(And hello, btw, I’m a real estate developer in Boston looking into developing some game ideas I’ve had for years, great forum)

is what folks think about the place that pc-controlled or gm-controlled events or mobs have in MMO’s. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen a gm-event in WoW, and then only in screenshots. Player or gm-controlled mobs seems like an ideal way to test how an entire player base would respond to a true challenge. I wonder if any developer blogs note this sort of interaction?

I know from personal experience in pvp that given any sort of reasonable intelligence, the tried-and-true “meatshield” phenomenon doesn’t exist in a player-level challenge situation (i.e. healers and damage-dealers die first, no exceptions, contrary to how every single AI-run mob is forced by script or player-utilized aggro ability to prioritize its’ kill order from least threatening to most threatening)

For me, as a player, this is a true “head-shaker” when in teamspeak on a daily occurrence players joke about the inability of a God-level being to not take heed of the 10 or so casters keeping one tank standing, or the 20-odd beings actually doing it all the damage.

I think in the case of some of the current MMO’s, a tradition and expectation that such roles should exist (meatshield, back-stabber, ranged caster, etc) forces the developers to code mobs in less than ideal fashion in order for everyone to “play their role”.

I’m wondering how far a game designer might need to go in breaking those expectations in order to actually be able to code mobs with semi-intelligent behavior, and if there is even any market in doing so?

A truly smart AI isn’t something people will ever want unless they have counters to the actions. A smart npc will take out anything in a dress first because they are easy to kill and will reduce the damage output against them quite a lot. Smart npc’s will play like we do..and in most of these game there aren’t counters to stop them.

For it to be viable you would need to have full collision so an npc could be blocked from the healer/caster. You would have to get away from the current aggro dynamics and build something truly realistic before you could create smart npc’s. You cannot just increase a mobs intelligence and call it good, you have to build the game in such a way that any move that a mob might make can be countered.

When many of us are doing is to look at current games and encounters and adding an additional level of intelligence onto mobs. That won’t work because the players don’t have enough options to either stop the mobs or survive the mobs attack. Our current crop of games and designs are built around tanks, aggro, and controlling the mob. But if you build that intelligence into the game from the start and give people options…then you have something truly fun.

[...] Blog &middot MMOs &middot Links &middot Forum &middot Login &middot Register Nerfbat – Complex Mob AI: Sweet or Sour? http://www.nerfbat.com/2007/03/19/complex-mob-ai-sweet-or-sour/ "There’s a great thread over [...]

I cannot tell whether players want improved AI from any game I have played. I can tell that players are not willing to give up advancement for improved AI, which is the choice they have. If anyone can point to a game where the good-AI encounters have as high a reward per unit time as fighting dumb rocks, we have something to discuss.

The best case scenario seems to be this: (1) new encounter is introduced with improved AI and a good reward; (2) seeing fun and reward, players flock there; (3) seeing this flocking, the developers assume the reward is too good and lower it; (4) repeat 2 and 3 as long as the “fun premium” holds out on the encounter. Also, the fun encounter is abandoned last by the most competent players, since they are best able to keep a high rate of return; they have a comparative advantage against good AI, because almost everyone gets the same return per input against dumb-as-rock encounters. The reward for the good-AI encounter will end up set so that it is worthwhile only for the people who can complete the encounter most efficiently, who can then get bored with repeating it and move on. The rest of the players will only visit the good-AI encounter when they think that the chance of improved fun is worth the loss in reward they get.

This need not be the case, but my cynicism tells me it often is. I know that when I have tried more dynamic encounters, my risk has increased much more quickly than my reward. My risk of a bugged encounter seems to be one of the fastest rising problems.

And within each section there could be a wide range of implementation methods. It could be something as simple as letting mobs level up. IE, a mob is involved in the deaths of XX number of players, the mob ‘levels’ and gains increased stats, making it slightly harder to kill than its brethren. And/or you could add new abilities as they level up. Perhaps if a generic orc reaches level 5, it becomes an orc chieftain and learns how to snare its opponents and call in additional help when threatened.

