[jncfhnb]

Seems unlikely to work imo. Games need to account for the fact that 90% of the player base will be deeply unskilled and the remaining 10% will be tightly invested in a meta of dominant strategies. You’d need the bots to be able to consider this and also not just equalize every character.

[PicassoCTs]

I found that to design games for the crowd seperatly and merge them, works wonders. One crowd gets a hyper-challenging rts, the others get to play heroe units making all the difference in a small dota game, playing off the the hyper-rts. The OPs can take over and micro, but they wont never micro as well as a human, for whom it is the whole game.

One example.. of course, you goto keep it civil. No pro players dunking on the mom&pop gamers who just want to have 5mins of fun on a tablet.

[10000truths]

This can be accounted for by training bots using player inputs from historical games, no? If you then partition the training set by player ranking, you'd presumably get a set of bots that approximate a player from each ranking. With that, you could simulate the effect of a balance change on players of various skill levels.

[bitshiftfaced]

Suppose you wanted to rebalance the rules of chess so that the black pieces had equal odds. You really only need to achieve this at the superhuman skill level, and then you could let the matchmaking algorithm could do the rest of the work.

[jncfhnb]

Not a great example. Chess is a 1v1 symmetric game and is pretty well balanced.

[the_sleaze_]

white moves first, in any perfect game black can only play to a draw

[JTBooth]

You can construct counterexamples too! For example, "on your turn, say a number. First player to say a number that is double a number the other player said, wins." Is a perfect (I think you mean perfect information) game.

[jncfhnb]

He meant perfect play although he is not provably correct

[jncfhnb]

> in any perfect game black can only play to a draw

You’re making this up. Chess is not solved.

It’s also largely irrelevant to my point.

[bongodongobob]

Nope, all the research with Stockfish et al is pointing to chess being a draw with perfect play.

[jncfhnb]

Not really. It would take immense effort to train bots to play “like humans” and not “as performantly” as humans which is very different. And if you’re going to be optimizing game parameters that means you’re assuming that either the AI doesn’t change its behaviors even though the game is different or you’re assuming that humans will adapts in the same way the bots do.

Like if all the humans use the AK because it’s super over powered, and your optimization algorithm sets the AK damage to 0; what are your “human” bots going to do? Because all the training data says to use the AK.

This approach only makes sense if you’re evaluating bot-optimal play outcomes.

It also takes away a lot of the design thinking behind balance. You probably don’t want to nerf the AK. You probably want to buff counterplay options (guns are not a great example but still)

[10000truths]

> Not really. It would take immense effort to train bots to play “like humans” and not “as performantly” as humans which is very different.

There is precedent in Maia Chess, which does a good job of mimicking human chess players at various ELO ratings. Of course, it's a lot more difficult to extrapolate to games with significantly more state/movesets, but I imagine that this space will be further explored in the near future.

> And if you’re going to be optimizing game parameters that means you’re assuming that either the AI doesn’t change its behaviors even though the game is different or you’re assuming that humans will adapts in the same way the bots do.

This could be addressed by including the game parameters of interest (what map, what character, the weapon stats at time of gameplay, etc.) in the input to the training data.

> It also takes away a lot of the design thinking behind balance. You probably don’t want to nerf the AK. You probably want to buff counterplay options (guns are not a great example but still)

Tool-assisted QA is nothing new. Using AI is a newer iteration of the concept. You still have to interpret the results it gives and make decisions based on that. The design thinking isn't replaced, it's augmented with additional insights. Are those insights potentially inaccurate? Sure, but you can account for that with sanity checks/manual intervention/play testing.

[jncfhnb]

You’ve largely missed or ignored my point. If you change the game your AI either fails to adapt or adapts in an AI way. But it can’t reliably adapt in a human way without data on how humans adapt to the change. That’s just not how it works. Maia won’t mimic humans hypothetical behavior if you make it so that bishops can also move like knights.

There’s nothing wrong with using bots in play test data but you shouldn’t ever expect an optimization algorithm to generate fun balanced game mechanic stats based on their behaviors by tweaking things until the bots are evenly matched.

[pfdietz]

You can get around that by telling those 10% to f- off and play something else.

[jncfhnb]

The ones who are most interested in your game to actually learn it? That’s a strat but it’s certainly not the game dev meta

[pfdietz]

Amazingly, "better player" doesn't imply "better customer". That is, unless it's a P2W game, where better = willing to spend more money.

[genocidicbunny]

But so very often it implies "Loudest customer" -- that is, they are the most likely to loudly and publicly complain. Games live and die on the whims of their audiences; It's generally a very bad idea to piss off the most dedicated 10% of your playerbase.

[pfdietz]

Unless that dedication is highly remunerative, pissing them off can be the smart thing to do, if that means pleasing the other 90%. The problem comes when the developers are having their egos stroked by this dedication. Imagining that those players are somehow valuable for PR is part of the rationalization for serving them, but experienced lesser players will learn that a game that caters to that elite won't be fun for them, and will treat that catering as the negative sign it is.

[genocidicbunny]

You're not wrong, but the other end of the spectrum is that you don't have any players because the only ones talking about it are unhappy.

I used to work on F2P games, and you have to balance things. As nice as it would be to ignore the loudmouths, unless you can guarantee that no one else is listening to them either, which you can't, you'll have to cater to them somewhat to pacify them.

[SpaceManNabs]

I agree that a rudimentary evolutionary algorithm probably wouldn't work since they often don't take into account multimodality. There are global stochastic algorithms that take into account this sort of multi modality. Most particle swarm framworks could handle this sort of bipartite nature with a more complicated fitness function. Differential Evolution frameworks in R also allow you to do a post operation on each candidate, which include something like rejecting it because it does not seem to lie in one of the two modes.

[dartos]

Yeah. A truly balanced game is boring. There’s no drama or tension.

You need the power fantasy of being strongest characters and the underdog tale of winning against the strongest characters as a less meta one.

[Log_out_]

Why not abandon the idea of balance entirely and tailor balance situational for maximum drama.make the meta shakespearean..

[1propionyl]

Valve memorably did just this over a decade ago with the Director system in Left4Dead.

[programd]

See also the storytellers in Rimworld. Randy in particular is a master of the dramatic turn.

[dartos]

That’s exactly what “balancing” a game means.