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40oz

Human opponents vs. CPU Opponents

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Do you prefer fragging real life players or do you like playing against enemy AI?

When I say enemy AI, I mean in any scenario of video games. Whether it be Contra enemies that take one shot to kill, Boss battles, or Doom monsters, or deathmatch bot players in Unreal tournament.

My preference is AI opponents.

I like playing single player games and cooperative games. Not to say I don't playing playing competitively against human players once in a while, I think playing against AI is the most fun.

Some may argue that I prefer to play against AI because I suck at playing against real players. Theoretically this may seem true especially given the output of video games in the last couple years, in which the single player experience is more less a cinematic-like experience rather than a real challenge of the player's skill. Often games rely on their multiplayer counterpart to be the real challenge of the video game and where all the replay value is at, which I think is kinda lame.

In games like Contra and Doom, fighting your enemies relies on understanding your opponents behavior and developing a strategy that relies on precise movements and tactics in order to defeat it, where as playing against human opponents is entirely unpredictable. That's not always a bad thing of course, AI opponents need to have at least a decent amount of unpredictable action.

My ideal game would be one that captures the absolute basics of particular genre of video games (namely first person shooter) in which the single player / cooperative experience is evidentally more threatening than playing real life players, without being hopelessly bullshit hard.

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AI is fun at first, but once you figure out it's weaknesses it's just a case of meta-gaming... not an actual test of skill.

Multiplayer adds a random, human (duh) aspect that makes it 100x more exciting than any kind of bot.

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Two completely different things as far as I'm concerned. Enemies in a single player game are designed to operate in an entirely different way from human opponents in a multiplayer game. A more fair comparison would be humans vs. bots in multiplayer, and I'd definitely go with humans there.

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I play some Quake 3 Team Arena against Hardcore bots and I always win. My team sucks at CTF (I should try other modes).

Bots would be alot better if they actually did other things, like decide to do stuff on their own and to switch things up a bit at random. I still gotta figure out how to designate a bot as team leader.

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Mr. T said:

AI is fun at first, but once you figure out it's weaknesses it's just a case of meta-gaming... not an actual test of skill.


I disagree. What do you mean by weakness? Sure there's some kind of a predictable pattern to whatever opponent you have, but overcoming that pattern isn't very simple to achieve. I mean, I suppose you could say that a doom monster's weakness is that it will only attack you if you are within it's sight. But that doesn't necessarily mean that even though a slaughterfest like Hell Revealed 2 uses monsters with weaknesses, that it doesn't test your skill to beat it, whether you know the weaknesses or not.

Dragonsbrethren said:

Two completely different things as far as I'm concerned.


Not at all. Quite simply a real life opponent or a CPU opponent, no matter what entity it serves, is preventing you from achieving a certain goal.

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I like playing against Human opponents better as most of the games I play are DM or muiltplayer focused. (Talking about bots)
The only game I find bots to be made well is UT. I've tested them a lot and found to be a lot like a human player (well when you have them at a high skill level). I've watched full many 15 bot DMs (when each bot is at the same skill level) and found that it is almost the same as a online DM. There are always the bot that seem like they know the map and get all the good stuff well other look like there lost and get crushed.
But when a Human play is thrown into the mix you notice the flaws in the bots right away. How they don't plan out there move more then to just get health or weapons. When playing a team game with them you notice how the bot teams don't have a central leader so they are easily beaten by a human lead team.
Really the only things keeping bots back is the ability to think a head and lead a team in battle.

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When I'm playing with friends, I enjoy that more than anything. However, most people are pricks and that makes it annoying to play against people online. Also, the Unreal Tournament games had some really awesome bots. It was actually a lot more fun to play against them than any human opponent.

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Mostly AI because, frankly, most people are jerks in games. Especially in games based on open servers rather than separate matchmaking, finding "good" people to play with can be near impossible, and the more popular the game is, the more flooded it becomes with assholes. At times like that I'd rather play anything AI-controlled, even if it might be less fun than a good human, because it's thousands times better than a bad human opponent.

And then there's those matchmaking games where you need to plan a game ahead instead of jumping into a server that's running 24/7. It can be proportionally easier to find good players in such games since you can filter out bad people, but between finding people in lobbies, having people spend ages deciding whether they have or not have enough time to play, have them decide their sides or weapons or races or whatever in the game and then, when the game finally starts after an hour, they tell they need to go eat a dinner and ask you to wait for an other hour. And then you rage quit the multiplayer lobby and go play some singleplayer.

Fuck people.



Still, if I had the choice, I'd rather play with people that I know to be "good" players. Doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be skilled, but as long as they don't bullshit around too much and know how to play the game (ie. actually make up strategies in strategy games, plan ahead in action games, etc. etc.) it will be more fun than against a predictable AI.

