[banana_maker]

The current marketing pitch (a personal gaming -coach-) has nothing to do with the current functionality of e.g. voicing timers or providing notifications. That's more akin to a personal assistant.

I would also say that what it's doing with Valorant is cheating. It's providing additional cues and advantages automatically, that other players have to keep tabs on manually. The other players have to risk glancing at the timer(s) and temporarily divert attention from the other parts of the screen, while the "AI" user can rely on auditory feedback that is not present in the game for everyone (and maybe was a conscious decision from the game developers).

The whole point of competition is to evaluate player vs player performance, not player+personal assistant vs player performance. If you allow uneven things like that, then it becomes an arms race and also becomes boring from both a viewer and participant standpoint. Part of the challenge of games like Valorant, League of Legends, DotA2, etc, is to learn how to manage the sheer amount of information while also engaging in fights/gameplay.

An actual coach "AI" concept could be to provide intelligent information -inbetween rounds-, not during gameplay itself.

[natdempk]

I agree this feels like cheating. I read the Valorant page and they've basically re-implemented information that is available to you in game generally, but takes skill/timing/awareness to track and made it more obvious and automatically tracked. How is this not just a low-grade cheating program? If the game developers wanted you to have that information in the format Senpai.gg is giving it to you in, they would provide it in that format in the first place rather than using their own audio queues, omitting specific timers, etc.

[whateveracct]

In-game coaching _is_ considered cheating in FGC tournaments

[Olcy07]

We do not target tournaments - any 3.rt part application or a human coach is also not allowed as well.

[whateveracct]

Matchmaking has anti-cheat. This is cheating in an environment that disallows cheating.

[natdempk]

Yep, for any sort of eSport you can’t have outside help/information outside of designated times if the format allows it, but also this isn’t targeted at eSports.

[p1necone]

Yeah but it's not allowed in esports because it provides an unfair advantage. It's still unethical and provides an unfair advantage outside of the esports community, there just isn't a judge watching all the players and enforcing it.

[brundolf]

But cheating can happen (and be prosecuted) outside of eSports. The founders should be careful.

[atatatat]

prosecuted, lmao

[brundolf]

I'm not exaggerating:

https://www.pcgamer.com/south-korea-makes-cheating-in-online...

https://kotaku.com/forget-banning-online-gamers-are-in-legal...

https://gizmodo.com/chinese-police-bust-alleged-76-million-v...

[woah]

You could go to jail for a long time. Watch it, buddy

[Olcy07]

Thanks for sharing your feedback, I agree that it takes time to learn and implement the specific actions in the game - and that is the reason why we developed the gaming coach. Ideally, we want you to learn the game dynamics so you can play better, improve faster and enjoy the game more!

[snet0]

This is akin to saying "if you practice with a cheat so you can see through walls, it'll train you to know where players are likely to be standing".

No, it's cheating. It provides an unfair advantage by replacing a skill with a technology. There may be good intentions, but if so they are founded on a total misunderstanding of competition.

[debaserab2]

I don't think it's quite that cut and dry - it appears to only be using data already available to the player. If anything it seems like a training queue to notice the information that's already present instead of passing it over.

[ben-schaaf]

Chess engines also only use data already available to the player. That simply has no bearing on whether or not it's cheating.

[notJim]

That doesn't sound like how it would be used though. If I can run your app all the time, and get an edge, why wouldn't I?

[alisonkisk]

Transparent, shameless attempts to deflect criticism make people like you less than if you just ignore it, phony exclamation point.

[luaKmua]

Speaking as a league player and a game developer, the audio cues are 100% cheating and also explicitly against Riot's ToS as stated here: https://support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/artic...

The relevant excerpt: "Exposing information that’s intentionally obfuscated (cooldowns or timers)"

As for all of the other match data mining, that's par for the course in competitive games these days.

[jcelerier]

> "Exposing information that’s intentionally obfuscated (cooldowns or timers)"

Doesn't this just benefit people who are good at counting ?

