Another One Bites the Dust: SWG Edition!

[sam, an eggplant]

That kind of stuff wouldn't add a ton of gameplay but would immensely improve immersion. More realistic movement alone would be a huge change.

It's very easy to go too far with realistic AI. Recent example.

I recently tried to play the Battlestar Galactica mod for Freespace 2, called Diaspora. Supposed to be excellent, fantastic, superlatively amazing.

I don't know what went wrong, or if this is how it was supposed to work, but in the first training mission I was faced with a "training drone" that engaged in a permanent turning war with my spaceship. Now all space sims end up as turning wars, we all know that, but this guy was actually playing like a human, never giving me a chance to get a bead on him. And it was a training drone, not even a Cylon! I had just started playing, with a dusty Saitek Cyborg joystick I pulled out of the back of my closet, and I'll be damned if I could hit him. After 10 minutes of turning at maximum speed I got physically nauseous and immediately uninstalled the game.

[WayAbvPar]

I have enjoyed this immensely- these are the discussions that brought me to this backwater community back in the LtM days. Thanks to Raph for his well-written and interesting blogs. I loved the tidbit about the orc camps not spawning in UO because of the urban sprawl.  I would love to see UO designed now with access to all the modern hardware and software developments. The coolest stuff seemed to get cut.

God, now I want to go grind the graveyard in Moonglow 

[Ironwood]

If you are someone who should not be reading technology patents, you should stop now.

Was this a joke or something that actually happens ?  Why ? 

I'm really confused.

In the US, there's the notion of suing for triple damages based on "willful" patent infringement. It's pretty easy to claim, and any evidence that someone (e.g., a random engineer) read an allegedly infringing patent can be enough to make it stick in a patent lawsuit. Every tech company I've ever worked for had a standing policy of telling its employees to not read any patents, ever, unless their lawyers told you to do so.

If one is lucky enough to get deposed in a patent lawsuit, one may have to make a legally-binding statement as to every potentially-relevant patent one is aware of. Needless to say, it looks really bad if one claims to not have read or heard of a given patent but then subpoena'd search results show otherwise.

It's really perverted, as the primary motivation for the creation of the US patent system was to promote disclosure of inventions to advance the state of the art...but becoming aware of another's disclosures can end up costing huge sums of money, so people are encouraged to stay ignorant.

Holy Shit.  Thanks for the lesson.  That's...well, you know what I'll say by now.

[WayAbvPar]

America: Stay Ignorant.

[Ironwood]

On Topic, I'll pitch in my thanks to Raph for some really interesting articles.

[Gimfain]

It seems like the ideal that people want is AI that is functionally indistinguishable from a human opponent of relatively equal skill to them.  But even assuming that is possible, the standard single player experience has usually been 1 player vs. dozens or hundreds of enemies.  That only works when the AI isn't really challenging on an individual level.

Not really. I want AI that doesn't make really stupid decisions. Example, the AI in Rome:TW would at times run a siege at one area of a wall with 1000 troops against your 200. This created a bottleneck you could win by stacking the breach, or pinning them with arrows. A better AI would attack two or more points, and stretch your defense to the breaking point. Later AI's in TW do that. The earlier one was just dumb.

Another example AI acting like players and getting hated? Trials of the Crusader in WoW. The Faction Champions encounter. That fight is probably one of the more hated raid fights in WoW's history. Why? Because they made the AI act like PvP players, and essentially showed how ridiculous the Trinity really is when bosses stop being polite and start getting real. Tanks were essentially useless, everyone had to go into pvp mode, and raiders who sucked at positioning with pvp intent were furious. Yet, that AI was pretty well designed. It acted like a player would. It would go after your healers, it would ignore the tanks, CC became very key, so did stuns, etc. And people despised it because it didn't fit into the mold of raiding they were used to. Also because it showed how terrible they were as players.

I found the faction champions fight funny, but oh dear there were so many people that absolutely sucked at it. Lots of people lack spatial awareness, and they don't really do much while moving, and that fight exposed how bad some raiders are at playing. It was still a fairly predictable AI that could easily be circumvented if people actually had spatial awareness, and nowhere near as hard as it could have been. Then again, there are lots of raiders that still totally suck at avoiding fire.

[Sophismata]

It's your own arrogance about being a leet player that leads you to think you want this. Computers will always faithfully execute and out-think humans within a defined set of rules. It's what we've built them to do.

Then, when you find that one situation that wasn't planned for suddenly it's ezmode and you'll be back here complaining that it's too easy because you found that singular exploit.

