Complete lack of any AI for the monsters

[Warlock]

There are encounters in the game where players need to defeat intelligent opponents - PvP, whether in battlegrounds or in the open. If monster combat AI was better, PvE play would be closer to PvP play and class role/balance would differ less between PvE and PvP. This would require major modifications to the game, such as rebalancing every encounter because the most critical, vulnerable or dangerous party members are attacked first rather than a damage sponge. Maybe in the next generation of MMO.

An even bigger immersion breaking thing for me is the aggro radius. Mobs you can see will happily stand there and watch you kill their friends a few at a time. A particularly good example is the final room of BRD - the Emperor knows you're there (he's talking to you!) but just sits there until you've killed all his allies and are ready to take him on.

[kandrathe]

I'd say that's the problem right there. If you balance things so tight that you need everyone doing X (X being exaclty the job they were designed to do and nothing else), I wouldn't call that fun. Mashing the same buttons and having all work go to hell because one slip-up is rather underwhelming. And not very clever, I'd rather have more than one way of winning (and losing).

If mobs do indeed less damage so that a tank slipup didn't mean an entire cloth wipe (or vice versa), the options for harassing the squishies would increase. And probably the options of how to deal with them.
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In this game every class has a pre-decided role. The abilities, skills, and talents are structured to customize that role, but the role remains. Priests mostly heal, warriors mostly tank, rogues mostly melee, mages and warlocks mostly do AOE or ranged magical damage, hunters are ranged physical damage, etc. It's not a matter of balanced tight, its a matter of learning to combine these roles in teams where there is no one man show. There are ways to be challenged and be clever without making every battle a random free for all.

[oldmandennis]

This thread seems like its running out of steam, this will probably be my last post.

Walk, you just might not have the patience for MMO's in general. They are not for everyone.

All those encounters I described have multilple ways to defeat them and multiple roles people can play in them. I'm not going to waste my time going into great depth about them when you have clearly already written off the game.

I've been on 3 Onyxia raids, maybe 10 attempts total. I've got my hat, but I'll continue to go, both to help gear up my team and because I find it fun.

and /agree with the aggro radious thing, but hey, thats most games

[Walkiry]

In this game every class has a pre-decided role.  The abilities, skills,  and talents are structured to customize that role, but the role remains.  Priests mostly heal, warriors mostly tank, rogues mostly melee, mages and warlocks mostly do AOE or ranged magical damage, hunters are ranged physical damage, etc.  It's not a matter of balanced tight, its a matter of learning to combine these roles in teams where there is no one man show.  There are ways to be challenged and be clever without making every battle a random free for all.
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Having roles and having the whole thing come crashing down the second any of those roles fails don't necessarily go hand in hand. So yes, I'd say that's a problem of tightness, or how long you can continue to do your job without the rest doing theirs. The longer it is, the more wiggle room you have.

Walk, you just might not have the patience for MMO's in general. They are not for everyone.

I've been playing City of Heroes since launch. The reason I wrote off WoW was because I don't think I'd have the patience to reach 60 and do the alleged "fun" things when the rest of the game aggravated me for a number of different reasons, but that's a different discussion, and one probably noone is actually interested in. End-game raiding had little to do with this decision.

[Jarulf]

There are encounters in the game where players need to defeat intelligent opponents - PvP, whether in battlegrounds or in the open. If monster combat AI was better, PvE play would be closer to PvP play and class role/balance would differ less between PvE and PvP. This would require major modifications to the game, such as rebalancing every encounter because the most critical, vulnerable or dangerous party members are attacked first rather than a damage sponge. Maybe in the next generation of MMO.

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Of course it would require changes and rebalance to the game!!!! So what? :)

My initial complain was just that, why are MMO's taking a step backwards when it comes to monster AI? One can complain of added complexability in other areas make it harder, but to me, that is just a bad excuse, it would be possible to add better monster AI with current state of AI, computer specs and so on. I feel it is just a lazy way out of "it works for others and it is "good enough", so why waste resources to improve it. Of course, all valid arguments, but so is the complaining of the lack of better AI I would say.

[Jarulf]

In this game every class has a pre-decided role.  The abilities, skills,  and talents are structured to customize that role, but the role remains.  Priests mostly heal, warriors mostly tank, rogues mostly melee, mages and warlocks mostly do AOE or ranged magical damage, hunters are ranged physical damage, etc.  It's not a matter of balanced tight, its a matter of learning to combine these roles in teams where there is no one man show.  There are ways to be challenged and be clever without making every battle a random free for all.
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I don't think anyone is arguing that every battle should be a "free for all" or totally random. WHat I wants at least, and the reason for my initial post, is a veriety in monsters and their behaviour. I don't want every single monster to behave in a specific way, I do want some "smartness" to them though, but it can vary. The outcome to the "smartness" can vary in that some might decide to go for healers if the healers are in fact impacting the battle, while others might ignore healers pretty much, even if they do tons of healing, if they feel they can do something else in battle that oculd work and so on.

Of course it is impossible if we make every monster go for healers, especially without altering anything else. What I wouldlike to see is that some, at times do it. For minimal changes to characters and such, one have to make sure those don't do as much damage perhaps. Alternatively, make sure they come in groups with a damage dealer so that a goup of warrios also get a challenge. After all, people tend to put together groups of vaiours characters, why should not monsters? And so on.

