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I don't think it has to be an either or. I think AI can solve a lot of problems that currently exist in human spaces with the result being that humans are more drawn in to those spaces.
Take an ELO matchmaking algorithm as an example. In a 'pure' setting there is a pool of players looking for a match and the algorithm matches the players to their closest ELO available. But what happens if you are having a bad day? Or the players around your ELO happen to just be better than you? If the algorithm is 'pure' it wont care, because technically the ELO will balance itself out, so it wont account for the fact that you just lost 3 matches in a row and are probably tilted to the point where you will stop playing if you lose again. But if the algorithm isn't 'pure' and is instead designed with the goal of keeping players playing as long as possible, it can pick up on the fact you are losing to much and send you to play a lower ELO player so you don't burn out. The problem there being that a lower ELO player has to take a loss.
Now the algorithm has a lot of 'power'. It essentially dictates for 80% of players whether they win or lose. The only way to make the field 'fair' is to segment the playing population until the vast majority of players trend towards a 50% winrate. Having a good day? Face higher ELO players, lose, go back to your own ELO. Got tilted? Playing bad? We happen to have a player that's significantly lower ELO, who still has one loss to go before we have to give him a 'win' game, cheer up.
The problem with a 50% winrate is that it isn't satisfying. The problem with ELO is that you can see it go up and down and it might demoralize you. The problem with hidden ELO is that you start feeling the algorithm working behind the scenes. A 50% winrate feels like a slog. It burns people out and they stop playing.
So what happens if we inject the player population with bots? Bots that just lose. Or if need be, bots that win. We can use the bots to break up the predictability of the algorithm. Just throw in random bot games. Give players an extra win because winning feels good. Don't worry about feeling lonely, the vast majority of players are human. We can even make the bots emulate a bad player. Have it make obvious rookie mistakes so that instead of suspecting it of being a bot, you just feel sorry for it. No one is worse off here. Matchmaker has happier players playing for longer.
As an example for the motte, I am sure the AI can figure out what kind of a post will garner the most replies. Why would it be bad for the motte to have an AI that constantly fuels discussions that keep people glued to their screen? If we are completely honest, what else is this place good for?
AI isn't bad for humans from a hedonistic perspective. If we have some higher goals for humanity than wasting time playing chess and arguing online then, sure, AI is probably bad. But for the internet? So long as you know that there are real people watching, like twitter recently started showing, the interaction is real. It doesn't even have to be typed by human hands. A new age of Robot Wars. Watch an AI expertly rattle off all the arguments of 'your side' against the 'opposition'. And if we are being honest, how different is that from the type of representative politics we already settle for? Be it in parliament or in media or online.
Can't relate to this filthy casual sentiment.
Also this system will result in taking longer to "rank up" which will piss people off. Unless you want to hide ELO altogether, which would suck because people don't only want to win, they want the status of being a consistent winner.
In my experience with a number of games that hide elo, is that they have a second set of advancement systems over it that smooth out progression, mostly to reduce the perceived impact of bad streaks and prolong the good feelings of ascending ranks even at a ~50% winrate as your overlay rank catches up to your elo placement.
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I made be a weird outlier, but I find a 50% winrate perfectly acceptable and satisfying as long as the matches feel fair and the competition is close.
I neither want to feel like I'm effortlessly cruising to victory nor like I'm struggling just to keep pace. Okay, there are times I'd like to go on a power trip and just crush everyone, but that's not the same kind of satisfaction as a hard-fought victory.
I think the 'problem,' then, with most matchmaking algos is that they aren't so good at optimizing for close wins except at the very highest levels, and only in games like Chess where random factors effecting outcomes are minimized.
Basically, if you get a couple 'lucky' wins you get paired with people who will absolutely stomp you and that is demoralizing. If you get stomped badly enough you're paired with people who are probably not so good and you win handily, which increases your morale but isn't as satisfying as eking out a hard-fought win. Win too hard and you get launched up back to the big leagues to be smashed.