So the AI gets patched, and you have to find that next exploit, and the cycle continues.  You eventually run into the chess AI problem. Nobody takes on expert mode because it beats Grandmasters regularly.  It's much more entertaining to just ignore the game entirely.

Your 'pushes us to be better' standard is flawed because it doesn't matter. Your gaming skills translate into nothing but being better at games. Great if you're competitively gaming, but that's such a small percentage of the market as to be pointless to develop for.

We can build games to teach other skills, sure, but those don't sell as well. People are looking for entertainment, and most want that to be passive entertainment. "I want to turn off my brain" stuff because humans are fucking lazy creatures. Sure the initial high of the challenge is great, but it gets boring and people move on.

The completion % for Dark Souls was 36% and while it's hard, its nowhere near the level of difficulty you're asking for. "Better AI" by your definition takes money out of dev & publisher's hands. It's not happening.

But we've had this argument before. You think it's pointless to not do things at 100% and be the best at it. You go, Ash Ketchum.

Absolutely got me on the last point. Don't remember the argument coming up before, I usually try to avoid arguing on forums these days.

As for the rest - all I'm saying is I want good AI. Better than me (for the reasons mentioned of self-improvement and challenge). I objected only to people saying "everyone wants" this, or that I only think I want something. I hate the idea of designed-to-be-challenging-but-still-beatable AI. I know I'm a huge outlier, and I could go on regarding my opinions on your other points (if you want) but I think we're in agreement about what games should have. They need to be entertaining for the majority of their player-base and that means not catering to me. I'm fine with that.

It's just that when people said "we all want this kind of AI", I was putting my hand up to say "not me!".


Edit: Ash Ketchum is a chump.

[Raph]

Onto game systems and social structure now: http://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/21/designing-a-living-society-in-swg-part-one/

Covers levelling, skills, power differentials, resources, crafting, and economy.

Hope to get to social stuff tomorrow, but this was foundational to talking about it.

[Khaldun]

This, in spades: that MMOs got addicted to preventing behaviors rather than enabling them. This is a big part of what I'm writing about now, about where the entire idea of virtual worlds when totally wrong.

[tmp]

The point of bringing up Faction Champions is that sometimes when you make the AI better, it really shows how flimsy the underlying mechanics of the game really are. We are used to the trinity because it always existed that way in raiding games from an MMO standpoint. What Faction Champions did was really expose how stupid that is by making a small change to the Boss Behavior. When you remove the taunt mechanics of tanking (which are totally ridiculous when you think about it) the entire thing falls apart.

This is a rather silly argument to me whenever it's brought up, because all it really boils down to is "look look, removing a key mechanics breaks the gameplay!" Like gosh, who knew? It's like removing double jump from Mario and then acting surprised you can no longer complete existing levels -- it doesn't matter any whether the double jump as mechanics is "ridiculous" or if the taunt breaks your immershiun, the key is the gameplay was built upon it, so if you suddenly yank it out then, duh.

One could as well disable the CC from the game and then go, too, "what, you can't kill anyone in PvP anymore out of sudden? hyuk hyuk maybe you're just bad". Because it'd do the same thing, break the crutch the whole mechanics is based upon, and expose that hey, if you remove stuff that was put there to have things function, they will no longer function.

[tmp]

Onto game systems and social structure now: http://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/21/designing-a-living-society-in-swg-part-one/

Covers levelling, skills, power differentials, resources, crafting, and economy.

I say that I am unsure that some on the team quite grasped this, because when the buff system went in it allowed buffs up to 400%, or something. I suspect this is likely because many of the team were just used to EQ-style advancement.

My vague recollection of that stuff from the SWG forums is, the buffs were cranked up on purpose because people held rather correct opinions that "10% is worthless" especially when it involves jumping through hoops and professions to obtain. If you want to have cooks in your game who actually take time to buy ingredients and spend time to make stuff, then this stuff has to give a benefit that looks valuable enough someone will want to spend their game money on it and then inventory slot(s) to carry it around and their time to keep it applied. And 10% comes nowhere near justifying any of this hassle.

You have Pillars of Eternity making the same mistake, recently. It comes with tons of recipes and ingredients for food and shit, and then you read that you get out of it something like 1 damage reduction for five minutes (or better yet, a point of benefit and then after a few minutes a penalty) and it's like "were you just trying to fill a bullet point for the box or something" because all this shit winds up utterly ignored because really.

