A.I Bots and the Future of "Group" Content

Community General Discussion
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TLDR: What are your feelings on these new developments of NPC Party/Raid members? Do you think that in the future, entire dungeons will be able to be cleared without ever having to interact with a single person? Would you rather do dungeons and raids by yourself with the help of bots? Would this be a healthy state of affairs for an "MMO"RPG?

So I’ve seen the writing on the wall ever since the “Proving Grounds” of MoP-WoD and the Legion Mage Tower challenges where players have NPC’s to fill the DPS / Healer / Tank role. This continued in BFA where you get entire bot parties to “pvp” against that are reasonably human-like (complete with random jump spamming or back pedaling) That isn’t even to mention all the companions we get in these expansions.

For Shadowlands, this same technology is used again in the mini dungeon to cap off the starter experience of Exiles Reach that you can either do in a party of humans or bots.

Pros:
I think there is room for new advancements with this in terms of A.I that can be used to coach players to improve their gameplay, seems to be their intention with Deepmind in Starcraft at least.

There could be bot mobs similar to those found on Island Expeditions in the open world which imo would make the game feel more alive, or at least be a world that fights back. Imagine “smart” mobs roaming around a zone with a distinct behavior pattern unique to their rare spawn for players to either hunt or avoid.

E.g., If you knew that there was a Fel Reaver out there that behaved like the Ganker from South Park, you’d take extra care and precaution both before and after leaving the safety of the town walls.

Players have also amassed large stables of alts over the years and how interesting would it be to be able to field a group made up entirely of your own characters as bots (might be 4th wall breaking).

The “faction champions” fight in ToGC, which simulated a raid vs raid with varying levels of success and maximum chaos, was where most of these ideas sprang to my mind.

Cons:
I’ve played WoW on and off from the start and I remember how much of a fuss dungeon finder was when it was implemented in Wrath, and then came raid finder in Cata, and so on, and it seems to me that with each such change, the community perceives the game being “dumbed down” for the sake of accessibility. Casualization has since become a permanent fixture as a negative talking point.

There might come a point where players just play through intricate story dungeons with their NPC parties and everyone gets silo’d off into their favorite “theme park rides” a la SWOTOR and ESO.

In any case, I could well be overstating Blizz’s capabilities regarding bots–but hey, it’s the start of a new decade and the 2020’s might finally be the time where artificial intelligence gets to the point where it can be implemented in areas that will have substantial market interrupting effects. Video games definitely included.

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I was so hyped about island ‘au’, yet it turned out to be a generic npc that just uses some abilities instead of precise strategy,interrupts, cool down useage etc to be an actual threat.

The island mythic ai was a farmable joke

I want more good solo content in this game with mythic ilvl rewards and creating some actually smart ai would be a good start, but mythic islands are not that

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I mean… welcome to 2005 Guild Wars?

We had NPC companions that you could run content with all the way back then.

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We’ve had NPCs assisting us for some time. Legion had the whole healer’s healing their mage tower NPC’s, for example. Proving Grounds existed in 2013 and had tank/healer components that involved an NPC team. This isn’t really new technology, it’s just being implemented in a way that’s more obvious about it.

In fact I’d argue that the video game market has had the ability to do this since the early 2000’s, if not the 90’s, it’s just not been the common trend.

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I think the idea of being able to run dungeons solo with a group of bots is interesting to say the least. I do think it would it would be nice for those leveling up when you just want to get a group for some dungeon quests. I understand the complaint about making the game to casual. If something like this were implemented, I would be very much in favor of not allowing bot groups in whatever dungeons are current. Or if they are, the rewards should be less than what you could get by grouping up, but I really don’t like adding tons of different systems and difficulties.

If they were to add something like this, I’d like them to keep it interesting. Maybe they could add a “huntard” bot that keeps growl on their pet and pulls extra mobs whenever the healer is low on mana. Or a prot warrior who rage quits if he dies. Or a priest healer in shadow spec.

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Man this brings me back. I loved henchmen but I think heroes killed GW PvE.

As for OP. For heroic dungeons and LFR I think filling in an empty body with a bot is a decent idea.

Exiles reach NPCs I’m assuming are very scripted to that specific dungeon though and it probably is a great effort to do a whole expac of dungeons and LFR

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This goes all the way back to Wrath when they had Battle for the Undercity. You were there to help out, and your contributions were important, but Thrall and Sylvanas and Varian and Jaina were there to do the heavy lifting.