People tossing up exmaples of how it would be impossible to have such changes, and mention Onyxia and any such things, sure, whatever. We are not talking about the few end of the game incredible hard encounters. Those monsters was designed to specifically NOT be smart. Of course someone with tons of better HP, more damage, more skills and so on will outwin players if they can be played as smart as a player. A more intelligent behaviour of monsters means you have to tone down other aspects. The very reason Onyzia has tons of HP, do tons of damage in each attack, is BECAUSE she needs it to counter the fact that she behavious very "stupid" otherwise there would be no challenge. I ask for a challenege and veriety not in increased stats of monsters, but changes in their behaviour. One does not exclude the others, one can have both. One can have hard encounters the "onyxia way", or one can have hard enocounters by having very smart monsters, yet with much less stats in form of damage, HP, armor and such.

[kandrathe]

I don't think anyone is arguing that every battle should be a "free for all" or totally random. WHat I wants at least, and the reason for my initial post, is a veriety in monsters and their behaviour. I don't want every single monster to behave in a specific way, I do want some "smartness" to them though, but it can vary.

Even at low levels I see alot of different class behaviors;

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• Many humanoid MOBs flee when their health gets low
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• Spell casting and ranged MOBs use their abilities and then melee when they are oom
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• Healing MOBs heal themselves and their friends around them
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• CC'ing MOBs (Stunning, Netting, Sheeping, Silence, MC) immobilize then move to a new target
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• Stealthed mobs stay stealthed and try to work in an ambush
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• Many spells cast by toons generate more threat
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  [st]
  
  

  The outcome to the "smartness" can vary in that some might decide to go for healers if the healers are in fact impacting the battle, while others might ignore healers pretty much, even if they do tons of healing, if they feel they can do something else in battle that oculd work and so on.

  
  I just don't think that the hated list is a bad way to handle preferential targeting. Perhaps some tuning to make healing generate more threat for some mob types is all you are really requiring. I just don't think its realistic either for the MOB to ignore the warrior beating on it to rush off to attack the healer who has very little yet.

[ZugzwangZeitgeist]

Is the AI really so bad though? I mean, if an encounter is going well then the monsters are usually behaving in a "stupid" way, beating on the tank. But lets look at what the aggro list basically means from the monster's point of view:

* If I see an enemy, I will attack it.
* Once in combat, my target will be either the enemy which is doing the most damage to me, or, if there is a healer keeping everyone alive to a great degree, I will attack them.

Now how does a player prioritize targets in a PvP skirmish? They target the "glass cannons" which do the most damage (rogues, mages, and warlocks), and if they see that a healer is doing a good job of keeping people alive, they'll attack them.

For all this talk of a stupid AI that acts very little like a player, those are both awfully similiar. The difference is embodied in the essence of one class: The Warrior. The Warrior is able to over-represent it's threat to monsters. Through the use of threat-generating attacks which are generally the domain of the warrior class (everybody else who has them generally has threat generation attached as a penalty), a warrior is able to keep himself ahead on the list and "fool" the enemy into beating up on him.

So, then it becomes a question of should the warrior be able to do this? I personally feel that it is a very sensible solution to the question of how "tanks" are supposed to defend other players from monsters. In an instance, a warrior is constantly working to force the enemy monsters to make him their target, rather then what their instincts would dictate. To remove this ability from warriors is to rob them of the ability to defend other players, since suddenly they can be ignored as if they weren't there.

Despite this, perfect tanking is anywhere from hard to impossible in the final, most difficult instances. I don't really think your criticisms are very valid, honestly.

You express the desire for unusual group compositions to be able to do instance content - they can. There are some instances which require certain components (Scholomance, for example, is significantly more difficult without a priest), but the instances below level 50 are very forgiving in group make-up.

Also, has others have pointed out, there ARE many unusual monsters within instances with a wide variety of abilities. The Scarlet Crusader foot troops in Stratholme for example, will change targets and shield charge casters before returning to their primary targets. Many, many monsters have a specifically anti-warrior de-aggro ability, the most common being a knockback which sends their primary target flying away and knocks him down the aggro list. I've heard in Blackwing Lair that every boss monster is immune to taunt and most have some sort of de-aggro ability. I've even seen a monster in Molten Core that seems to totally disregard it's aggro list and attack targets at random.

Speaking as a warrior, high level tanking requires a good amount of skill, and is a lot more complex then "find target, sunder, sunder, sunder". It's only your quick reaction time (or someone else's) that will save you from a wipe when you find yourself knocked back and stunned for 3 seconds while a monster that can kill your priest in 4 runs straight towards your rear ranks.*

I certainly would be interested in an MMORPG that tries to do something different, but I think World of Warcraft's combat model is fun, simple, and effective.

[savaughn]

I don't think anyone is arguing that every battle should be a "free for all" or totally random. WHat I wants at least, and the reason for my initial post, is a veriety in monsters and their behaviour. I don't want every single monster to behave in a specific way, I do want some "smartness" to them though, but it can vary. The outcome to the "smartness" can vary in that some might decide to go for healers if the healers are in fact impacting the battle, while others might ignore healers pretty much, even if they do tons of healing, if they feel they can do something else in battle that oculd work and so on.
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So, just a couple of thoughts here.