[Lantyssa]

The problem was the beginning months like Raph said, where crafters needed to build up the materials and structures to make the best.  It was probably a year in until the proper stats for BE tissues were cracked, and people went from making stuff at 50% quality to consistently hitting 98-99%.  (Granted that one took extra long compared to general crafting since the displayed contributions were incorrect, but that meant a boost to every single piece of armor and clothing worn from then on.  And saying it like that kind of awes me, since it means I'm personally responsible for power creep in an online game.  Wow.)

Whomever took over after he left didn't understand that.  They started buffing/nerfing things based on current player power instead of potential power.  When crafters finally caught up those changes threw everything out of whack.  Suddenly a solo player could handle an entire herd of rancor at once.

[Surlyboi]

A single player? Hell, when I was a BE, I made Durnis that ate Rancor herds for breakfast.

[Raph]

people held rather correct opinions that "10% is worthless" especially when it involves jumping through hoops... 10% comes nowhere near justifying any of this hassle.

Someone had better let the D&D guys know that +1 magic swords are worthless....!

[WayAbvPar]

people held rather correct opinions that "10% is worthless" especially when it involves jumping through hoops... 10% comes nowhere near justifying any of this hassle.

Someone had better let the D&D guys know that +1 magic swords are worthless....!

At low levels they are fine, and if something can only be hit by magic. After about 5th level they are essentially worthless.

[Lantyssa]

10% is a +2 sword.

Back when we had to slaughter goblins both ways uphill while slogging through a stone to mud spell, we dreamed of having +2 weapons.

[Merusk]

The tyranny of PC stats and game mathematics when it runs into player expectations.

+1 is 5% on a D20. Seems nice on the surface, sure.

When I pay you 5% interest on a dollar loan it kinda seems pointless, yeah?

Same thing when doing 5% extra damage at base 100dps to a 10k HP mob. Sure, you killed it 5% faster, but was it worth the time and effort to get that 5%?  Most humans are going to instinctively say no, even when the mathematical models say, "But it lets you kill an additional 1.8 mobs per hour and an additional 43 per day!"

[Nebu]

Back when we had to slaughter goblins both ways uphill while slogging through a stone to mud spell, we dreamed of having +2 weapons.

    

[Rendakor]

As a lifelong D&D player who has recently introduced some long-time-video-gamers to PnP stuff, +1 weapons certain come across as underwhelming.

[Gimfain]

Onto game systems and social structure now: http://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/21/designing-a-living-society-in-swg-part-one/

Covers levelling, skills, power differentials, resources, crafting, and economy.

Hope to get to social stuff tomorrow, but this was foundational to talking about it.

That mining/processing tree is crazy. Just promise me that there won't be any steel minerals found in the world of crowfall.

[Malakili]

As a lifelong D&D player who has recently introduced some long-time-video-gamers to PnP stuff, +1 weapons certain come across as underwhelming.

I dunno, I knew a lot of raiders who used to geek out on getting even an extra 1% to hit.

[sam, an eggplant]

Dikuclones are all about character progression, and progression becomes increasingly incremental at endgame. Moving from one raid tier to the next might be a 20% total performance gain, so 1% here or there is a big deal. People expend tremendous effort optimizing for that 1%.

SWG wasn't a dikuclone, so obviously that doesn't apply at all.

[DayDream]

the value of +10%, is all about WHICH 10%.



adding "+10%" chance to hit on a base 50% hit rate, and turning that into 60% chance to hit is very different from adding +10% to a base of 10% hit rate and turning that into 20%.  Or, even moreso, multiplying by 10% instead of adding.  Or any number of other ways to play that out.

Good theorycrafting can be complicated.

[Malakili]

Dikuclones are all about character progression, and progression becomes increasingly incremental at endgame. Moving from one raid tier to the next might be a 20% total performance gain, so 1% here or there is a big deal. People expend tremendous effort optimizing for that 1%.

SWG wasn't a dikuclone, so obviously that doesn't apply at all.

But I was responding to a post that was talking about crossover between video game audience and pencil and paper rules. 

[tmp]

people held rather correct opinions that "10% is worthless" especially when it involves jumping through hoops... 10% comes nowhere near justifying any of this hassle.

Someone had better let the D&D guys know that +1 magic swords are worthless....!

If the D&D guys made that +1 as much of repeatable, short term benefit hassle to obtain as the guys inventing MMO buff systems do, you can bet your behind that yes, the reception would be about as lukewarm.

The saving grace of +1 is you get it once and it sits there, always helping. It's not much of a bonus but it's not much of effort to have it, either.