Maybe 1/4 of the matches you play, if that, are genuinely close to your actual skill level. Thus, the 'quality' of every match, in terms of its enjoyability, varies immensely even if your win rate is consistent.
This yo-yo effect is what I find frustrating. I'd like to play against people whom I feel challenge me when I'm playing at my general 'best' without exerting myself to try to keep pace.
If AI can optimize for that better I'd say "AWESOME." If that means I end up playing against AIs that are optimized to give me that experience, I'd be rather annoyed.
The trick about modern games is that they're not actually fun to lose. I want to derive joy from playing, so if it's not fun to lose I don't get to relax as much and if I lose it invalidates the entire experience- to the point where I actively despise most multiplayer games, and that inability to derive any joy whatsoever from playing them has alienated me from my friends to a non-negligible degree.
A long time ago we invented games that have interesting mechanics with multiple different ways to find the fun in a match; it should be extremely revealing that almost all of the best selling multiplayer video games are either completely open world, have multiple different win conditions, or a massive amount of variations on those win conditions that don't boil down to "win match" or "lose match".
Most modern games, however, do indeed boil down to this. Warcraft 3-descended games (League of Legends and DOTA 2) have very little other obvious strategy other than "wait for the timer to run out" or "the highest APM wins" (which is the problem the former games try to solve), all Battle Royale games move incredibly slowly and winning the engagement is based significantly on luck, and other shooters like Halo and Counter-Strike/Rainbow 6 only record win/loss and getting back to where you were again takes a long time. In the latter's case, the game is "do nothing but stare at a few pixels for a minute and if they change color click the mouse otherwise you die and will spend another minute waiting for the round to end", which is neither fun nor engaging. Titanfall 1 (and Battlefield, and the newer Call of Duty titles) also suffer greatly from this with their increasingly lengthy time between seeing something to shoot at. Racing games suffer from this as well to some extent, but that's also due to the nature of racing games (and why the AI has to cheat as the player continually outmaneuvers it- because if it doesn't there's no longer any challenge) and the refusal to contrive a system where those things are natural... but then again, you only ever notice it when it's done badly.
Most to all lower-tech board and card games also suffer from this, though it's interesting that some foundational observations on player types come from the makers of such a card game. Sure, those games in particular are best seen as iterables, since it doesn't take that much time to play and random chance can and will make perfect plays lose, but that's not necessarily how people view them and the longer they take the less fun they get.
This sort of "there are 5 different games and you're playing them all at once, and each game appeals to a specific type of player" was what made Call of Duty massively successful; where even losing would be advancing your other goals, and there were lots and lots of goals. Provided matches were large enough, and at least on PC they were, you could basically just do whatever and still always be taking an engagement (win or lose) within 15 seconds of spawning in. Payday 2 is the spiritual successor to this kind of game where the name of the game is to complete objectives rather than just kill enemies, has a massive number of ways to go about this (including encouraging certain ways to play through integrated achievements), and each player is scoring a kill once every 15 seconds on average.
I would find a high loss rate acceptable if the difference between win and loss didn't matter in terms of how much fun you're going to have that match. Since most of them tie fun to winning alone, the only winning move is... not to play.
Bingo. Allowing players to define their goals to an extent lets them have an enjoyable time even if they're not ultimately crowned the final winner. Sometimes I find myself doing this manually. "Okay, I don't care if I win this match per-se, but I'm going to try to get X number of kills with this weapon that rarely gets used."
I've realized that there is a burgeoning selection of cooperative-competitive games where the players all share one large over-arching goal, and all are expected to contribute to it, but there are sub-goals, often secret, that each player is trying to achieve in the meantime AND there are certain metrics along which the players ARE competing and can get rewards for better performance.