[luaKmua]

Competitive games have a variety of ways for players to express their skills. I'm not going to comment on whether or not it's good design, but it is clearly the intended design and that's the important differentiating factor. Competitive games are always going to benefit some players who are good at some specific aspects of them inherently by their nature.

[gunshai]

In Dota you have to keep track of all sorts of stuff like this.

There is a decent sized list of all the timings you should keep track of with in a game, and they change from game to game. If you don't do it you're basically lost.

[tigertigertiger]

That's the way games work.

Doesnt having a good memory give advantage to chess players?

Or having good reflexes benefit shooter player?

[jcelerier]

Well, at least in a casino, if someone notices that you look like you are counting cards you will promptly be escorted to the exit

[whiskyant]

Dota 2 allows for a real time coach to join your team during a match at any time, it's built into the game. They have full vision/information of what your team has.

However, "Coaching is available in private lobbies, casual matchmaking, and Co-op bot matchmaking, but not Ranked matchmaking, Team matchmaking, or Tournament lobbies."

[berkozer]

Yes, Valve has a similar vision for CS:GO as well. We don't provide any coaching services for tournament or professional events.

[mike_d]

Providing situational feedback during gameplay by way of an overlay or audio queues is clearly cheating.

If I were an investor in this company, I'd be asking the founders what their plan is when they get banned by the major anti-cheat engines.

[hobs]

listening to a song that has INJECT at the right moment put in for your perfect injects isnt cheating as long as you dont play it during tournaments, its just a metronome to practice to.

Its not a service I would ever want to use because I actually enjoy games and I find coaching it to be too much to care about, but I think "audio clues to practice" doesn't meet the bar of cheating lol.

[snet0]

Your description doesn't sound like it's feedback based on game-state, though.

[hobs]

I see your point, but to me its starting to splice hairs because at the time the meta wasn't something that changed much, there was effectively a pre-determined set of actions in the first 10 or so minutes and most matches were less than 16 minutes so perfecting your opening via almost a programmatic efficiency was pretty normal.

The proper inject time (for instance) is just X*N seconds since game start, the second best time is right after that.

[alisonkisk]

Ugh. Why don't the devs randomize things a bit so the game can be more interesting and fun than memorizing digits of pi?

[reportgunner]

Randomizing doesn't always make games more interesting and fun, it often makes them less skill-rewarding and more frustrating. This especially shows if you play for hours every day.

[hobs]

Generally I would agree, and perfected build orders are part of the reason I stopped watching.

[notJim]

Is there actually a song like that?

[hobs]

I definitely remember "maximus black" a starcraft 2 streamer talking about a song he had that had this very same setup yeah.

[tmp_anon_22]

Cheating in video games is a growing industry. But if they push boundaries and are a US or EU company they will be sued to splinters for it.

[alisonkisk]

What tort is "helping someone cheat at a video game"?

[tmp_anon_22]

Many large studios, I specifically think of Blizzard and Jagex, have a reputation for wielding legal successfully against third party clients, phishing, trademark/branding abuse, botting, and similar activities. Further there are severe legal consequences in China and elsewhere for cheating in video games.

Even if there isn't decisive legal consequences they can carpet ban whoever they want whenever they want. Which is likely the reputation which causes the landing page of this service to be plastered with "don't worry you won't get banned" all over the place.

[meheleventyone]

Cheating in a game ruins other customers experience so does have a direct monetary impact which is why games companies care about it so much.

[berkozer]

Thanks for sharing your feedback. We understand your concern but we are very careful to not develop any feature that would be considered as cheating for the majority of the gaming and game developer.

[site-packages1]

In my experience, may of these companies (Riot, et. al) are not particularly consistent over time or in the application of even current rules. And it's also hard to divine what "would be considered cheating" by these companies as one support person may say something is cheating, and another might consider it cheating and ban your account.

It seems very fraught and risky to use for gamers who desire that their accounts don't get banned.

[alisonkisk]

That's good if it helps get cheaters banned.

