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.
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.