It's especially interesting and engaging when the gameplay is heavily asymmetric/class based so every player is contributing some particular element which is necessary for success, and is thus having a very different gameplay experience than everyone else. Not a new innovation, Tank/Healer/DPS roles are a well-known staple of multiple genres.
So the group wins or loses as a whole, but each player still has individual 'recognition' for their performance and some incentive to, if not backstab the group, to undermine them in order to advance their own victory conditions.
The trick with THOSE games is to avoid situations where one person's screwups completely tank the group's efforts which makes the whole thing a VERY negative experience for the person catching the blame.
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The problem, insofar as there is one, is that Elo is a metric, not a target. And like all metrics measuring things people want, it immediately gets treated like a target. Which doesn't really make it lose its value as a metric because it's very hard to fake, but it does make people miserable.
Past the first handful of games in a Trueskill style system (where your rating has both an expected value and a variance, and when the system has little knowledge of your skill the variance is huge), the yo-yo effect isn't very real. If the matchmaker is actually matching people close in ranking (a big issue in many games is prioritizing queue times over match quality), it should take extremely improbable streaks to get matched significantly outside your skill range. Realistically, the gap between you at your peak and you on an off day is much bigger than random Elo fluctuations. It's just that when you're treating ranking as a target, not a metric, any random upswings feel like long deserved gains and random downswings feel like the matchmaker is out to get you.
Your level of exertion can't help but be factored into you ranking. If you do ever exert yourself to keep pace, you'll be ranked higher than your general 'best' without exertion. So you're explicitly asking to be matched against people worse than you.
I mean, I'm explicitly asking to be matched against people who will give me a challenge without forcing me to pull out ALL the stops in order to compete, and will fight fair in any event.
It's like a boxer cutting weight to go down a weight class. I still want a real fight, but I don't want to have to focus on optimizing my performance along every possible metric to stand a chance of winning.
Yeah. But we can surely design algorithms that consider ELO but also consider, I guess, the fact that ELO doesn't capture all the factors that might go into the outcome. In some games, weird random factors can impact who wins, or certain particularly cheesy strategies work really well unless you specifically counter them.
Chess doesn't have the problem, mind.
Maybe design the game to ask "Was the previous match fun for you?" and takes your feedback to figure out what level of competitiveness you actually enjoy.
I dunno.
My point is, if you prefer that level of challenge, but will pull out all the stops if challenged more, you're explicitly saying that you'd prefer to not be matched against yourself, but someone worse. The way to get that level of challenge more consistently then is to not tryhard when challenged more, but take the loss and drop in ranking.
The beauty of going off pure Elo is that it doesn't care why you're performing at your level. Whether you're talented but goofing around, or terrible but trying your best, all it does is match you against someone performing at the level you've recently been performing at.
Elo is that algorithm. Trueskill if you want to add in the factor of uncertainty. As a metric, it doesn't matter if your rank jumps around +-100 due to random factors, they'll even out in the long run and are not a precise enough measure that these jumps matter that much. Any consistent change will still only come with an actual change in player skill. It is only as a target where these random jumps leading to losing 200 from where people feel the 'deserve' to be (which is nearly always their peak, though of course the peak is also a random jump ahead) are a problem.
Cheesy strategies are a separate design issue, a match can be perfectly balanced 50/50 but be a boring blowout either way depending on random rock-paper-scissors.
Lets say, for arguments sake, that I can expend my full, sweaty, maximum try-hard effort for about one (1) match before I'm exhausted and return to baseline performance, then I have to rest up before I can expect to pull out that kind of performance again.
In that case, if I go full, all-out aggressive to try and win at all costs, I may pull out a victory, at which point I'm exhausted and I either stop playing for the night, or I go ahead despite knowing my performance will degrade, and guess what, I'm matched to a person with a higher skill level and I can expect to lose pretty handily unless I dig deep for that serious effort again.
It's not clear to me why a ranking algorithm should assume that I play full-tilt at all times, or that I would want to play at full-tilt at all times.
