Navigator - Roaring Wave Attack

[Yup]

Also making all moves completely random would be terrible and make defenses and grinding completely horrible.

Or would it breathe new life into what I see as a fairly stale feature

[slauki]

It has been requested a few times (starting with the introduction of PvP that players could set priorities or at least could block certain moves to be used at all. SSD and Green Harpy are very good examples.). That would make the so called AI more obsolete and give the player more control. It would also help in case of the Navigator or any team setup.

was always a fan of the deny ability feature...they said this might get defense to predictable, but i think it would just make em better. like good old assassin golden son. he had the potential to be the best farmer out there, unfortunatly he uses his endure all at the beginning at the battle too often, so he is basicly bad...wasting so much potential with specific chars...

[JJJ428]

That’s why I think stopping certain characters from using situational power moves would only benefit the game. There would be a lot better characters to use for grinding plus I think it would make the arena even more diverse because certain characters would be considered more and not discounted because of them possibly using an ill timed power move.

[Sparton_LOTB]

Sparton why is there the objective for AI to use every move possible. I think this takes the effectiveness away from a lot of characters. As Slauki pointed out in another thread warrior NBOL and sentinel harpy using their power moves when generally they suck. Also I feel bad for people who use Pharaoh Eddie in pvp because you have lost countless battle because he used enrage instead of revive. I think the AI should just stick with its best moves possible without trying to get to complicated with the coding. Trying to attack unless low on life then use a healing ability. Maybe I am simplifying the matter too much?

Our AI isn't that smart. That hasn't changed since the game launched. We have plans to improve that, for sure, but other than small scale changes based on the way the AI system currently works, we won't see radical changes in that department in the short term.

However, there's three important factors to keep in mind:

• Sometimes players think certain moves are useless and should never be used, but over time that perception can change, for better or for worse (Sentinel Soulless Demon's Brace is an example of this; not nearly as relevant now, but people initially thought it was worthless, pretty much since the global launch of the game. However, early in the Arena's history, that single character keeping themselves alive with that skill and slowly wearing an enemy down became a huge roadblock for some players)
• The AI doesn't have all of the parameters/awareness it needs to make smart decisions in all cases. The example of reviving is one such matter (the AI doesn't have awareness about if allies are dead, it only has awareness of if one or more teammates are low HP. This is why a lot of revive skills have other effects (such as doing damage + revive, or reviving and providing a positive effect to all allies))
• Really smart opponents aren't fun opponents for most people, so the AI makes occasionally suboptimal choices. Those aren't supposed to be hilariously dumb choices, buuuut that's the way it rolls the dice sometimes, due to how it's currently implemented, and the above point about the AI not having the awareness needed to control how dumb those decisions can get compounds on that.

To bring that to the point about Roaring Wave, if we could tune the AI so that's only used on, say, a high-health character that has 3+ negative effects if there isn't 2+ other enemies with health low enough that Landfall will probably kill them, then yeah, we would adjust the AI to use it like that. But even then anyone could poke a hole into how that could lead to the AI making a "dumb" choice based on a whole bunch of other factors that we can't realistically bake in to AI when we have over a hundred characters and plan to have hundreds more.

Additionally, as we just can't get that specific, we made a judgement call based on the info we do have, anecdotally and based on data for what characters he's often pared with/arrayed against. Looking at what we knew, we figured that occasionally using the single target basic that could deal massive situational damage would mean you can't just have modestly high health and be safe against him, which adds an additional factor to consider when Navigator Eddie is a live threat on the enemy team. That judgement call ended up being worse than we expected, for sure, and we have counter anecdotes from players that even within the intended scenarios of Navigator Eddie being a PVP opponent that he's more likely to drop the ball than not, but that's the assumptions we were operating under when we were considering the change.

[Yup]

From me.. there's no "fault" in the initial decision. I'd just like it reviewed after players have weighted in, That's all.

I "get" the semi-dumb AI. Which is really only ever a problem for any player in terms of their defense. Otherwise, players seem happy with how the AI generally operates (sans bugs).

Of course, this is all solved by releasing a PvE only Eddie, which is prohibited from PvP entirely, and to only be used for farming levels

[Mariner-1212]

Sparton, I saw that Unity recently gained integration with IBM's Watson... in case you're thinking the AI should be an unstoppable force.

[Sidney]

@Sparton

If you admit that your AI isn't that intelligent, than why not give the players the ability to use the moves they prefer for a certain character? Furthermore, give them the ability to choose the order in which their characters attack. This would give you the freedom to tweak skill choices all you want, but still give the players what they want. It may not work perfectly in all instances, but for the speed of farming this would solve a long time problem. Just a thought...

I know you guys do a lot of work to keep the game alive, but tying the hands behind the back of a great farming toon is not a good way to keep long time or even short time players interested.

I'm not trying to be a troublemaker, but I'd just like to see some attention given to the long daily grind we are all faced with.

[hold]

[*]Really smart opponents aren't fun opponents for most people, so the AI makes occasionally suboptimal choices.

That has to be one of the worst excuses for: we can't do any better.

Plus what are you trying to say with: Really smart opponents aren't fun opponents for most people? That your bug infested client is mainly played by people with an IQ close to dry bread? (that would at least explain why people are still throwing money after NF but preying on the gambling addicted without delivering quality is equally evil)

[Sparton_LOTB]

Sparton, I saw that Unity recently gained integration with IBM's Watson... in case you're thinking the AI should be an unstoppable force.

Perhaps when we add an Insanity difficulty for Cosmos worlds...

If you admit that your AI isn't that intelligent, than why not give the players the ability to use the moves they prefer for a certain character? Furthermore, give them the ability to choose the order in which their characters attack. This would give you the freedom to tweak skill choices all you want, but still give the players what they want. It may not work perfectly in all instances, but for the speed of farming this would solve a long time problem. Just a thought...

Something like that could definitely solve problems like the current one Navigator Eddie has. However:

• That's a pretty big feature to create, make the UI for, bug test, etc. I've mentioned a long while back when this subject was last brought up that we may eventually go down that road, but right now we'd want to focus on other Quality of Life features (like Auto-Replay to help with Troopers) or gameplay features (like Gauntlet).
• This can grant a massive advantage to certain players who understand how to utilize the feature, if we're able to make it flexible to the point where a lot of people seem to be asking. This isn't inherently bad, but it may put newer players at such an extreme disadvantage that it may put them off things like PVP, auto-grinding in harder game modes, etc. We would like to shore up other known issues with those features (such as matchmaking problems some newer players have in the Arena) before trying to figure out how to best surface and explain things like tuning character AI as a general feature for players.

[OdoyleRules]

It could be worse. Remember when it used to change Eddies automatically. Now that was a pain.