Complete lack of any AI for the monsters

[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.