On a larger scale, you could implement something where a mob camp collectively learns based on its experiences. Are heroes coming along and slaughtering them individually day after day? Well then maybe the mobs start walking around in groups of 3, or 5, or 10 depending on how bad the situation is! To prevent an over-escalation of power, I would have it work in reverse as well. Has that same camp become so strong that they never get attacked? Well then they might become complacent and wonder out alone more often. Or perhaps extend their wandering patterns to cover greater areas. Or maybe they tend to be drunk a lot of the time, resulting in a decrease of their abilities.

You don’t really want the NPCs to think for themselves too much. But you want to give them a semblance of organized thought, which is actually just a complex interaction of scripts resulting in varied, but somewhat predictable behaviour. Of course, mapping out these behaviours would be up to the playerbase, and I would throw in a few changes on a regular basis just to keep them on their toes.

The average player is no Kasparov, they’re not looking to fight big blue. The AI they care about is the part that makes the NPC a believable actor within the world – pathing, quest text, etc. I think you will find that the average player actually thinks of the dialog given by an NPC as “ai”.

Again, I think the lesson here is that we’ve gotten a little caught up in the possibilities and allowed ourselves to over-think some aspects of the technology. Quest text is a perfectly valid form of artificial intelligence in this use case.

If I push the lever, I know what I am going to get. Goblins are not terribly difficult and I can consistently solo them; input 5 minutes to get 10 satisfying goblin deaths, 50 gold pieces, and 100 experience points. This will help me if I want to kill more goblins or try the dynamic encounter next time.

If I try the dynamic encounter, we have two problems. First, it is probably less rewarding per unit time. I must give up my fun shinies to have a more fun play experience, which seems like really poor game design but it seems like all the interesting things to fight are harder and far less rewarding for the effort than dumb mobs. So there is the trade-off involved.

Second, the experience is inconsistent. It might take a minute or ten minutes. I swear, if the enemy panics at 5% hit points and runs away from my melee-only character, I will strangle someone after I spend five minutes chasing it down, assuming it does not run through eight other enemies or jump over a cliff (oh, he doesn’t take falling damage? Lucky). I need to bring excess resources because it is unpredictable; do I have enough healing potions on me for this fight? My win is not guaranteed, so I might fight for a while and end up in a worse position (level- or loot-wise) than I started the evening. The encounter might be bugged and therefore not interesting or not possible, and I will not know that until I am in the middle of it. Tell me that you have not engaged in a complex, multi-step battle, only to have one enemy fall through the map, fail to spawn, be un-attackable, hide somewhere you could not find, etc.?

So I am giving up my shinies and slowing my dinging in return for the chance of having an interesting encounter. And how interesting is that encounter really?

How often do you try new restaurants? How often do you get fast food? You do not go to Burger King for fine cuisine. You go because it is quick and reliable. Who wants to try the new Thai/Lebanese/Hungarian place, only for it to take an hour, cost five times as much as fast food, and turn out to be completely unpalatable?

If you want me to take a risk on something, the payoff needs to be worth my while, because I have been burned before, a lot. Despite that, we keep trying new things. Sometimes. People will try more if the most interesting encounters are the most rewarding ones.

The players don’t have the same concept of “AI” as we do; we developers make the mistake of reading our own definition and understanding of AI into the term when they use it.

What the player is looking for in AI improvements is relatively simple: a relatively simple finite state machine with some elements of randomness.

When player’s are talking about “better” AI they are often talking about improving the simple rudimentary behaviors: pathing, quest interactions where an “AI” is perceived as “dumb” because it doesn’t accept the items you’re trying to turn in or because it spawns 50ft up a wall and the game insists on telling you it is “too far away”.

Keep your AI simple, and build complexity through encounters.