But if given the choice between a predictable yet reliable AI and an unreliable asshole human opponent who's out there only to waste your time? AI all the way.



PS. The only game ever where I almost only played multiplayer instead of single was Age of Mythologies, and it was only because the matchmaking in that game was the best fucking thing ever. You simply first pick your side to play, and then in the lobby press one huge round button and the servers pick you an opponent at random that's close to your ranking score and starts a game without asking either of you anything at all. That thing was brilliant in how easy and simple it was.

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you can make a damn good AI if it has a path to follow, and can quickly analyse surroundings such as cover. amazingly, the cajun bot has this in the old dos EXEs- you could set bot "nodes" that the AI would then use to navigate levels. You could even edit maps with the nodes to make any map playable by the bots. however, they were smart enough to figure out passageways on their own after a few minutes, as I recall they built a table on successful "moves" throughout the map (think of the bots as roombas)

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Depends. Sometimes the bots/AI can have unfair advantages vs humans (e.g. ultra-long range railgun sniping in Quake 3, when a human couldn't even see you as a single pixel on his screen, 100% accurate aim in Battlefield 1942 and other games, again from humanly impossible distances, different rulesets in RTS games that give the AI superior production speed/no cost etc.) which however do make them worth playing against.

Also, you can trust the AI to be consistent, well-behaved, and in client-server based games, you can also trust that if you screw up it probably be your fault, and not, say, the netcode glitching or the opponent cheating (AI's "cheating" is a different matter altogether).

Then there's another aspect: even if playing vs humans is theoretically more unpredictable compared to the AI which can be "figured out" sooner or later, in practice playing any MP game at a certain level will ALSO result in only a handful of tactics being (ab)used by human players, due to a "tactics darwinism" mechanism.

Leaving player attitude problems aside, newbies soon find out that they can't compete by playing "normally" unless they too jump on the cheese bandwagon and do what everybody else does.

E.g. everybody will do a Zerg rush in Starcraft given the chance, everybody would do the 7-man grunt/footman rush on medium resources in Warcraft 2 given the chance, everybody will spawncamp/basebomb/grenade spam etc., everybody will want to be the hosting player in a certain game if that will give him an advantage in terms of latency etc. so in the end MP "competitive" play end up being severely restricted and regimented even moreso than AI (ignoring that and experimenting freely might be fun, but it pretty much guarantees that you'll never rise beyond the rank of "scrub", or that you will be labeled a myg0t-like disruptor in certain game communities).

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Jodwin said:

Mostly AI because, frankly, most people are jerks in games. Especially in games based on open servers rather than separate matchmaking, finding "good" people to play with can be near impossible, and the more popular the game is, the more flooded it becomes with assholes. At times like that I'd rather play anything AI-controlled, even if it might be less fun than a good human, because it's thousands times better than a bad human opponent.

And perhaps the most important part: AI opponents won't spew racist insults at you over VOIP because you decided to bring a specific weapon with you (like CS's Arctic Warfare and The Specialists' Raging Bull).

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Usually AI, for the reasons Maes listed, but ultimately it depends of the specific game itself. There's only so many times I can replay a strategy game against AI opponents and watch them react the exact same way (sure, players will also follow established build orders etc. but sometimes they'll panic or do random/stupid things, be more or less good at micro, and so on), on the other hand I'll never get bored of Doom SP.

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Doom's SP is so good exactly because it's simplistic at its core, yet it may take a lifetime to master. E.g. you may be used to slaughtering thousands of demons in one map without even a scratch, and in another you may die at the hands of a simple imp cleverly hidden behind you.

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Maes said:

Leaving player attitude problems aside, newbies soon find out that they can't compete by playing "normally" unless they too jump on the cheese bandwagon and do what everybody else does.

E.g. everybody will do a Zerg rush in Starcraft given the chance, everybody would do the 7-man grunt/footman rush on medium resources in Warcraft 2 given the chance, everybody will spawncamp/basebomb/grenade spam etc.

Deja vu.

Then they learn how to defend against such attacks and start playing better. Or ragequit. Good riddance.

Playing against AI opponents is boring, I'd have a hard time naming a game where the AI was challenging enough to keep the game interesting for long.

All the people complaining about other players crappy social skills, seriously, what could be more fun than getting badmouthed by some idiot over the internet. For me that's part of the charm of playing QL on Polish servers. I usually respond in English, inducing fits of rage and line after line of 'SPEAK POLISH MOTHERFUCKER'.

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Belial said:

Deja vu.

Then they learn how to defend against such attacks and start playing better. Or ragequit. Good riddance.

Playing against AI opponents is boring, I'd have a hard time naming a game where the AI was challenging enough to keep the game interesting for long.

