Keep Playing With AI 175
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports
how a newly developed AI system 'learns' your playing behavior and can even play for you when its time to take out the garbage or do other non-essential things around the house. My only question is if it could even learn to bs for me on those laggy starcraft 3v3 games."
Taking out the trash... (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides which, who wants to give up their game for "someone" else to play. I mean it would be bad enough coming back from running an errand and finding that your sibling/gf/friend has died and put you back to the start let alone your friend. Or even that they've managed to get you past the point you've been banging your head against for ages so that now you feel cheated at not having achieved the goal yourself.
Nope, I think the "pause" button is not going to be replaced by an AI any time soon.
Oh no... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, though, there has to be a line drawn here. Sure, it'll be good for parents to get the kids off the machine for dinner, but won't it eventually lead to being an all-AI game? Isn't the point of big games, like MMORPGs to be that the people with no life and play 800 hours a week to have better characters than the casual gamer? With this system, you teach the AI to practice blacksmithing, let it run day and night for a few days, and come back with a master blacksmith. Just seems like you are taking out the challenge of the game...
For the record, I don't play MMORPGs.
Its a nice idea but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
So If i'm not very good at a game the ai wont be either? Even so this could be exploitable and used to be better at a game than a friend, we all remeber zbot from quake2.
He said many players of online games become frustrated because their lifestyle limited their interaction with a game world.
but in a stragagy game you can run when nature calls and be mostly ok
Typically they involve creating lots of slightly different solutions to a problem, testing to see which perform best and then taking and randomly mutating these to produce a new batch that are again tested, mutated and so on.
They should focus this advanced AI on the computer players of the game not into an autopilot mode.
What?!?! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oh no... (Score:3, Insightful)
And Bully for them, I say. The more potentially dehumanizing technology there is around, the more we are forced to consider what is quintessentially human. AI that plays your game for you might be a liberating experience, in that it puts you face to face with the conclusion that having no life and playing 800 hours a week is not worth anything after all.
To Game Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree the server should be watching the player. How better to take notes on how to improve the gaming experience? But don't use it to play the game FOR the player when the player's bored with the game. FIX THE GAME.
If you've designed your game with lots of boring repetitious stuff which is well-suited for a machine, then you've gone the wrong direction.
If your idea of making certain events rare is a spawn-rate measured in hours or days, then you've gone the wrong direction.
If you think of your paying customers as gerbils who will do anything, especially hitting the spacebar or attack key every ten seconds, for eight hours at a stretch, then you've gone the wrong direction.
Instead, if you want to keep your player's interests, offer more entertainment that works within their available time. Make the player's time in the game more valuable. Make it possible to play a little over lunch, a little on Thursday evening, and still feel accomplishment.
For starters, employ adaptive spawning instead of location-based spawning. If the server notices a party of adventurers who haven't fought anything in a while, decide approximately how tough an encounter should be, then let it descend upon them. Vary the toughness, vary the approaches, vary the circumstances which trigger a spawn. Don't count server time to the next spawn, count character time to their next adventure opportunity. If the game isn't focused on hunting and leveling to the exclusion of all else (hah, yeah, like THAT will ever happen in THIS industry), then watch the players' behavior to decide what kinds of quests the player likes. Ration those out at a rate that keeps them interested, in character-time, not server-time. If the player plays twice a week, give them the stuff they like each time they log in. If the player really does enjoy slashing for hours on end, then give them a little surprise every now and then.
Massive multiplayer games should take advantage of the massive multiplayer-ness. Like, duh. The statistical analysis which could be done on player behavior in MMORPGs is staggering. The fact that game designers just don't bother doing it or using it, is mind boggling beyond the extreme. The fact that today's MMORPGs are essentially single-player games with thousands of human-powered NPCs just makes me wonder whether anyone really gets it.
Re:Does EVERYTHING have to be automated?! (Score:1, Insightful)
the end result is cars that YOU CANNOT EVER STEER OR CONTROL YOURSELF! and that would be a wonderful thing.
until the collective IQ of the planet rises above 80.... we desperately need everything automated.
Re:Did the macros write themselves? (Score:3, Insightful)