Monsters outside of instances or the occassional "elite" areas are intended to be fairly trivial battles. These places are designed for the casual consumer who does not wish to have complex fights. Even these models do use a good variety of heuristics in determining how the fight goes. Just because you understand the targetting system doesn't make it "stupid".

The monsters inside of instances have MUCH more complex heuristics and AI than those outside. It is possible that this is because the instances are run on a battery of servers that have more CPU cycles available to them than the global map.

AI just choosing the attack that most damages a foe and targetting a calculated "weakest opponent" is not "smartness". That's just a different targetting system that is no more complicated than what is already in place. What's more, such a system tends to make bad games. There are a number of games that have implemented such a system and failed. This kind of a targetting system tends to create very boring encounters where one method of attack proves to be the best and you just load up on that and brute force the encounter. BORING. It also creates a system that trivializes classes and you either end up with identical classes or one class that is clearly the best and dominates to exclusion.

There are some things that would improve AI. A good example would be the soldier AI in Half-Life, which created a memorable encounter because the bad guys knew enough to move, hide, snipe, jump out, etc. These kinds of AI improvements would be nice to see, especially in an instance where the instance servers can provide the additional CPU cycles needed. We have seen more and more interesting AI work out of Blizz as the newer instances have come out. I doubt you'll ever see it in the normal monsters, but I fully expect to see this kind of more sophisticated AI as things move forward. That said, I would much prefer a more tactically challenging encounter to a more varied one and I think that the developers have been delivering on that score.

[Walkiry]

For all this talk of a stupid AI that acts very little like a player, those are both awfully similiar.
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The players act nothing like the AI. "Hunt the squishie" is far more predominant in PvP than PvE. Players are much better at finding out who the most competent player in an enemy group is. Players don't break 2v1 engagements because a second foe just glances in the general direction of the "add", unlike AI enemies (try it yourself, when you see a 2v1 in PvP throw a weak heal, or a crappy ranged attack at the foe that is not being beaten on by your ally and see how likely it is he'll come after you when a 2v1 has a much greater chance of success, then try it in PvE and you'll see how you can pull adds off an ally by just looking at them if your ally hasn't been "building aggro"). Players can't be "pulled" by shooting at them and then running into a group of allies waiting to beat the snot out of them. Players seek these numerical advantages constantly and logically. Players realize they're in a losing fight and try to retreat waaaaay earlier than the AI. Players know how to use mobility to their advantage. Players lure enemies into traps, not just stand there pressing "attack". Players can interfere with "glass cannons" and healers without having to all switch targets and decide to stop a fight and start a different one (using crowd control skills on those pesky enemies while killing someone else) and can do this even before these enemies have used any ability that makes them climb an imaginary "hit list".

And if you want to see an even different player behaviour, battlegrounds have them thanks to the simple fact that there are rules to win encounters different than just merely beating each other until the resurrection timer is longer than the time you stay alive.

[ZugzwangZeitgeist]

The players act nothing like the AI.

This is incorrect. Given the absence of a warrior and heavy aggro manipulation, monsters determine targets in much the same fashion as players.

"Hunt the squishie" is far more predominant in PvP than PvE. Players are much better at finding out who the most competent player in an enemy group is.

Of course players are better at such things. However, that doesn't invalidate the fact that the core monster AI used follows the same basic philosophy of attacking the greatest threat that most players will.

Players don't break 2v1 engagements because a second foe just glances in the general direction of the "add", unlike AI enemies (try it yourself, when you see a 2v1 in PvP throw a weak heal, or a crappy ranged attack at the foe that is not being beaten on by your ally and see how likely it is he'll come after you when a 2v1 has a much greater chance of success, then try it in PvE and you'll see how you can pull adds off an ally by just looking at them if your ally hasn't been "building aggro").

Monsters do not coordinate attacks, no. Their behavior is selfish rather then group oriented.

Players can't be "pulled" by shooting at them and then running into a group of allies waiting to beat the snot out of them.

Yes they can. I've even seen monsters do it to particularly dim players :)

Players seek these numerical advantages constantly and logically. Players realize they're in a losing fight and try to retreat waaaaay earlier than the AI. Players know how to use mobility to their advantage. Players lure enemies into traps, not just stand there pressing "attack".

Some do.

Players can interfere with "glass cannons" and healers without having to all switch targets and decide to stop a fight and start a different one (using crowd control skills on those pesky enemies while killing someone else) and can do this even before these enemies have used any ability that makes them climb an imaginary "hit list".

Actually, so can most monsters with abilities of that nature.

And if you want to see an even different player behaviour, battlegrounds have them thanks to the simple fact that there are rules to win encounters different than just merely beating each other until the resurrection timer is longer than the time you stay alive.
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You appear to have reduced your argument from "There is a complete lack of AI for the monsters" to "Players are smarter then monsters." I do not disagree - players, at least some of them, behave more intelligently then monsters. My contention is simply that the AI used by the monsters, particularly high level monsters with wide arrays of abilities, is quite strong for the genre, a statement which none of this refutes.

