I’d like to propose an innovative approach to improving matchmaking and AI training in Overwatch. What if the Vs AI queue became a live training ground for a new AI system that learns directly from players waiting in queue? By observing and adapting to real player strategies, this AI could continuously improve, eventually providing a much more challenging and realistic experience. As the AI evolves, you could use its performance as a benchmark to more accurately assess a player’s true skill level, leading to significantly better matchmaking across the board. The key to making this work is community participation—players would be openly contributing to training the AI, with full transparency about the process. Given Overwatch’s lore already features advanced AI like Echo, this initiative could be seamlessly integrated both narratively and technically. You are quite literally helping “Echo” train for combatLeveraging the community in this way would not only enhance the game’s AI but also create a more engaging and fair matchmaking system for everyone. It’s actually quite low hanging fruit.
I mean, it’s a great idea, but probably way more complicated than you’re making it sound. AI isn’t magic, and you need a way for the training to actually understand what it’s doing.
How do you observe a player’s behaviors in a way that makes sense? What constitutes a skillful behavior? What defines strategic play and teamwork? How do you define what the world looks like for the AI (e.g. analyzing geometry, proximity, openings, etc)?
I wouldn’t mind some players being bots, if it meant that matches are balanced better.
Mainly, I just want all the over-performing sweats out of my matches. Throw them into bot matches where every player is an AI with godly aim, or another sweatlord.
Filler bots would help the most in the lowest skill bracket, where even a completely mediocre veteran player would be an absolute menace on dps.
That sounds so easy and power efficient to be taking data from so many sources all at once and trying to implement it in real time.
And I bet it’s cheap as dirt.
Ai (ml) cannot be better than majority of players , so skilful individuals would still dominate. Problem that bliz is not charity and that majority is their livestock
They can use replay data to train them, all it would be is converting movements to tokens and using every combination of hero and map and given the raw scale of data they have, that’s more than feasible. I dream of a day I can just play with AI with a difficulty slider that’s indistinctable from people
This is a terrible idea. Here is why.
For starters this would lead to skill based matchmaking becoming far to strict, making quick play have a rubber banding effect. As this is seen in many other games, such as Halo Infinite, call of duty, The Finals, Marvel Rivals, Fragpunk… By rubber banding, I basically mean the matchmaking feels “rigged” where Everytime you have a good game, you are immediately punished after in your next couple matches. Humans are always in different mindsets, so sometimes you just have a good day. Then you jump on the next day after work, and your tired so you aren’t as reactive. The matchmaking doesn’t factor this in so now enjoy suffering. Overwatch matchmaking is in a pretty good spot right now, where quick play feels relaxing, and not sweaty. And ranked is fairly transparent, the main problem being smurf accounts in metal ranks. That’s the issue with FTP as a hole thou.
The next problem is 1 of of the reasons I stopped playing Marvel Rivals aswell. Bots in quick play disguised as players. You knew they were bots, cos there aim was weird. If they had AI, then players would be constantly skeptical, and you’ll cause players to become uncertain with the game. That’s not what you want, when you need to sell them store items to survive.
The only way I want to see AI in overwatch is if it’s AI anti cheat. Where it tracks players gameplay, and compares it to cheaters. This way it can learn the difference, and effectively ban cheaters quickly, without requiring a rootkit.
I by no means think this would be a simple or even cheap endeavor but the benefits would put blizzard/Overwatch leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. We would the teachers we show them the geometry we show them the ropes effectively. It’s slowly records what we do (and what we’ve done OLW recordings). We would effectively be making the Standardized test for ourselves. For the endless bots debacle hopefully Bilzzard keeps them in house strictly as the rubric. This would also help the developers by almost instant being able to see the small changes in a kit by just having the botss play against each other. In short I love this game and want it to succeed. I hope the software development company develops the next and actual tool that would revolutionize how we see the competitive rankings.
Right, but I think you’re missing what I’m getting at. The question is how do we train them to do this? Someone still has to develop the model that describes this information and how to interpret the data.
Like, creating ChatGPT wasn’t just grabbing “AI” and feeding it 5 billion sources of text and then out magically pops a chat bot. They had to actually fundamentally figure out what all that text means and what it means to ingest that information.
You must remember that from the perspective of a human, the game and the way its presented to us is designed specifically for us to understand. We see geometry, we understand the rules of the game, etc. To the computer, it’s all just numbers – and worse than that, the numbers represent a massive amount of proprietary and unique data formats. What does a 3D mesh of vertices mean? What does a collection of player movements actually look like? What does it mean to move from position A to position B, and how does that matter with respect to the state of the game? Walking through a chokepoint means two totally different things if there are enemies on the other side.
That’s the tokenization process. Everything AI is basically predicting the next thing. Like “The sky is-” if Mars was mentioned than the chance of the next word being blue is no longer like 95%, it drops it to where red is above that now. With raw data alone and knowing every replay is basically a record of inputs, you can absolutely brute force every probability of a map with every player until they numbers smooth out to mimic indistinguiable movements. If you’ve seen marblr videos than you know you get SO much information per tick
Right, but I think you’re missing what I’m getting at. I’m asking I (hatsunemiku) am asking Overwatch/Blizzard (~70 Billion dollar tech company) to please consider using emerging tech to make game better. I cannot build/develop such systems myself. If only there was software produceing company (blizzard/Overwatch) to help. Yes it is expensive to produce, yes the gameplay is going to be bad, yes eventually the bots would eventually become the terminator in game. Why not fantasize and hope for a better game? This IS after all is the overwatch forums where ideas are free to flow. TLDR I’m tired of shooting at “Ai bots” that walk in the same line over and over. I hope that they produce one of the strongest tools for game development in the process with the help of the community.
A lot of the things about the game could be improved by AI. But sadly we aren’t there yet in accessibility. AI training in general still requires a lot of servers to perform. And renting servers costs money let alone owning one. This is on top of the company having to come up with an algorithm that makes good use of AI in their games too. It’s too much money right now.
Yeah but we’re talking about a multi billion dollar company (blizzard) owned by a multi trillion dollar company (Microsoft). Money should never be an excuse. It’s just not part of their vision. They are happy with what they’re doing.
Maybe, idk. I have yet to see any AAA companies implementing complicated AI into their games yet. So my guess is that developers still don’t know what to do with this technology yet, even if money isn’t the obstacle.
So far, I’ve only seen Replica Smart NPCs demo and Oasis AI Minecraft as a real world example of what modern AI can achieve.
