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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
I bet Bill dunks on all of them in PvP.
No, that's just basically 'the thing I told you that I can do already', implemented directly into the monitor instead of into a specific piece of inbetween hardware.
Now, I agree that it's a big problem simply because 'just buying a monitor' is REALLY accessible relative to what I was talking about, but we're right back to 'the only way to solve this is with proper design, halfassing it will never get you there'.
I don't know what proper design means in this case and therefore I do not understand how that can solve this topic.
I don't remember you arguing for combat assistance. Though i do remember saying trackers are garbage and that that mixed with AI in the future will be broken and become AI playing over actual player skill/ ability.
Eh, don't worry about it, I guess I was moreso addressing NiKr than you. I just slipped up on my usual method and addressed you directly.
Probably not even worth any additional conversation.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that this specific monitor is one of the things I had in mind in the past when I have said there are many ways of running a combat tracker without using the actual computer that has the game installed.
Perhaps now that this has been shown to the public, people (Steven) will get the point that there is nonway to stop combat trackers, and so the best thing he can do for his game is attempt to keep all players on thebsame level in regards to the tools they have on hand.
You know, like I said four years ago.
And like you said, design should address this kind of thing, cause w/o additional software this thing only seems to be able to see what you see, so it's a glorified WoW tracker addon.
But this thing is just the start (though not really) of similar products.
How long do you think it will be before we get ram with AI built in to it in order to perform similar functions?
I would say the same about routers, but that kind of already exists.
This stuff is already riiiight on the line for me. Anything that "sees" more than the player can is just cheating imo.
Its kind of sad they are using this as an argument that we need a tracker so it has to happen. This is literally used for cheating, if you can imagine anything it that will end up happening. As they ai advances you will have more tools to use with it.
If their argument really is people will be able to cheat and have these screens. Than the argument literally like iIsaid before goes from tracking to full combat / player assistance with all the data the ai can pull from.
Need to target certain clerics have them highlighted, need to see aoes the boss does and where its going to attack based on animations you can get aoe things drawn, need a interactive map load that up, have ai point what skills you should use in combat, etc.
Point should be sure it is coming but how do we try to reduce the effectiveness.
If you cant detect cheats you should embrace it?
Reality of what happens like every other game the worse it gets people the more people quit and stop playing.
There is noway to stop AI to play
MMOs could become auto battler
Pay to levelup like in Eve
Or we go in special certified places with special hardware maintained by one anti cheat company.
I agree - especially considering what we are talking about isn't a cheat, it is an aspect of the genre that just exists, and has always existed.
No one on these forums has played an MMO at a time before combat trackers existed - unless they were part of friends and family testing of Meridian59 - as they existed for the actual beta test period of that game.
A developer coming in now and saying " we can't detect this, we can't stop it, many of you really enjoy it, but please dont" doesn't make it cheating, it makes that developers naive.
Now, if we were talking about AI that played the game for us, that isn't a universal aspect of all MMO's, I would say that something needs to be done. However, for one small developer stomping their feet saying they don't want something that every other game either accepts or embraces as a part of the genre, no.
To be clear, when AI's playing games becomes an issue, certifying hardware isn't going to do anything. You can easily get AI playing a game with the game running on certified hardware and the AI running on a different computer.
The only real way to prevent AI's playing games in general would be to require everyone to have a camera pointed at them playing, and streaming it to the developer. However, by the time AI is good enough and common enough to play MMO's, it will also be good enough to generate that video in order to cover it's own tracks.
So, basically, there is no way at all to stop AI from playing games. All developers can do is design games in a way where AI won't be useful - design games without filler.
In an RPG, players should be roleplaying rather than rollplaying.
And the devs should design the game for roleplaying, rather than rollplaying.
Which is why it's not unusual to ban add-ons.
From a roleplay perspective, combat trackers make sense.
They assist players in having information the characters would have.
Taking the parse from a day's combat and going over the logs later on is the equivlent of sitting down in the bar for a drink to discuss how the fighting for the day went. In many cases, it is actually literally sitting down at a bar to discuss how the fighting for the day went.