From my perspective, monsters NEED to be dumber then players. Monsters with exploitable weaknesses gives players something to actually do. If monsters had no ability to be "managed" by players, and simply used the best tactics for any given situation, then the only way players could overcome a situation would be brute force and never having an exploitable weakness. Taking this even further, dungeons would be unassailable - afterall, all the first orc in Lower Blackrock Spire would have to do is sound the alarm to his neighbours and you would have to fight a hundred or more orcs.

The atmosphere and feel of the game relies on monsters who are, at their core, passive and dumb. It is the players who are the instigators, sneaking through the dungeon and slowly killing it's inhabitants.

While a game which featured highly aware monsters would certainly be interesting, it would also require a total re-thinking of the genre. Dungeon crawling would be closer to Splinter Cell, with players desperately avoiding combat. It would be like if the game were filled with nothing but variations on the rogue class. Or even worse, combat in the game would be nothing but number crunching and optimizing, with the side with the biggest numbers winning. It could be a fun game, for sure, but it would not be a Heroic Fantasy MMORPG.

World of Warcraft, in general, does a good job at compelling and fun Heroic Fantasy style combat, particularly for an MMORPG. I don't think it's really fair or reasonable to fault it for failing to be what it was always advertised as. Since I read this thread I've been trying to think of an RPG with a significantly more sophisticated AI then the model presented in WoW - I've come up with a lot that are even dumber (from Rogue to Fallout to Baldur's Gate), but can think of none that were much more sophisticated.

It's also worth mentioning that there is a difference between adequate Artificial Intelligence for monsters and having the monsters behave in the smartest way possible.

[Swiss Mercenary]

Wasn't the AI in BG2 pretty decent, but marred by the poor spell choices for enemy mages?

[Walkiry]

This is incorrect. Given the absence of a warrior and heavy aggro manipulation, monsters determine targets in much the same fashion as players.

Aggro manipulation for mobs is tacked to pretty much everything the players do in PvE, figure out the rules and you will be able to do as you please with the enemies.

Of course players are better at such things. However, that doesn't invalidate the fact that the core monster AI used follows the same basic philosophy of attacking the greatest threat that most players will.

Duh. You can say that the AI of every game behaves the exact same as the players if you reduce it to "both want to beat up the opposition". The fact that the objective in both cases is to beat up the greatest threat doesn't mean the players and the computer reach that conclusion in the same way. Players, as human beings, are smart and adaptable, the AI is not. That's an important distinction if you're determining if the AI is smart (the I in AI), not if they just want to accomplish the same things.

Yes they can. I've even seen monsters do it to particularly dim players :)

So, would you say the player behaviour in that case was intelligent?

Actually, so can most monsters with abilities of that nature.

Yes, but once you have figured out the rules they follow you can manipulate that to your advantage. You can also figure out how a player opponent will try to interfere with you, but that won't necessarily apply to the next human player.

You appear to have reduced your argument from "There is a complete lack of AI for the monsters" to "Players are smarter then monsters." I do not disagree - players, at least some of them, behave more intelligently then monsters. My contention is simply that the AI used by the monsters, particularly high level monsters with wide arrays of abilities, is quite strong for the genre, a statement which none of this refutes.

The reason I have "reduced" the argument is that I was answering to a specific claim. You can't claim that the AI behaves the same as the players because their goal is the same, because that's simply not what is being discussed. It's how you attain that goal, and the AI is pathetically easy to manipulate and follows a rigid set of rules. That's not intelligence, that's a mathematical algorithm. It's as flexible as an arcanite bar.

I searched your previous post for the "strong in the genre" and all I saw to that effect what that your last phrase went something like "I'd like to try a different MMORPG with better AI", but that's it. If that was the main focus of your post, you should try to disgress a bit less...

Taking this even further, dungeons would be unassailable - afterall, all the first orc in Lower Blackrock Spire would have to do is sound the alarm to his neighbours and you would have to fight a hundred or more orcs.

No, you'd just have to make sure you kill the watchers (you know, just like in the movies, where you quietly kill the sentinel when he's at a point in his patrol where noone's watching him). There are plenty of alternatives when you design encounters than just having a line of monsters separated a few feet that you pull one by one and smack silly (or more than one if you programmed them to be "linked"), and then a final bigass boss.

Or even worse, combat in the game would be nothing but number crunching and optimizing, with the side with the biggest numbers winning.

As opposed to how it is now, where the side with the more time to farm epics having the biggest numbers and a significant advantage? I'll trade number-crunching optimizing for endless hours in front of the computer doing the same thing any time of the week.

And number-crunchers are always at an advantage, in every game that uses any kind of math to determine its outcome.

Wasn't the AI in BG2 pretty decent, but marred by the poor spell choices for enemy mages?

It was. Then you give a strong enemy a good selection of spells (Irenicus), and people moan and bitch and use engine exploits to go past him (running far away so that timestop didn't affect you and stuff like that). In a MMOG that'd have been patched for sure, but as it was an offline game, so BI didn't really care if people exploited their own single player game in that way. Same with the dragons, if you stood far enough and cast a striking cloud, you could nibble at the enemy's life slowly, and if you timed it right you could walk just in range with a bunch of magic users throwing magic missiles and kill him while he's casting a heal spell. Once the dragon was active, though, it was a very different story :)

[Brother Laz]

There is a certain 'ruleset' that is used in all MMORPGs as a matter of fact.

