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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.
Use of AI for Balancing
Saiytama
Member, Alpha Two
In a conversation with a friend, he mentioned that MMORPG games usually do not have accurate balancing due to the fact that we are human and cannot analyze all possibilities. However, this does not entirely apply to Artificial Intelligence. It would be possible to train one to assist in balancing the classes and races in Ashes of Creation, so that it would be responsible for performing simulations and possibilities of builds, thereby providing a wider range of solutions for balancing.
I believe that within a reduced scope, a human could do this. However, when the number of possibilities increases significantly, not even the creators can handle the vast amount of possibilities and builds. In this way, we could avoid having overly unbalanced classes or races. I know that achieving 100% balance is impossible, but we could get as close as possible to this number by using Artificial Intelligence as a means to validate as many combinations of builds as possible.
I believe that within a reduced scope, a human could do this. However, when the number of possibilities increases significantly, not even the creators can handle the vast amount of possibilities and builds. In this way, we could avoid having overly unbalanced classes or races. I know that achieving 100% balance is impossible, but we could get as close as possible to this number by using Artificial Intelligence as a means to validate as many combinations of builds as possible.
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Comments
Kinda like having AI do your cooking so you get a tasty meal but have no fun cooking. Or just reading book reviews instead of reading the book yourself. Or giving your significant other toys to play with instead of making love to them yourself.
In my opinion, all classes and races should have the capacity to reach a common potential, and from there, the rock-paper-scissors system would work very well. For example, everyone could reach 100 power, where this 100 represents various experiences, items, builds, buffs, and so on. But the 100 of rock would be superior to the 100 of scissors, for example, because of the compatibilities and counters from one class to another.
We have the Ashes database to access various information, and they also have the damage/defense calculations. We can work on the idea of how to simulate and feed the AI so it can run the simulations as accurately as possible. I don't know how the team is currently using metrics to perform the balancing, but we could incorporate the same logic while feeding the AI.
don't need ai to balance anything. why would I need a prediction of which numbers I need to adjust, especially when the prediction will be incorrect plenty of times, instead of knowing exactly what number I need to adjust?XD
What does "balancing classes and races" mean exactly?
Should the goal be to nerf physical damage dealer classes like Rangers and Rouges when a server has a lot of magical damage classes like Mage, Cleric and Summoners, because those are weak to Rangers and Rouges as per the Rock-Paper-Scissors design?
Because to my knowledge it seems that the balancing of combat power is exactly that: a Rock-Paper-Scissors System as described in the Wiki (see Link)
The balancing within that system will be done during the Alpha 2 and the Beta Phase. And the balance is supposed to topple when certain roles on a server become more common than others. More Casters means Phyiscal Damage Dealers will become stronger, more Physical Damage Dealers mean Bruiser become stronger, more Bruisers mean Casters become stronger.
Let's be honest, there will be many items, various classes, and races, so there are countless possibilities that could take many years and a very robust team to balance well. Therefore, the balancing model I am proposing is not about making everyone equal in strength (without counters), but rather ensuring that within the Rock-Paper-Scissors system, everyone has a chance to win even when fighting against a class that is strong against theirs (in Brazil, we say something like "having fingers," referring to the player's PvP skill).
Seeing how the world event system is dynamic, it can be assumed that there already is some sort of Virtual Intelligence in use to make that work and to me that sounds like they are already on it.
Input from Experienced Pvp Players might be better. Only Problem with that, is that in a Class-Locked Game, people are usually very biased in their class assessment due to Ego reasons, very vocal with the weaknesses of their own class and blind to their Strengths. But AoC putting so much on transparency and Player Feedback&Interaction, maybe itll be better
AI is good at objective things, like math. So if you wanted to equalize DPS output across all classes in ideal conditions, then yeah, AI could do that somewhat easily. But you could also do that by writing a simulator, which is much simpler than fiddling with AI.
It's the subjective parts of balance that I think AI would really fail at. Take this hypothetical for example:
Say the bard had an AOE silence in a 15ft radius for 1s. For starters, what do you balance that against? You could calculate how much outgoing damage was prevented, sure, but a 1s 15ft radius stun is going prevent just as much outgoing damage. Obviously a silence and stun aren't balanced 1 for 1. In a silence you can still move, but what's the value of moving? The AI needs a number to balance against, how do you quantify being able to move?
Maybe you can balance it against something like a tank's wall. The wall breaks ranged LoS so they can't attack until they reposition, and maybe that takes about 1s so it's effectively like a 1s silence, right? Let's pretend that's true for a second. People hate feeling helpless, and a silence makes you feel helpless. A wall is a wall, you go around it lol. Mechanically they both limit damage the same amount, but the silence feels worse. So the forums are spammed with posts about the bard silence being OP and how much everyone hates it, but the wall doesn't get a single comment. They're objectively balanced, but a human factor makes one feel like it's not balanced. How does an AI grapple with that?
Balancing is as much about numbers as it is about vibes. If something feels balanced, then it's balanced. I don't think an AI is going to understand vibes. Even if it could, AI needs to be trained, as others have said. I haven't checked, but I'm fairly certain there isn't a balancing dataset that exists, let alone one that takes into consideration player sentiment.
It can’t think of anything, it can only regurgitate information