@fichom said in [The "What"] AIs in ladder - season 2:
so you'll have to be patient
weak. I'm procrastinating as well atm, you should do the same and prioritise discussions with randoms on the FAF forum!
@fichom said in [The "What"] AIs in ladder - season 2:
so you'll have to be patient
weak. I'm procrastinating as well atm, you should do the same and prioritise discussions with randoms on the FAF forum!
Required rating for participation in balance talks when?
Another reason to add AIs to the ladder is to increase interest in FAF. Part of the message would be: "If you develop your own AI, we might put it into the ladder." That could be a strong incentive to someone with talent to work on FAF AIs.
(Edit: I'm not suggesting that we LACK people with talent. I'm just talking about bringing on MORE people.)
I'd be happy with any of options 2-4 at a high level.
Thoughts on potential options
My preferred solution would probably be non-cheating AI being matched with people who join the 1v1 queue and fail to find a game after a couple of cycles, with an option for people to opt out. Players would only get matched with an AI within a certain rating range (say +/- 300 of that AI's rating), and also would only be matched if their last game (or last x games) was against a human. New players would also fight against an AI as one of their initial 'rating assessment' games (to hopefully give a better new player experience to the 1-sided initial games that can happen with the current system). I'm guessing this falls into option 2.1.
A variation on the options is to also have the AI implementation done temporarily (i.e. for the option 2s, you could have a week each month or quarter where AI gets added to the pool, a bit like how mapgen was featured for a week).
If option 4 was done (separate ladder) then I'd prefer it to have both AI and AiX; if it was done for just 1v1s against the AI then it could be done as a 'AI Challenge' button since a game could be created as soon as you click on it, with the goal of trying to get the highest possible rating. While the rating given from this wouldn't be as useful as under options 2-3 it'd still be of some value.
Potential benefits
As to some of the potential benefits I can think of initially from these options (which will vary depending on the option):
Potential disadvantages
There are also potential drawbacks from each of the options. The main ones I'd see are:
M27AI and M28AI developer; Devlogs and more general AI development guide:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/2373/ai-development-guide-and-m27ai-v71-devlog
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5331/m28ai-devlog-v87
I especially like the "AI challenge"-idea.. Might give players a motivation to have a goal instead of just 'getting better', getting crushed by AI also isn't as frustrating as against real players, especially cuz some leave rude comments on the way.
For testing I also fully support the idea with "AI ladder-week".
Required rating for participation in balance talks when?
I just want to state that this is in the very early discussion phase. Development and matchmaking teams are still talking about how it would be implemented, and whether it would be a good idea at all.
I think if the AI was a self learning neural network and playing in ladder games helped it improve then that would be very cool. The google AI for starcraft did something similar in their ladder games.
Never Fear, A Geek is Here!
I have expressed my opinion on this topic in a separate thread, that is hopefully more abstract level (and more about custom games) than this thread:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5557/faf-for-casual-players
I generally don't think that queues as we have them for TMM are a good fit for PvE in general. They would have to substantially change to be a good fit, as described in that thread. I think that AIs in queues are a potential good way to asses their rating, that's it, and we should concentrate on that.
A proper coop queue meant for PvE players would at the very least need difficulty selection, so id argue custom games are better suited anyways, unless we just want to implement a way to make finding coop partners easier.
@thecore said in [The "What"] AIs in ladder - season 2:
I think if the AI was a self learning neural network and playing in ladder games helped it improve then that would be very cool. The google AI for starcraft did something similar in their ladder games.
I agree it would be very cool. If Google wants to provide us with their bleeding edge AI tech worth millions of dollars as well as the servers to run it all for free I don't think anyone would complain.
I like this idea. If for instance if your not matching after a few failed attempts or waiting a long time there could be an option, "would you like to play against AI" if yes instant game in an ideal situation.
But would you be playing with Ai woven into real teams or a full team of Ai vs a full team of players?