It makes no sense at all (AT ALL) that people going off fighting dragons or what ever, things many times more powerful than they are individually, wouldn't put all the thought and effort in to that fight that a semi-professional team puts in to a semi-friendly match of football.
If, as an RP first player, you just show up to a fight unprepared, the RP side of you should EXPECT to lose.
I say special certified places. I imagine them similar to amusement parks, cinemas, casinos... Those would "keep all players on thebsame level in regards to the tools they have on hand" (as you said).
I am not sure hot to "design games in a way where AI won't be useful - design games without filler". You mean without repetitive mindless grind?
The game will be designed based on our feedback, playing Alpha 2 without combat trackers.
Try to predict what happens after release.
The game will also release Before 2020.
The most basic thing that would have to be done first:
"Don't design stuff where the player is just reacting to things that are visible on screen without making any true decisions."
Then:
"Don't design stuff that is scripted and does the same things in approximately the same order or timings."
And then most important for Ashes:
"Don't design stuff so that player Synergies are just part of a 'rotation', even if that 'rotation' differs by which party the player is in."
'AI' is quite good at things where you have to recognize patterns and save internal states and events. It will eventually be good at complex stuff. The ones I have can play certain games, even complex state games, fairly well. But those have also taken years to work out.
Basically, AI will always be able to play, but the things listed above drastically change (for now) the amount of effort and time it takes to develop and calibrate one. Even if the game itself isn't super difficult or complicated, requiring people to 'have an intention', then 'observe a semi-random event that affects their intention', then 'take the information from the last 7-10 seconds combined with the outcome of that event, and apply it to their intention', would raise the difficulty of calibrating or training most 'basic AI' enough. It would change the task from 'ok I can just throw a basic Finite State Machine at the problem' up to 'I need thousands of hours of training data before this even starts to do the things I have decided it should do, and I have to set those goals carefully'.
This can be achieved without applying the same complexity to the game's internal 'mob AI', because it isn't a 1v1 style game with equalized parameters or any assumption of fairness.
At this point, the Tracker is just 'a memory assistant/checker', as it should be.
Thank you for the info.
I have to analyze what you told me.
Old traditional AI could have difficulties to learn and I am not familiar with new AI capabilities.
Data from trackers help feeding and training AI
https://forums.advancedcombattracker.com/discussion/283/ai-plugin-tool
AI creators welcome the challenge.
@Mag7spy I read (or at least skim) all the threads, so you can just mention my name and I'll see it. There's no need to ping me, cause people cannot press a single button on their keyboard
So that's my bad here, as you noted.
It's more of a runaway train now, though.
EDIT: Now removed from mine, at least. Won't help relative to 'mine quoted before this point' ofc.
This thread is just where the 'overly' engaged forumers put all the stuff that only they're interested in discussing, y'know?
We just end up talking about the same things in other threads no one cares about otherwise. So, best to let it all be sucked into the black hole of the Megathread.
That said, Mag7's 'discovery' of the AI-infused MSI monitor technically has added some 'real' discussion points to the thread, so I guess 'Mag brought the pop item' this time.
A lot of peripherals over the years have given players advantages outside of the games intended TOS. Some monitors allow you to add things like crosshairs, increased FOV with aspects and resolutions, mice and keyboards with macro key bind scripts. Look at how many streamers(and non-streamers) team up and use their team mates stream to essentially screen peak and back seat game them through various competitive games, extraction looters, battle royales, death cams etc.
Technology has ruined gaming integrity.
Maybe so, but that conclusion relies on three ideals.
1) That it's technology and not 'accessibility' of specific types that did that.
2) That the physical difficulty challenges of the game were intended by the developers of that game (in a way that the peripheral actually bypasses)
3) That gaming 'integrity' was ever a real thing once you left the subculture of 'people who actually kept playing long enough to be talking about it years later on a 'RetroStyle MMO Revival' forum like this one'.
This is why this thread keeps going, after all.
It's going to come down to what Steven greenlights for PvP content. I don't actually expect that the trackers are going to be a PvE-primary thing, based on what little I've seen of their encounter design. It's PvP where you'll see the larger amounts of tracker/parser usage.