It would be substantially more difficult than you are letting on.
But more to the point, it would fundamentally be a different game. Group content is designed to be played by groups of players where there is shared responsibility for success.
With AI followers, the game is largely playing itself, regardless of how well you program it to play like humans.
It would be far simpler and less resource intensive to just create more elaborate Delves for solo players. Heck, even Mage Tower-like class and / or role specific Devles would be easier.
Well, you’ve clearly never tried to kite mobs while Brann decides to go all in on them (while set to healer, no less).
Because it’s programmed by Blizzard, and so if a player failed a dungeon, they would inevitably blame Blizzard for saddling them with braindead AI. There would be hundreds of complaint threads.
Not to mention even if you could, there’s a universe of difference between knowing what to do and doing it. Pre programming inputs for NPC’s and then just having your player character fill in the gaps is both significantly easier, and you can just Google what the best presets for the NPCs are from smarter players than you and they’ll do them without fault.
At that point just go play xcom, DOS, or Baldurs gate.
The human variable isn’t just whether the people will play correctly or not. Adding other humans allows and requires the challenge of coordination. With bots, they either will be coded to never fail those coordination checks, the coordination checks are designed such that they can be overcome by brute force, or there has to be an element or randomness to how well the bots do handle the coordination checks. How would you feel if you had wipes due to the system randomly choosing for one of your bot teammates to overlap with another bot teammate?
The more of anything, the less the individual means. Say that you are in a fight and characters w, x, y and z on your team are doing all the damage while you struggle to keep up. What difference does it make if they are human or bots, your contribution is still the same. You are being carried.
Under the system I proposed, the bots would be leveled the way you are and their effort would be scaled to match yours. The better the player was, the better the group would do.
How do you measure effort? Would their dps always match your dps? If you are playing tank and forget to taunt swap, does the other tank also forget to swap later? If you fail a mechanic does every fail it?
Alternatively, what if the bots cannot do the mechanics consistently? Would your success be dependant on RNG?
Yeah same thing happens in a pug when “human bots” are playing. We hear people complain about it all the time. If anything, the bots would probably be better scaled and more consistent than the humans in a pug.
I run follower dungeons for things like farming recipes. I’m a decent player, but not a mythic player. I’m only iLVL 619.
As it stands, I can run through a good chunk of the dungeon and pull the mobs back to the followers and they can down them.
I don’t even have to DPS at that point. I just do it to speed things up.
So you’re wanting to what, do this in a mythic raid? The human factor is what helps to make content difficult.
Perhaps you’re wanting something like the ability to use your alts as ai in a follower dungeon? That way you have to spend the time to level them up and gear them up?
I wouldn’t be completely opposed to something like that. Then you have to put in the work to get out the reward. But stepping into a dungeon because my item level is high enough and have the NPCs essentially walk me through it doesn’t sound as much like I’m playing a multiplayer game and more like it’s playing me.
For DPS it would be measured on damage stats done, damage taken and anything else that could be measured. Same for healing. The system would run the tank. Yes there are subtle things that are more difficult to measure but for most players they probably scale with the things you can measure.
Or harder since the system would be able to scale down if the player wasn’t holding up their position.
What if I have my CDs up but don’t use them because I’m holding for a boss?
What if we pull more mobs so my AoE is higher?
What if we pull more mobs but one of them is more dangerous so I focus that one doing less overall?
These aren’t even niche examples. They’re extremely common ones that happen every single run of every single key.
You’re oversimplifying the content / gameplay because you don’t do it and have no idea at all how it works. Even the concept of an “AI mythic+ tank” is ridiculous to anyone with any vague knowledge of what mythic+ tanking entails.
As I said before there would be a table of various statistics. Each row would be a statistic for the player which would be updated as play continued and there would be a column for points given for that particular stat. The column would have a total at the bottom which would determine the scale. All bots would adjust to that scale.
Do better, the bots would do better.
Do worse, the bots would slack off.
Most important, not one person doing regular group activity would be involved or impacted other than the usual “No, you can’t have fun unless you do things our way !!!”.
Isnt that literally M+ though? RNG on when affixes appear, RNG on spell casts of mobs, RNG pathing based on what tank is pulling (tanks have different routes) and RNG for the loot.