· Hit points? Resistances? Damage reduction from armor? It is not very realistic that an elf and a rock golem hit each other 20 times until the rock golem drops dead. In real medieval melee combat, people wore armor to deflect incoming hits, and if a hit wasn't deflected, it was usually crippling or fatal. But in a game environment, this would translate into Russian roulette, so someone in the '70s came up with a hit point system and everyone copied it due to lack of a better alternative.

· Damage ratings? Arthas' magically enchanted doom sword would be exactly as deadly as a normal one. Either would maim or kill a person in one hit.

Perhaps the enchanted sword would be more effective on things that are large enough to shrug off normal swords, such as dragons, or invulnerable to them to begin with, such as golems. But against most normal critters and people, it would make no difference.

· Healing? If you get bashed upside the head with a mace and don't die instantly, chances are your head and helm are a mess. Apparently, healing spells can repair armor, remove arrows and shrapnel and reattach limbs that have been cut off and fallen into a lava pool...?

· The whole magic item system. Aside from the fact that furbolgs typically don't carry robes and flayer shamans don't carry crossbows, the concept of magical items is flawed from a realism standpoint. Why does a tiny ring have the same enchantments as a set of full plate? What happens to an enchantment on a bow when you replace the bowstring? How can you even repair enchanted items without breaking them? Etc.

· Magic. Even in a low magic world like Sanctuary, it doesn't take a genius or twenty years of study to cast a two second spell. D&D attempts to explain this with the whole precasting thing, which results in perhaps the most stilted gameplay ever when translated to a computer game. The Force approach only works in high magic worlds, and does not explain the rigid classes such as druid, shaman, warlock, mage.

· Buffs and curses. What happens when you MotW something and it loses a limb? Does the limb still have MotW? Then I think I'll use one as a weapon, with bloodlust and MotW cast on it. If not, then a good way to get rid of a deadly curse is by cutting off a fingernail.

· The lone hero concept. If there is a demon hiding in an underground labyrinth and threatening to take over the world, why go in alone instead of with a few dozen ninja wizards by your side? Or why do you fight Onyxia with 40 people instead of 4000?

· Lesser monsters first. If Diablo was serious, he'd send all of his balrogs and oblivion knights at the hero who killed Andariel, not wait until he kills Duriel and Mephisto too.

......

Bad AI doesn't really make it any more unrealistic...

......

[Edit: there *IS* a 3D game with randomly generated levels under development right now. It is called Hellgate London, made by a team of ex-D2 programmers with about one tenth the manpower of Blizzard, and is basically a first/third person 3D version of D2 in the near future]

[Tharn]

Giving mobs some real AI would require complete rebalancing of the game, including classes and mobs. Elite mobs as they are would need to be completely removed. It might be more fun to fight a group of non-elite mobs with UT-bot-like AI PvP-style, though. They could do this in some later instance, but it won't match real PvP anyway.

I'll give out some examples why "Intelligent AI" would not work without complete rebalancing of the game:

1) Colission detection would be required to keep mobs off healers. In that case tanking skills are not required at all and it is about finding some choke points, so the mobs can't run around the tank

2) After entering any instance with somewhat organized beings, like Deadmines, SFK, SM, Strat/Scholo/BRS/DM one or two mobs will run away and call back everyone in the instance to kill you. It should actually work for any place in the game - such as Scarlet Crusade fields in Tirisfal Glades when leveling from lvl 1 to 10 and many others.

3) All bosses with AoE would just run into thickest pack of players, preferably with healers and spam AoE until they are dead

4) Drak would Conflag and attack healers right first and his guards would focus fire on them. He would definitely not allow to be hunter-kited to the Beast room

5) Intelligent Onyxia fight would look like this: She goes airborne right in the begining and does Deep Breath (which usually wipes about 20 people) 2-3x times in a row and then deal quickly with the rest

6) Intelligent Ragnaros would first kill all ranged healing and DPS with his 6K damage ranged attack (atm he does that only when not occupied in melee) and then deal with melee buggers, preferably by spamming his AoE

[ZugzwangZeitgeist]

Aggro manipulation for mobs is tacked to pretty much everything the players do in PvE, figure out the rules and you will be able to do as you please with the enemies.

This is true of nearly every single game involving computer controlled opponents ever invented, making it hardly a strong criticism.

Duh. You can say that the AI of every game behaves the exact same as the players if you reduce it to "both want to beat up the opposition".

I could, except thats not what I was doing. I laid out in my first post how the rules monsters follow result in prioritizing the same targets as players - you know, the main part of my post which you neither quoted nor responded to.

The fact that the objective in both cases is to beat up the greatest threat doesn't mean the players and the computer reach that conclusion in the same way.

"Duh." Who cares how the computer reaches it's conclusions, as long as the result is the desired behavior?

Players, as human beings, are smart and adaptable, the AI is not. That's an important distinction if you're determining if the AI is smart (the I in AI), not if they just want to accomplish the same things.

