it out to be. It’s not to develop the chess-quality AI that will win every time. Who would even want to play vs that in HOTS? The goal is to create something that is viable and there are thousands of ways to simplify the problem yet make something very solid. It’s actually pretty much what a lot of AI research is about these days - find ways to simplify the problem. Example - ignore the macro, the AI doesn’t need to know the “big picture” of the game, e.g. when to take camps, push, get XP , etc. The commands like “follow me” or “follow the team” are totally fine, you could create a few of those scenarios if needed. Once you do that, it’s 1. learning the talent trees - very simple, just basic data analysis and 2. basic micro behavior, placement of the hero around the team which limits the map to a relatively small area (immediate zone around the player that AI is following), use of abilities, etc. That would be very sufficient for a decent “gold-level” AI that can fill a missing player’s role. People in silver/gold rarely have more clue that that.

48

Well, the first assignment in that course I had was to find a definition of AI; the purpose of that assignment was to show us (the students) that there is no single generally accepted definition of AI, so we differ there (that course was a few years ago, so that “no one definition” situation might have changed, but I kinda doubt it)

As for the rest, I didn’t mean to imply that Alphastar had global vision as in “no fog of war cheat”, and if that’s how it came out, my bad; it’s just that (at least according to that one video I saw) it had the whole map “fit on screen”, because otherwise it was kinda terrible at micro (the minimap doesn’t show what kind of units you’re facing, and it doesn’t tell you when a psi storm is gonna hit :stuck_out_tongue: )
But I’ll grant you I’m not that involved on the specifics; I’m just tired of people (no you, just some people) acting like Starcraft 2 (or even LoL) is a solved problem.

Again, AI isn’t my specialty, so maybe this has changed a lot in the years since my course (that, I don’t doubt), but a lot of people misunderstand machine learning, so I was trying to clarify that it isn’t as simple as many think.

Something I didn’t mention in my previous post ('cause it was already way too long :sweat_smile: ) is that Starcraft 2 was a relatively stable “system” to machine-learn when Alphastar was developed. HotS, on the other hand, still got balance patches, system changes, and new heroes, comparatively frequently when the last AI blog came out.
So using machine-learning to train bots would be kind of a waste of time, since the system would soon change to no longer (exactly) reflect the training environment.

All that said, it is possible to make bots that are better at “general skills”, so the training still applies after the smaller changes; but my point still stands, I think: even if it doesn’t take “Google money”, it still isn’t really worth the investment for ABK, is it?
'Cause people don’t (generally) consider “is the AI that replaces my leaver teammates?” as a primary criterion to decide if they want to spend money on comsetics in a F2P game… At least I don’t think they do :man_shrugging:

49

He was trying to fix that particular problem. I’m not going to disagree with you that the AI was broken, I think in 2017?

While I never was interested in VS AI mode, it was once the most popular mode in Hots. I had friends who played it exclusively and most ended up quitting after the AI behavior was changed, the sentiment from my friends was VS AI mode became “unplayable”, or simply no longer fun or challenging.

50

I can’t remember if you’re on the EU or US servers, but I don’t think it matters for QM. I’ve seen games where GM/Master (in raked) were mixed with Bronze 5’s, it’s all about forming matches fast using MMR averaging to try to bring some sort of skill balance. That’s not a complaint, QM is supposed to be the casual mode, but it can lead to large skill gaps between individual players and teams.

You’re probably right, but if you just happen to get unlucky and have the time to play perhaps only two games a day and both have AFK or other troll players in them and the next time you log in the same happens, I could see how it might negatively and unfairly color a players perceptions.

As for Froggy, he said he’s taking an extended break from Hots, or maybe not ever playing it again, so he’s not “part of the problem” at least actively. Hes entitled to his opinions and I have no reason to doubt his personal experiences as related.

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51

Me neither and I rarely play it in general, but I feel like one of the problems it presented is the dropped player especially in higher ranked matches. Because the current AI basically can’t be trusted to do anything but run head first into stuff or sit at home. These are basically the options now. And I think a lot of complaints about quality of matches stem from the fact that if someone drops or leaves you are stuck in 4v5 and the only thing that can save you there is the crappy matchmaking, which is an odd thing to count on.

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52

Why would it be bad at micro? It plays at 300-2000 apm (enforced). It takes what? 3-5 actions to switch around to view everything? So a few nanoseconds for ai to actually overview the whole map and just poll it every .1 seconds. I bet they just decided it was pointless to implement constant “screen switching” since AI isn’t really limited by APM (the APM they set was fairly arbitrary, could just up it by 5% to service the occasional screen overview) so it has little effect on it’s ability to do anything and would be a useless programming exercise, nothing else.

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