[bee_rider]

The idea of:

> For example, we have an "Early Ganker" tag for the gamers who tend to gang in the early game. [...] We provide these tags based on only publicly accessible data on the official game publisher API. For example, any gamer can search for the opponents’ game data and conduct a similar analysis.

also seems questionable to me. Is it common/practical to do this kind of thing in these games? It seems to me that, while it might be technically possible to get the info, it should be impractical for a human to actually do the analysis, in the timespan allowed by a pregame lobby, right?

I guess it could also depend on how much preprocessing they do... hypothetically we could imagine a game where every match is recorded and saved to a public user account, and a "coaching" AI system that extracts users tags by watching these offline, and then just queries them at match time. This analysis would pretty clearly be information that players wouldn't normally be privy to, despite being available through legitimate means.

[interator7]

As a League of Legends player, it's very common. Virtually everyone that I know that plays this game has some sort of overlay(LolWiz, Porofessor, Blitz.gg, etc.) that provides unimaginable level of detail about the enemy team and my team before the game even begins. I can find out what the enemy players like to do("invade", or initiate cheese fights early), roam to other lanes in the map, and more. I know what their winrate on their champion is, how many kills on average they get before 10 minutes, whether they don't ward(a crucial component of the game that opens them up to ganks if not done correctly), and who they may be connected to voice call with. If anything, it seems like Senpai.gg's tool isn't doing enough.

[andrewzah]

Well, this is what I was referring to by an arms race if these kinds of tools are allowed. It’s a considerable disadvantage to not use them, so everyone is basically forced into using them.

In my opinion for non-professional play (casual and ranked), these kinds of tools should be outright banned. The game goes from “how can I improve myself and play better” to “let’s expend the minimum effort possible solely to win”. You’re not playing to your strengths but just to the opponent’s weaknesses from the get-go. That’s just incredibly boring. Just because one can have a shortcut to a win doesn’t make for better or more interesting gameplay.

Regarding professional play, the teams have the resources to do this given the limited player pool and they’re also at the pro level anyways.

[bee_rider]

Huh, well this supports my decision to not get into MOBAs.

[eertami]

In Dota at least you can make your data private and your picks/habits cannot be tracked by third party websites or applications.

I feel like gaming stats should have way better privacy options in general.

[berkozer]

That's certainly right. We don't provide any suggestion based on private data. For example, gamers cannot see the tags of an opponent if the opponent opted out to be private.

[ZephyrBlu]

I think if people care about their data it should just be anonymized instead of hidden.

Data from games is such a good way for people to get into programming and data analysis (Speaking from personal experience).

It's easily accessible, real and has a decent level of complexity. Would be a shame for it to go away because people want to hide their data.

[andrewzah]

At least when I played, dota2 wasn’t like this (and it’s a better game, anyways ;-))

Realistically speaking this kind of stuff doesn’t really matter at a lower level anyways- everyone’s bad and makes dumb mistakes. And it doesn’t help to know about data if you don’t know how to capitalize on it.

I can’t recommend getting into MOBAs/ARTSs solo, but if you have 2-3 friends they’re quite a blast.

[JCharante]

To be fair giving this info is not helpful if you're bad at the game itself. I've tried using it but I'm still only top 65%. Once you get to the level below pro players, there's so few people that you remember everybody's usernames or remember who plays on tuesday nights and will remember their playstyle / champions to ban.

[yissp]

Couldn't you look yourself up and adjust your playstyle accordingly? Like "oh, these guys will be expecting me to do X, but now I'm going to do Y instead to throw them off".

[NorwegianDude]

From my experience it's most useful for getting information on clear outliers. The ranking system might rank a very good player with terrible players until the ranking settles in. A few players are "boosted" by other players to reach higher ranks. In such situations it might be useful as you know that specific opponent on the other team is the one to watch out for or who to focus.

There is a lot of summary stats available, but the most useful one from personal experience is the win ratio. If the data tells you that one player on the other team wins 70 % of the games, then that's usually a clear indicator that the ranking of that player is most likely lower than it should be.