I really don't care if the AI is smart, I care if it is effective within the context of the game. True artificial intelligence does not exist. When game developers work on the AI of a game, the goal is not to recreate a fully intelligent being, the goal is to form the simplest possible set of rules which will mimic the desired behavior.

Yes, but once you have figured out the rules they follow you can manipulate that to your advantage. You can also figure out how a player opponent will try to interfere with you, but that won't necessarily apply to the next human player.

You are once again arguing that the player is smarter then computer controlled monsters.

The reason I have "reduced" the argument is that I was answering to a specific claim. You can't claim that the AI behaves the same as the players because their goal is the same, because that's simply not what is being discussed. It's how you attain that goal, and the AI is pathetically easy to manipulate and follows a rigid set of rules. That's not intelligence, that's a mathematical algorithm. It's as flexible as an arcanite bar.

Of course it's not intelligence - name one RPG where monsters act consistently in a way you would call "intelligent". If this is your standard it is an absurd one, because such things do not exist.

My specific claim was that the AI produces behavior that is similiar to a player, not the "same". I made that claim, and supported it, in order to refute the original poster's claim that the AI in WoW was nearly non-existant. I also was illustrating how manipulation of the AI is a specific role and challenge within the game, represented by the warrior class.

I searched your previous post for the "strong in the genre" and all I saw to that effect what that your last phrase went something like "I'd like to try a different MMORPG with better AI", but that's it. If that was the main focus of your post, you should try to disgress a bit less...

You have to be kidding me. So all this time, you weren't talking about artificial intelligence in roleplaying games, but artificial intelligence in general? That this is all a flight of fancy that has very little to do with practical game design? Pardon me for assuming you were arguing about standards of AI in gaming, when you were really arguing completely without context.

No, you'd just have to make sure you kill the watchers (you know, just like in the movies, where you quietly kill the sentinel when he's at a point in his patrol where noone's watching him). There are plenty of alternatives when you design encounters than just having a line of monsters separated a few feet that you pull one by one and smack silly (or more than one if you programmed them to be "linked"), and then a final bigass boss.

Well, I find that sort of amusing, since killing patrols IS part of the game, and is a pretty tedious process. Despite that, what you are suggesting is a game of stealth and avoidance - it is not what World of Warcraft was ever designed to be or advertized as.

As opposed to how it is now, where the side with the more time to farm epics having the biggest numbers and a significant advantage? I'll trade number-crunching optimizing for endless hours in front of the computer doing the same thing any time of the week.

You're missing the point - if the enemy's were of equal tactical ability compared to players, the only possible way to beat them would be to simply be stronger. To have bigger guns, as it were.

As is stands, currently in World of Warcraft, elite monsters are extremely powerful. They often are capable of killing a player in one on one combat, and usually close to equal the players in number. When they don't, they're usually even more powerful, as is the case with boss monsters. This means that players need to use strategy to win. If you remove the ability for players to leverage an advantage of intelligence and tactics against the monsters, you reduce the game to a matter of beating the enemy up faster then you can beat them up, hoping that their health bars fall faster then your health bars. By removing, for example, the ability of the warrior to control monster aggro you remove the strategy of keeping aggro on the tank. Allowing a priest to heal is critical for their role in a group.

You're making smarter monsters and creating a dumber game.

Baldur's Gate is a great example of stunningly terrible AI - the AI of World of Warcraft is far, far more developed then Baldur's Gate. In BG, monsters simply acquired the nearest target - it didn't even matter what it was, they had no way to prioritize targets. Monsters didn't become active unless they appeared on screen, which meant that you could activate one monster at a time in a large group simply by moving slowly. The AI had no idea what to do if it couldn't simply run up and attack you, and this could be manipulated a huge number of ways. If presented with a target it couldn't hurt, it would just keep trying to kill it in vain. Once could stand around and lay a thousand traps beneath an unsuspecting enemy, which would immediately destroy it as soon as it became hostile. Monsters with timed buff spells could just be waited out, and those buffs that had previously rendered the monster invincible would just run out if you left the room or turned invisible.

Monster behavior in Baldur's Gate makes World of Warcraft monsters look like supergeniuses.

I'd still love to hear of an RPG with much stronger general monster AI then WoW. Not simply as a challenge, but because I'm genuinely curious. It seems to me that WoW implements nearly every comparatively advanced element of monster AI that shows up in RPG's, from monsters which call for help and run to get help, to complex boss monsters with large numbers of spells that are hard to control, which is why I find this accusation that WoW monster AI is terrible kind of silly.

[Walkiry]

Apparently the post doesn't show up if you "quote" too much stuff, so changing to B instead.


This is true of nearly every single game involving computer controlled opponents ever invented, making it hardly a strong criticism.

Yes, and makes your statement "monsters determine targets in much the same fashion as players." false.

I could, except thats not what I was doing. I laid out in my first post how the rules monsters follow result in prioritizing the same targets as players - you know, the main part of my post which you neither quoted nor responded to.

No, that's exactly what you did. I explained that players don't priorize the targets in the same way, and thus players don't necessarily take the same targets the computer does. You know, what I talked about the whole time in my post and apparently you don't like.

