AI game concept: teaching your follwers/alts

[Kilpi]

Reasonable response. Have you been alive these past few years? Everything they've slapped AI on has been made an order of magnitude worse functional and less usable. It's all marketing nonsense. If you want to be technical, the game already has extensive "AI." If you want to be even more technical, AI isn't even real yet and likely a very, very long ways away.

And I did read the entire post, all it was was rambling nonsense using a hot topic key word to wrap it up in a cute little ribbon.

I mean all generative multimedia AI stuff sucks for everyone, I agree on that. But neutral network learning on AI NPC behavior has nothing to do with that and could potentially be a huge upgrade for videogame AI.

[WowIsDead64]

Technical state of Wow is terrible. I mean, TECHNICAL STATE. Game design is ok. We all love retro stuff and pixel art, that mimics 8/16-bit hardware from 80-90s. But at the same time Wow has many systems completely disfunctinal.
1) Auto-loot
2) Tab-target
3) Being unable to use RPish 3rd person view instead of long camera distance due to HUGE hitboxes, that prevent you from clicking anything through (and broken tab-target stacks on a top of that)
4) Broken pet AI
5) Pets constantly despawning due to game being unable to handle teleports and vehicles properly
6) Etc.

And broken follower AI is just part of this picture. Tank, that puts AOE under himself and therefore pulls all mobs 1 mile back and out of your AOE, so it's constantly wasted? May be it would be ok in 2004. But not in 2024.

P.S. But it's nice noobish tank simulation though. Some tanks do exactly this, while not understanding, that not all classes/specs are as perfect, as Paladins, and therefore lose half (or even 70%) of their DPS, if they're moving.

P.P.S. I really miss old CS bot times, when I was able to edit all waypoints manually and teach bots to do all tricks, like camping, jumping, etc.

[Powerogue]

Believe it or not WoW already has entities in it that you can gradually teach how to play the game.

Far from this somehow reducing the "toxic" aspect that gets complained about, this seems pretty easily predictable that players would immediately become hostile towards the robots for not learning fast enough AND even more hostile towards other players since they're already used to venting their frustrations about the incompetency of the robots. Failing to recognize that there are real people behind the screen because, for most of their prior interactions, there aren't.

Just seems like an awful, soulless idea. Even as someone that is OK with things like follower dungeons. That sort of thing is meant to be a tool that helps practice and see content that has questlines and such locked behind it even after the other players have moved on from running that content.

[HansOlo]

Let's go.

Guilds based on AI. Raids based on AI. Arena based on AI. I don want to so anything with human interaction.

Lastly - nerd scream by AI.

OP is suggesting that AI is the future. Genius!

[Kilpi]

Let's go.

Guilds based on AI. Raids based on AI. Arena based on AI. I don want to so anything with human interaction.

Lastly - nerd scream by AI.

OP is suggesting that AI is the future. Genius!

Then your main can also be AI and people who keep playing a game they don't like can actually stop playing but still play. They can then come up with a new thing to whine about.

[HansOlo]

Then your main can also be AI and people who keep playing a game they don't like can actually stop playing but still play. They can then come up with a new thing to whine about.

I want to get bullied by the AI as well.

This will lead to a special kind of masochistic interest.

[Kilpi]

I want to get bullied by the AI as well.

This will lead to a special kind of masochistic interest.

The AI can also start posting on these forums.

[Schizoide]

They do, I'm sure most of the forum spam is AI-generated these days. I see it all the time on dating apps. Some ridiculous instagram-model looking 22 year old hottie messages me, I ask her how many Rs in the word strawberry, she says 2, I move on.

[voskopoula]

Interesting idea,
but if i teach enhancement shaman NPCs then we are doomed. For one they will do more dps than most enhancement shamans and second they will die often :P

Still interesting idea

[Schizoide]

Bots can play perfectly, they will always beat humans in throughput via moment-to-moment decisions. They tend to have more problems tactically, delaying cooldowns for specific points, target-switching, more complex mechanics that involve interpreting the world, etc. That stuff can be hard-coded in but then you’re basically writing DBM for one specific spec, it’s a bunch of work. And now here comes magical AI to the rescue!

[AudibleEscalation]

Solo dungeons are great content.

So right now, when you want to do the weekly dungeon quest (when it's not part of season rotation), you just hit the follower dungeon button, and pull the entire instance to the boss and kill everything. It's extreme faceroll. The NPC bots will die, but who cares, they don't do any significant healing or dps anyway. It's a painless and quick way to complete the dungeon in couple of minutes.

What you're proposing is actually competent NPC team. That would also mean that the dungeon difficulty would have to be ramped up to "challenging". You as a player would have to rise to the occasion, not just be carried by NPC bots. And at that point you'd be crying here how everything is too hard and Blizzard is just catering to the hardcore soloers and completely ignoring the casual soloers who only play one expac behind everyone else.

It sounds like a cool idea - in concept - but I doubt people who run the game solo would actually like it very much.

[Timester]

Plain no.

If I don't want to play with people, I play solo or stop play at all (do other stuff in life, like touching grass).

Solo dungeons are great content.

Yes, they are. Because they are... solo just to see the dungeon, with no interactions and fast or to achieve hard kills by themselves.

What you are purposing is to replace human interaction with bot interaction. You are purposing a job to teach bots.

[Schizoide]

Why are solo dungeons great?

1) They give players a chance to practice a new class, role, spec, or ability without any stress that they're inconveniencing other players.
2) They allow players to fully explore a dungeon, something we can't typically do until the next expansion because it would take 5 players to do so.

So I ask you this-- wouldn't making the NPCs better help with both of these things? And put it in raids too, why not? Just don't give out loot, or I guess now that all loot is so heavily devalued just restrict rewards to LFR quality.

[Ssateneth]

Let's go.

Guilds based on AI. Raids based on AI. Arena based on AI. I don want to so anything with human interaction.

Lastly - nerd scream by AI.

OP is suggesting that AI is the future. Genius!

there are already superior version of what you want. you can run your own private server on whatever wow expansion you want and you can populate it with thousands of bots that roam the world (i'm not talking about the chinese bot mafia that sells gold) that kill mobs and do quests and populate the cities. you can invite the bots to your party or raid, summon them to you with a chat command, have them tank and heal automatically. you can have them spec into whatever you want, trade anything. you can have an auction house system running too where you post post things and bots will buy them and you can buy stuff off the AH from other bots. you can install AI driven chat messages that run the AI model locally. you can even scam them, treat them like garbage, ban them off the server, whatever you want, and you won't be held accountable to anyone.