But if you are instead made to jump through multiple hoops over and over and over for 5-10 mins worth of that +1? Fuck that shit.

[Gimfain]

At 50% hit and 10 damage on average hit your will hit for 5 damage/round. At 55% hit and 11 damage on average hit, you will hit for 6.05 damage/round. +1 sword gives you a 20% increase in damage. The reason why you might not see this increase is because its hidden by RNG but if you played a gaming session where your friend deals 20% more damage you will notice it fairly quick.

If we take a typical 10% health and damage increase and put it into a PvP fight, the following happens. Person A has 100 health and deals 10damage/round, person B has 110 health and deals 11 damage/round. After 9 rounds person A has 1 health, it takes 11 rounds for person B to die. This means that person B has 18% health left when person A goes down.

If we take another scenario where you add a healer (since those still exists in games), where teammate A's healer does 5healing/round, and B's healer does 5.5 healing/round it takes 17 rounds for A to go down, it takes 25 rounds for B to go down. It skews the stats even further if we add damage reduction, and that's why rift's valor system was so awful for PvP.

In any competitive gaming 10% increases makes a huge difference, and that's why themepark player goes through hoops to get 10 of the 1% increases because when you play tough content a 10% increases makes more than 10% difference.

[Azazel]

Not being a Jedi didn't even register on exit surveys. Bugs, lack of content, those were the top exit reasons, and by a LOT. I want to say fully half of all exits were from people who had run out of things to do because there wasn't enough content.

I never played the game because I couldn't be a Sith/Jedi.  You didn't do exit surveys on people who didn't play the game, obviously, and some of those didn't play the game because they didn't like the sound of Sim Beru.  Are people like me a minority?  Don't know, I don't make games (or do business plans for games) for a living.

tldr; your survey didn't include people who really wanted to be Luke or Darth

Agreed. I was heavily into EQ and very excited to see what SWG would be. When reports were solid on the fact that it turned out to not be about star WARS, and after "hm.. wait and see?" it turned out to be SimBeru with Wookee hairdressers but the worst grind ever to be a jedi I simply didn't bother at all. And I have thousands of dollars worth of Star Wars merch. I should have been a lifelong subscriber to that game.

[Ironwood]

I played it.  It was awful.

I am now finding out WHY it was awful.

[Cyrrex]

At 50% hit and 10 damage on average hit your will hit for 5 damage/round. At 55% hit and 11 damage on average hit, you will hit for 6.05 damage/round. +1 sword gives you a 20% increase in damage. The reason why you might not see this increase is because its hidden by RNG but if you played a gaming session where your friend deals 20% more damage you will notice it fairly quick.

If we take a typical 10% health and damage increase and put it into a PvP fight, the following happens. Person A has 100 health and deals 10damage/round, person B has 110 health and deals 11 damage/round. After 9 rounds person A has 1 health, it takes 11 rounds for person B to die. This means that person B has 18% health left when person A goes down.

If we take another scenario where you add a healer (since those still exists in games), where teammate A's healer does 5healing/round, and B's healer does 5.5 healing/round it takes 17 rounds for A to go down, it takes 25 rounds for B to go down. It skews the stats even further if we add damage reduction, and that's why rift's valor system was so awful for PvP.

In any competitive gaming 10% increases makes a huge difference, and that's why themepark player goes through hoops to get 10 of the 1% increases because when you play tough content a 10% increases makes more than 10% difference.

Well, sure, if you believe all that fancy schmancy math stuff.  I prefer to have my facts based on gut feeling and from the hip shooting.  And besides, as long as my +1 is slightly shinier than the regular Longsword, that's all that really matters.

[Azazel]

Well yes, AAA games have fucked themselves. See Square Enix's disappointments at the 2+ million sales of games like Sleeping Dogs and Tomb Raider. Those games selling 2+ million copies ought to be a goddamn studio/publisher defining hit, instead they actually caused people to lose jobs because they weren't "hit enough."

I want to say Capcom is the worst at this, to the point where they've nearly gone bankrupt because of it.

Capcom also fucked themselves with overly-aggressive and overly-dodgy DLC. Including on-disc DLC and too many iterative releases of the same games at full retail. And more than a few games that just aren't that good.

[Azazel]

We can build games to teach other skills, sure, but those don't sell as well. People are looking for entertainment, and most want that to be passive entertainment. "I want to turn off my brain" stuff because humans are fucking lazy creatures. Sure the initial high of the challenge is great, but it gets boring and people move on.