"Duh." Who cares how the computer reaches it's conclusions, as long as the result is the desired behavior?

The "desired behaviour" is the whole point of disagreement. The computer reaches the desired behaviour if your desire is to get an aggro list and attack according to its priority. If the desired behaviour is for the computer to behave in a more flexible way, the ruleset fails miserably. You care about how you reach your conclussions because that's exactly what makes an AI, taking feedback from player actions, the more the better. If you rely on a very limited input set, the outcome will be limited by it. So yes, for AI it's very important how you reach your conclussions. Duh.

I really don't care if the AI is smart, I care if it is effective within the context of the game. True artificial intelligence does not exist. When game developers work on the AI of a game, the goal is not to recreate a fully intelligent being, the goal is to form the simplest possible set of rules which will mimic the desired behavior.

And it's the desired behaviour what we're arguing against. The behaviour the devs wanted for the mobs, quite simply, sucks. Because it's really repetitive, and not very creative or varied.

You are once again arguing that the player is smarter then computer controlled monsters.

No, I'm arguing that players are more varied than the AI. "You can also figure out how a player opponent will try to interfere with you, but that won't necessarily apply to the next human player." Those were my exact words.

Of course it's not intelligence - name one RPG where monsters act consistently in a way you would call "intelligent". If this is your standard it is an absurd one, because such things do not exist.

It exists, there've been quite a few games that "learn" from player behaviour and adjust the AI to the appropiate level. That's hardly new for the world of games, and even the simplest of these would put these MMORPGs to shame. This is hardly rocket science.

My specific claim was that the AI produces behavior that is similiar to a player, not the "same".

And my specific claim is that that's bollocks. Players decide not only when something is dangerouls, also when something could be dangerous, and can realize a tactic won't work even before it's put to practice. There're no aggro lists, and they choose targets even before combat starts.

You have to be kidding me. So all this time, you weren't talking about artificial intelligence in roleplaying games, but artificial intelligence in general? That this is all a flight of fancy that has very little to do with practical game design? Pardon me for assuming you were arguing about standards of AI in gaming, when you were really arguing completely without context.

No, you have to be kidding me. Where the hell did that come from? What I said is that I didn't see you doing the comparison "WoW is good compared to other MMORPGs" in your first post, we were talking of WoW in the context of WoW, and if the AI was mimicking the players in the context of WoW. There was never a "compared to other MMORPGs" thrown in. And if you want to throw that in, I'll throw that there're plenty of games out there with AI capable of a semblance of adaptability, and that's not "theoretical". Pardon me for actually using the context we were actually in.

Well, I find that sort of amusing, since killing patrols IS part of the game, and is a pretty tedious process. Despite that, what you are suggesting is a game of stealth and avoidance - it is not what World of Warcraft was ever designed to be or advertized as.

*Looks at the Rogue class* Uh-huh. Right. Because every suggestion or criticism means changing the whole game to fit that suggestion every single time.

You're missing the point - if the enemy's were of equal tactical ability compared to players, the only possible way to beat them would be to simply be stronger. To have bigger guns, as it were.
(...)
By removing, for example, the ability of the warrior to control monster aggro you remove the strategy of keeping aggro on the tank. Allowing a priest to heal is critical for their role in a group.


Of course, because in every game where the enemy has a decent tactical ability the only way to succeed is to have the bigger guns. Because as soon as the computer has a minimum of adaptability they'll always outthink humans.

In your example, there is no other possible way to stop an enemy, right? It's impossible to give players abilities that interfere with enemies or help friends that don't fall in the aggro/tank/heal/mage midset that plagues the fantasy genre.

You know what the best way to tank in City of Heroes was inside of office buildings? To place the tank in front of a door and physically stop the enemies going through. Something as incredibly simple as collision detection already gives you a new way to deal with threats. There are many other ways you can have a player protect your team, and the whole taunt/aggro thing is just the lazy, cheap way of doing it.

You're making smarter monsters and creating a dumber game.

The only way you can make this dumber is to go play whack-a-mole. If you insist on giving each player only a very limited set of abilities that make them fit to the tank/heal/nuke combo, then yes of course you can't make the enemies more complete. One day someone will realize that it's actually ok to let the healers survive a hit from a hard enemy, or the tank to go 5 seconds without healing. But with the trinity mechanics, because you need the enemy to be "tanked" by smacking a single player, when you design an encounter for 40 players around a single enemy, that single enemy is going to be stupidly balanced when hitting anything but the min-maxed tank, because only one tank can be getting the hits.

In BG, monsters simply acquired the nearest target - it didn't even matter what it was, they had no way to prioritize targets.

Bollocks. Go fight Irenicus at the end of BGII and watch him torn to pieces your mage when he casts his first spells. Then tell me it doesn't know what it's doing.

Monsters didn't become active unless they appeared on screen, which meant that you could activate one monster at a time in a large group simply by moving slowly. The AI had no idea what to do if it couldn't simply run up and attack you, and this could be manipulated a huge number of ways.
(...)
Monster behavior in Baldur's Gate makes World of Warcraft monsters look like supergeniuses.


No, that's what you think because a large number of mobs were not given ranged attacks. Which goes back to SM's point about limiting the AI because you gave them crap tools to work with. Take a look at the encounters that placed you with a decently-decked group and see how they work instead.

