Complete lack of any AI for the monsters

[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 :)