I’ve said for years that they should replace LFR with a single-player raid experience modeled after Battle for the Undercity. That way, everyone could see the raid and story, AT THEIR OWN PACE, and not have to deal with any trolls ruining their experience.

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I would love a Trust system like in XIV. If I wanna learn a class without being yelled at is nice or take it slow or explore the dungeon without racing out the gate. I would definitely try learning how to tank this way.

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Actually, I would love it if we could scale down and do older raids at their intended level, but with an AI raid team to fill out the roster. Sometimes you just want a change of pace, you know? An alternative to current tier and one-shotting older raids for mog.

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As a multiboxer I’d love to fight AI… but when I play solo, I don’t want random AI in dungeons or PVP.

AI can come in but it has to be selected and separated. “LFG with Computers” “LFG with players” “Casual PVP Against Computer” “Casual PVP Players only”

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I would love an npc like in Diablo 2. I would also love a npc tank because if you add up all the times waiting for one all up per year, would equal days.

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Like Nazjatar companion? I hate those :stuck_out_tongue: they always keep you in combat and aggro stuff you don’t need lol.

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I really don’t like the idea of bots in PvP at all, it quite literally is no longer PvP then lol. The only way I can think of it sort of working is like how GW did it (funny that was already mentioned). With their 1v1 arena you had like 2 or 3 bots that you could order around and kind of control. That was actually very fun, but it was a lot more to do with strategy and positioning.

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:laughing: :+1:

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Fair enough, I guess I’ve been hanging out on tech reddit and listening to podcasts too much that I’m in my own bubble.

To make my point clearer, it’s less about the heavily “programming babysitter” scripted A.I we’re used to like the ones in Mario Kart-but rather, learning A.I that you might have seen in a headline as a common talking point now finally getting enough money and development thrown at it and put into practical applications.

With the old type A.I, once the “puzzle” was solved you could easily game it to beat it with cheese. But AlphaGo / AlphaStar is on a different level.

You can imagine it like a kid that first learns how to drive a golf ball starting off terrible but practicing every day until he gets really good, maybe good enough to fool a player or at least build immersion that this NPC might be thinking about what to do next.

That said, this is off-topic and I don’t see the Hard Problem of A.I being solved in our lifetimes.

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Yea, the AI would need their own queue. Sometimes I suspected blizz to introduce NPC to fill in the gaps in BG’s… (or players were really that predictable and bad)

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Man, still my all-time favorite game! The second one was a’ight… but just no the same.

On topic: Bring on the AI. I embrace our robotic overlords.

(I have nothing else to contribute. Carry on.)

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In all fairness - as a guardian druid even PVP islands were farmable jokes 99% of the time. I regularly survived 1v3 while my teammates did the things.

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Well to answer this question I’m gonna have to say no. It would be a horrible idea. Despite how obvious of an upgrade it would be to have half the playerbase (who are extremely bad at the game) be replaced by bots that are superior to them. This would kill what little is left of the community.

HOWEVER

You do list alternative uses for the tech. I actually suggested something similar when WoD came out. I wanted the ability to have a shared account wide (per faction) garrison to park all my alts inside of. Then get to talk to them on my played character and get one to follow me around and be my bodyguard. That would be extremely fun and spice up the overworld. They’d obviously be disabled in instanced content of course.

As for having “smart AI” making the world feel more alive that’s interesting too. Like rare npc’s doing their own quests and exploring the world. Hostile, neutral, allied, all of the possibilities sound great. Even having a more basic version of that AI just being scattered around in the “battleground” areas where you’d normally see npcs fighting each other forever. With nobodies HP ever going down. It’d be nice to see those NPC’s actually fighting a mini battle that one side could actually eventually win. Then having the winning side take over the area briefly before being hit with a counterattack that pushes them back.

Only time i ever saw something similar to this being done was the TBC dark portal. If you pulled the demons that were standing and doing nothing into the allied npc’s you could force the allied npcs to all die. Then the demons scream about their victory and start walking into the portal to invade Azeroth.

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Except the NPCs on our party is pretty poor. Honestly, that mini dungeon should’ve been a proper dungeon where players fill the tank/healing roles and the npc’s just bumble around being extra DPS or at the best scenario, just sit back and watch. And considering how Short it is, it wouldn’t be much of an issue for new players to learn how to tank and heal for the first time.

Meh, along it’s an optional extra, it’s okay. Considering the AI isn’t particularly bright in a lot of times. Though i think it should be important to incentize using real players by having a 15% bonus or something.