All the people complaining about other players crappy social skills, seriously, what could be more fun than getting badmouthed by some idiot over the internet. For me that's part of the charm of playing QL on Polish servers. I usually respond in English, inducing fits of rage and line after line of 'SPEAK POLISH MOTHERFUCKER'.


THIS!!!

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Belial said:

Playing against AI opponents is boring, I'd have a hard time naming a game where the AI was challenging enough to keep the game interesting for long.


Ahem...Doom? :-p

Also, I was not referring to counterable tactics. These are comparable to "quick chess mates" or rapid opening moves in Chess, which will be countered and avoided easily by any middle-level player, yet may grant you the occasional victory vs a total newbie.

No, I'm talking more of things like e.g. everybody picking race/side X in game Y because picking anything else would just be handicapping yourself, all other skillsets being equal. To keep up with the chess paradigm, it's pretty much like choosing to promote a pawn to something other than a Queen or open with moving the pawns at the side first: not a good idea in most cases.

In some cases, certain factions/characters/whatever in a game are so obviously overpowered/easier to use/advantaged in some way, that players will inevitably stick to them, rather than risk losing by picking a less "cheesy" faction. An example of this are the countless Cyrax or Kabal players in MK3, back in the day. Why? Because those characters had easy moves, devastating combos, and both had immobilizing moves which left the opponent stunned and totally open to a painful combo.

Another aspect of gaming is this: after a gaming community has matured enough, players of certain games will tend to limit themselves to precise tactics, specific weapons, or even specific sides/teams/levels, and the average game will tend to look the same. Some say that is the highest technical gameplay possible in that game, and are happy with that. The downside is that if you want to enjoy something different/refreshing and where the challenge factor does NOT come from following a precise drill everytime "or else", you must join specialized clans/servers/explicitly agree to a limited ruleset.

An example of this are rifle-only servers in CoD, rebalanced official maps from Battlefield 1942, bannable no-basebombing/spawncamping servers, no-hero games in Warlords Battlecry 3, "modem leagues" in many online real-time games etc.

TO make a DOOM example, imagine if there were "keyboarder only" deathmatch leagues, for people who believe it's a more pure control method and enjoy the more limited degree of control it allows, and want to be pitted only against other similarly minded opponents.

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It depends.

One one hand, playing humans is always fun. The inherent unpredicability of any deathmatch always keeps a good player on their toes.

One the other hands, bots can be used to further specific skills (I used Skulltag bots to practice the chain/minigun.

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Belial said:


You still haven't got over that, have you?

Here, there's a much better one:

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=862529#post862529

Here's another bad aspect of human opponents: many behave as if they were hard-core, life-time members to a hypothetical "League of Winners", and as such will not tolerate ANY criticism, insinuation or doubt over their (real or, mostly, hypothetical) "competitive" status and ultra-1337 abilities. The real WTF if that there are some who won't tolerate any "dissenting" opinion in general vs "competitive" gaming, not just personal or specific criticism (that, I'd understand).

Let alone that "competitive" gaming is not the same as just "being better than you" or "pretty damn good" at a game: IMO competitive means that you play for prizes in a controlled, refereed environment (usually an official Cyber Athletics tournament). As such, only a small percentage of gamers can genuinely class themselves as such. Why? Because they can produce medals, cups, cash prizes or the very least, attendance certificates to such events.

This rules out internet gaming, no matter how professional you think you are or how much your clan kicks ass: lack of any regulation, controlled network conditions etc. makes it no more "professional" or "competitive" than being the best football team....in your neighborhood. Get over it already. There are exceptions like online chess tournaments and other (mostly turn-based stuff of course) but no sane real professional gamer would risk his reputation on a random server of any real-time game. Only in the controlled LAN of an organized tournament.

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heh. that's the traditional "progaming" rant, but with the word "competitive" used instead. amateur sports can be competitive and so can amateur gaming.

also i bet you'll be utterly delighted to hear that the zddl 1on1 league had prize money last season, therefore zdaemon = competitive/progaming.

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Maes said:

There are exceptions like online chess tournaments and other (mostly turn-based stuff of course) but no sane real professional gamer would risk his reputation on a random server of any real-time game. Only in the controlled LAN of an organized tournament.


When I played for CAL on CS:S, I saw multiple people switching their names for exactly that reason. Also, these so-called "pro" amatuers (ROFL) threw a shitfit whenever you killed them in an "unpro" manner (AWP, Autoshotty, or Autosniper). Crybabies.

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There's a Team Fortress Classic server I enjoy visiting often named "Humans vs. Bots". It's actually a lot of fun, since the AI is turned way up and they have perfect aim and reflexes. The goal of the round turns into pushing the enemy line back to spawn. You can't beat them one-on-one so it's an exercise in teamwork.