I agree with almost all of what you said in this post, except for this bit, which is just stupid. I've been at work all week. Now that I'm home and tired and feel like slaughtering some dumbass AI in a dumbass FPS to let off some steam and relax/have a laugh/enjoy some light entertainment might mean "I want to turn off my brain", but it's a totally different kettle of fish to being lazy. Unless you secretly agree with hardcore Sophie.

[Ironwood]

Counterpoint :  I've had a shitty, long, hard week and actually, all I want to do when I get home is fire up two-player Portal 2 and teach Elena some more spatial awareness while solving brain thunking puzzles.

Generic 'People Want This' always has exceptions.  That said, I still don't believe that Sophismata wants what he actually says he wants.  Or possibly wanting a thing is wildly different to having a thing.

A much superior AI in an FPS single player ?  No-one really wants that.  Multiplayer, sure, but single player ?  May as well just fire up a game you have no clue about playing and jump online so that anti-social and maladjusted kiddies can hurt you for hours.

[Gimfain]

I can honestly say that a huge amount of games I really enjoyed despite them having mediocre AI, and I can't figure out any games I enjoyed because the game had great AI. When it comes to games I will settle for functionable AI.

In an fps I wish for controls that are intuitive and responsive while the layout of the map makes for interesting gameplay. I don't really mind that AI has a tendency to become obvious and in some cases its enjoyable to solve the patterns that mobs go, just as long as you don't have to deal with bullet sponge. DS/bloodborne doesn't have any spectacular AI, but it serves its function, its the tuning of the fights and responsive controls that makes those games such a popular niche.

I with rpg's would have better AI, fights usually ends up being about statistics. However, I will enjoy a good rpg even though it has mediocre ai.

[tmp]

At 50% hit and 10 damage on average hit your will hit for 5 damage/round. At 55% hit and 11 damage on average hit, you will hit for 6.05 damage/round. +1 sword gives you a 20% increase in damage. The reason why you might not see this increase is because its hidden by RNG but if you played a gaming session where your friend deals 20% more damage you will notice it fairly quick.

That's a nice theory. Here's the same fight in practice:

(enemy has 60 hp)

basic sword: hit miss miss hit hit miss hit miss miss hit hit, dead
+1 sword: hit miss hit hit miss miss hit miss hit miss hit, dead

your 5% extra to hit simply doesn't get much opportunity to register. Your +1 damage makes no effective difference -- whether you do 50 or 55 damage to the enemy in your five first hits, is still just as alive and kicking until the total damage meets the 60 hp threshold. And when you do meet it that 6 hp of damage extra you did while at it with your better weapon makes no difference whatsoever.

If we take a typical 10% health and damage increase and put it into a PvP fight, the following happens. Person A has 100 health and deals 10damage/round, person B has 110 health and deals 11 damage/round. After 9 rounds person A has 1 health, it takes 11 rounds for person B to die. This means that person B has 18% health left when person A goes down.

i don't think I ever was part of a PvP fight which involved lining up and then carefully trading autoattack blows until one person falls over, making sure the outcome is controlled by no factor other than the damage/hit rng.

Even so, what you get here is a situation where after 10 hits it takes the weaker person to die (because you know, 99 damage you dealt to them in 9 hits doesn't actually kill them, it will take another swing) their opponent is with 10 hp left. That's actually 9% remaning, not 18% Meaning that yes, if it wasn't for that hp increase they got along with damage bonus, the damage bonus itself made no effective difference. If you had both of them with 100 hp each then whether their weapon dealt 10 or 11 points of damage would make no difference -- they'd die together.

[Ironwood]

I can honestly say that a huge amount of games I really enjoyed despite them having mediocre AI, and I can't figure out any games I enjoyed because the game had great AI. When it comes to games I will settle for functionable AI.

In an fps I wish for controls that are intuitive and responsive while the layout of the map makes for interesting gameplay. I don't really mind that AI has a tendency to become obvious and in some cases its enjoyable to solve the patterns that mobs go, just as long as you don't have to deal with bullet sponge. DS/bloodborne doesn't have any spectacular AI, but it serves its function, its the tuning of the fights and responsive controls that makes those games such a popular niche.

I with rpg's would have better AI, fights usually ends up being about statistics. However, I will enjoy a good rpg even though it has mediocre ai.

The Grunts in the original Half-Life came as a pleasant surprise at the time and actually worked to give you a challenge and scare you.  I suspect, however, that was only because the AI in opponents up until that point had been so shockingly bad.

Having a Grunt fling a grenade at your camping ass was...both terrifying and gigglesome.