It might just be a better or worse player overall, so adapting to it might not be possible, except for knowing who to put pressure on.

[berkozer]

Thanks for the explanation. Senpai.gg is still in Beta and we're continuously improving our features.

[EamonnMR]

Is an AI that aimbots by predicting player moves with uncanny accuracy really that different from a regular old aimbot?

[bee_rider]

Another interesting point in the spectrum could be, what about a program that marks up the screen or minimap with detailed heatmaps of likely player positions based on historical data?

If that's not obviously cheating, make it time dependent, make it player dependent, etc.

If that is obviously cheating, what about producing those maps and not providing an in-game overlay?

[snet0]

I think it's very simple: if you'd describe its usage as a "skill", it's probably fine. Obvious "navigating this cheat menu UI takes some practice" cases aside.

If a professional team uses data analysis and then teaches their players something like "at 30s, on this map, this player rotates from here to here in 70% of games", that's just good training. If they have this data being live-streamed to their second monitor, it's cheating.

[andrewzah]

Those kinds of maps are already available for study outside of the game for DotA2, eg. here’s the analysis for a game I played. These are incredibly useful for learning and analysis after the match.

https://www.opendota.com/matches/5501229759/laning

[EamonnMR]

I don't see as very different from a wallhack if it's any good if it's an in game overlay. I suppose if it's an offline thing that you can study but need to apply yourself that's no more of a cheat than any other prep.

[reportgunner]

I would say that a skilled player doesn't need to see the heat maps in real time, it would be enough to see them once or twice and they will remember because it "makes sense" to them that the heat maps are the way they are.

[bobobob420]

Nope it’s not and that’s why 100 percent if this tool is doing what it is saying, I would consider it cheating. I have tons of hours in Valorant and if this becomes common I will not play the game. I play specifically because of the learning curve and skill curve. There’s already a big enoug problem with Smurf’s and ranked boosting

[girvo]

big enoug problem with Smurf’s

Maybe its just because I play on Sydney servers, but I really find this a bit overblown personally -- and I've ranked up from bronze 2 to plat 1 over six months of playing. I think its honestly just that some people have "on" and "off" games, at least from the hundreds and hundreds of ranked matches I've played.

[bobobob420]

1/3 games of Mine has a smurf on my or other team that will admit it or it’s insanely obvious. I play central NA

[anonymoushn]

This sounds like "Deadly Boss Mods for games other than WoW" which probably is just cheating.

I'd be really interested in a product that does more of what a human coach would do.

[alasdair_]

I was thinking the same thing. Blizzard explicitly allows this kind of thing but most games do not.

Even with DBM - there used to be an addon that told you exactly where to stand to avoid different bosses attacks. That got banned pretty quickly because it over trivialized the mechanics.

[anonymoushn]

For suresies. I didn't play in Firelands but I heard some stories of the "drawing football plays on the ground" era. We used a similar addon for Sha of Fear p1 side platform but it displayed where to stand on a HUD, not on the actual floor.

[danr4]

I'd say DBM being PvE is a big difference. But WoW generally is a whole other beast just because of how addons are ingrained in it.

[hnick]

Competitive PvE exists too (speedruns, world first races, etc). In FFXIV mods are less tolerated and while some raiders use triggers (TTS voice lines triggered by enemy actions or friendly buffs to tell you what to do), many consider it borderline or actual cheating, while others are fine with it because it's similar to having a player do it (ignoring perfect accuracy and no brain capacity used). So it's a controversial area.

[Olcy07]

Thanks for your feedback. We understand your concern, but we do not share any information that is not available on your screen. In a sense, we provide an alternative interface so you can learn about the game dynamics to improve faster. All the features that we develop aims to accelerate the learning curve - so we do not share any information about your opponent, their location etc. that is not available to you while you are playing the game.

[notJim]

Providing an alternative interface is exactly why it sounds like cheating.