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Even funnier is that "competitive" is very ambiguous in meaning: the opposite of "competitive" would be "cooperative", and sometimes it just is a qualifier of the type of game you're playing: e.g. the conceptual opposite of "Doom co-op" would be "Doom deathmatch", because of the diametrically opposite goals: helping your buddies survive vs blast your buddies' asses off.

Some games are "competitive" by nature e.g. in Chess you always have two opposing sides. You can't choose e.g. to make a white-black alliance. Same as football, basket, etc.: there are two opposing teams which compete against each other. There's no such thing as "co-op" football where two teams, dunno, help each other scoring goals...

Of course, you can play any sport at several different levels: casually (irregularly), amateur level (more often than casual level, bit better organized), advanced amateur, etc. without becoming actually professionally involved. A good example would be 5x5 football, which is gaining popularity. There are mini tournaments of people who play it a level clearly higher than casual, but are not paid professionals. At most they can compete vs similarly minded individuals for a symbolic price or the joy of winning.

In online gaming, pretty much anyone considering himself "better than average" or rather, taking things a bit too seriously tends to self-identify as "competitive", which IMO is a far cry from even an amateur 5x5 football match, which the very least is refereed (especially in organized tournaments). I'd rather call such players "hardcore players" or whatever, but not competitive.

TL;DR version: the term competitive gaming is a misnomer and a contradiction, and very few gamers are the genuine article. If you're the real deal, the more power to you and good luck in your life. If not, STFU and good luck in your life.

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As I said in talking about my dream game being more difficult in single player and coop than a competitive deathmatch, I kinda picture it like this:

The game starts where you have your simple controls, move and shoot. That's it. You get greeted by an armory with a few powerful weapons, like rocketlaunchers that shoot really fast, spazz shotguns, miniguns that spam bullets like crazy, flame throwers, etc. You get infinite ammo, no reloading or any of that crap. These weapons are deadly and sort of trick you into thinking this game should be a breeze.

NOT!

First level you are pitted against ginormous bosses with attacks that will kill you instantly or heavily damage you if you don't play to the absolute best of your ability. In the midst of fighting these bosses, you have to find endless hordes of real tiny monsters that are pretty deadly too but are far more easier to kill, they're just fast and flail around recklessly around the area. It would be complete panic everytime you play.

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40oz said:

It would be complete panic everytime you play.


Look no more. What you want is called Steet Fighter 2010 ;-)

Or try the Raiden and Tatsujin (Truxton) series of arcade Shoot Em Ups: they have weapons that look deadly and powerful, but in practice you are swarmed by shitloads of enemies, need only one hit to die, and most opponents are so tough that you won't be able to kill them before they spam the whole screem with big, fat bullets. The only way to kill things fast is by taking risks e.g. getting the spread weapon and moving really close, else stay away and let them do their bullet-showering coreography.

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Maes said:

You still haven't got over that, have you?

Pot, kettle, black.

Posting the link was easier going through all that again, since neither of us is going to say anything new.

Battlefield, Warlords, etc.

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Belial said:

Pot, kettle, black.


Hardly, since I know where I stand.
Do you know where you stand?

I know I'm not a professional cyberathlete (or even a traditional athlete, for that matter) nor did I claim to be one. I also am/were pretty good at certain games, but would not use the term "competivive": maybe "pretty good", "hard to beat", "a tough SOB" etc. but not "competitive", since it means nothing.

E.g. I was undefeated at my local arcade in "Tokyo Wars", so probably some people thought of me as "competitive" in that particular game (I was even accused of cheating/doing something funky), but in practice I was just "pretty darn good" or even "the best" among my local peers. Nothing more.

Most importantly, "competitive" is such a vacuous term which conveys no information about your actual level of expertise. Would playing "competitively" against players of equally low level still be considered competitive, or is there a threshold?

The problem is that whoever uses the term implies "greater than average" skill (?), but then he could just say "I play pretty darn good" or "I play at a very good level", "I'm hard to beat" or just "I take everything about this game very seriously" without causing all this confusion and wannabe-overlap with real professional cyberathletes.

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Rhetoric trying to change the meaning of a word you don't like using to describe something will not convince anyone.

The latter 2 paragraphs are just your perception of the words usage.

You're kicking a horse that's been dead since the SC thread.

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WildWeasel said:

And perhaps the most important part: AI opponents won't spew racist insults at you over VOIP because you decided to bring a specific weapon with you (like CS's Arctic Warfare and The Specialists' Raging Bull).

My friends were playing MAG for a while, and it was kind of hilarious when things started getting domestic over someone's mic. Either a wife/mother yelling at the player (and them yelling back), or kids pestering their dad as he plays. Seemed to happen about once a match. Also yeah, the racism, homophobia and bad sportsmanship.

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Belial said:

You're kicking a horse that's been dead since the SC thread.


And you're like a vulture that's still attracted to said horse's corpse.

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