All you've commented is simply the problems we already pointed out, lack of abilities selection and range/activation of mobs (EDIT: And now that I remember, the pathfinding was limited by the capability of the computers at a time, so if you had a low number of nodes for it because your computer wasn't up to snuff, it's more likely you saw this behaviour more often than others, YMMV). If you look at what happens after that, once the combat actually starts, WoW enemies don't do nearly as well with the abilities they're given as the enemies in BG II. There are lots of encounters that don't start with you walking up to the mobs, so it's not exactly hard to find them.

I'd still love to hear of an RPG with much stronger general monster AI then WoW. Not simply as a challenge, but because I'm genuinely curious.


Since you're decided to bring other games in now, here's a hint: look past RPGs. They're not the only genre of games out there.

[Swiss Mercenary]

Since you're decided to bring other games in now, here's a hint: look past RPGs. They're not the only genre of games out there.
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Just a disclaimer - please don't talk about FPSes. All that AI consists of is various levels of auto-aim-for-the-player's head, and dodge-like-crazy. Things beyond that are just especially neat tricks designed to take advantage of specific weapons (Flak cannon bounce effect, shock core double-explosion in UT, "Aim-for-the-feet" rockets in Quake 3, the like.)

But that doesn't mean I can understand why people claim that the WoW AI is the next best thing since sliced bread. All it is, as someone kindly pointed out, is an aggro table, with healing causing 1 point of aggro, damage causing 4, shield bash causing 40... With no respect to clever strategical options. About the only thing more basic is "Attack the closest target", or "Attack a random target".

As for the examples of a "Smart Onyxia" - that highlights the problem with the AI. You are missing the point of "Smart AI, and less insta-hit-kills on squishies." If Deep Breath only did 800 damage, and had a smaller area of effect, but she tried to use it on the biggest clumps of players, and more often, and the like, it would make the encounter more... "Realistic"? (Hate the word, when used in this context) "Smarter"?

No, I'm not saying that it is at all a feasible change at this point of the game's life, but it just goes to show that the WoW AI is anything but smart.

[fractaled]

(Up front I'd like to say I'm not disagreeing with your basic premise that this would require a total rebalancing, not to mention other things)

1) Colission detection would be required to keep mobs off healers. In that case tanking skills are not required at all and it is about finding some choke points, so the mobs can't run around the tank

I think collision detection would add a great deal of tactics to a game. The choke points, while lending an advantage to the holder, probably wouldn't be ubiquitous, and probably wouldn't be necessary in most cases. In skirmishes between 5 players and 5 monsters, 4 non squishies could effect a wall around the healer. Also, if non-frontal or non-engaged attacks did significantly greater damage, it would not be feasible to run around 4 other guys to get at the 5th.

2) After entering any instance with somewhat organized beings, like Deadmines, SFK, SM, Strat/Scholo/BRS/DM one or two mobs will run away and call back everyone in the instance to kill you. It should actually work for any place in the game - such as Scarlet Crusade fields in Tirisfal Glades when leveling from lvl 1 to 10 and many others.

This would be quite the thorn for level designers. Snaring/silencing/taunting would be very important. Ambushing/trapping would also be more important.

3) All bosses with AoE would just run into thickest pack of players, preferably with healers and spam AoE until they are dead

I think there is something wrong with "running into the thickest pack of players". This doesn't happen in real battles (unless you're a suicide bomber) because it exposes you to attack from all sides, some of which are typically vulnerable.

4) Drak would Conflag and attack healers right first and his guards would focus fire on them. He would definitely not allow to be hunter-kited to the Beast room

5) Intelligent Onyxia fight would look like this: She goes airborne right in the begining and does Deep Breath (which usually wipes about 20 people) 2-3x times in a row and then deal quickly with the rest

6) Intelligent Ragnaros would first kill all ranged healing and DPS with his 6K damage ranged attack (atm he does that only when not occupied in melee) and then deal with melee buggers, preferably by spamming his AoE
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These last 3 would require the toning down of boss's abilities. Insane abilities like that are to cover up for weak AI. (Not that 40 people should necessarily be able to take down a dragon or a god anyway).

[Walkiry]

Just a disclaimer - please don't talk about FPSes. All that AI consists of is various levels of auto-aim-for-the-player's head,&nbsp; and dodge-like-crazy. Things beyond that are just especially neat tricks designed to take advantage of specific weapons (Flak cannon bounce effect, shock core double-explosion in UT, "Aim-for-the-feet" rockets in Quake 3, the like.)
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Well, FPS games have done quite a few things in AI, not just mad-aim, but I think strategy games have done a better job at "adjusting AI" than them. There are, of course, those that merely rely on cheese (watch the computer generate resources 100x faster than you!), but not necessarily. In either case, even the most basic of these could provide an adequate level of variation for a MMOG, and would a whole lot better than what there is now.

Even better, while in a regular game the computer has a limited amount of time and data to adjust the AI, in a MMOG you have plenty of time and a whole lot of data, so you don't have to make adjustments over the course of a single gaming session, these changes can be made slowly over a long period of time, which would be extremely cheap computation-time wise.