I think this is where my assumptions about competition sort of diverge from the usual. I'm generally not playing to 'win' and improve my ranking. If there's no money or prestige on the line, what would be the point? So I'm playing to have fun and not end up more stressed and angry than when I started.
Which means I want to match with people who will challenge me at the level I'm most comfortable at, in most cases, and not be 'forced' to go all out. Because my goal is having fun and not 'winning,' I don't have to nor want to switch into full on effort-mode if I start losing. I just want it to be fair.
So I don't WANT a ranking algo that expects me to be trying as hard as I can at all times.
I'd like to be able to say, for instance "computer, match me with someone who is a about equal to my my baseline skill level," or "computer, match me with someone who will push me to my limits" or "computer, I don't really care who I match with today."
Again, so I can optimize for having a fun and enjoyable experience, even if I don't win.
It matters from the player experience side, is my point. If my ELO can jump up or down +/- 100 due to random factors, then I can end up matched with players who can, respectively, stomp me easily or are a relative cakewalk, in quick succession, and neither of those experiences is particularly enjoyable.
The yo-yo effect is my issue, and based on my experience with most online competitive multiplayer games (looking at you, COD) the algos tend to yo-yo you around mercilessly. Although that is quite possibly due to the algos they employ being designed to keep you addicted and push microtransactions on you, and thus are not optimized for a smooth experience.
At that point, just let me have a server browser so I can CHOOSE who I play with.
This can achieved by having multiple accounts and switching based on your level of intensity. It is often frowned upon because it can be easily abused, of course. The computer can't really tell whether you're honest or just asking for the first one but actually planning to go all out and stomp people worse than you.
Sure, there's plenty I can do 'manually' to try to fix the issues I'm speaking of. The big one is I just play games with people I already know.
Genuinely, I think I'd be satisfied if all games just included a 'casual' and 'ranked' mode by default, so I can hop into ranked if I ever feel like going all out and seeing how good I can REALLY be.
But I'm still going to point out my issue with the current state of game design.
And if I'm being fully open, my core problem with multiplayer online games these days is rampant cheating, since I can't even feel like the hard-fought matches were fair.
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I imagine that one major issue is that peoples skill varies greatly between different matches.
How's their mood? How tired are they? Are they on drugs? Etc.
What is measured is a very rough estimate of average past performance, but any given game you might be significantly higher or lower than that number.
This goes for every player in the game and if you end up with the people who's playing their first game of the day, had a cup of coffee and haven't smoked pot you're going to roll the other team if two of their players took a smoke break..
For people who play as groups the issues get even worse. Are they trying hard to coordinate in order to win or are they just hanging out, using the game as an excuse?
It is impossible for an algorithm to solve this equation for people who aren't extremely invested in the game and therefore make sure that they almost only play at their best. The issues get worse the further down you go in the rankings.
Yep.
I think the general solution that works well enough is to simply separate out 'casual' and 'ranked' mode, with the expectation that in casual mode you'll get matched with people of wildly different skill levels and competitiveness and thus the game isn't going to be able to keep your winrate consistent
The bigger problem to is how ubiquitous cheating has apparently become, so that you can't be sure that any given match was 'fair' and thus the whole concept of playing multiplayer online with randos gets soured.
Yeah, holy shit it's bad. I returned to playing Dota for a bit and there was cheater in at least every other game, I'm not exaggerating. The scripting has gotten ridiculous and it turned me off from playing, even with friends.
I saw that there was a massive ban wave where even pros got hit but I'm unsure how big of an impact that had.
There was a recent video examining the phenomenon in Escape from Tarkov, which is a game I have really wanted to play for a long time but now, having seen how your odds of being matched up against 'undetectable' cheaters in a given match/raid approaches 1, I literally don't see the point. I play a game to have a certain kind of experience, and that experience assumes everyone is on some kind of level playing field. But no, given the chance to cheat with minimal risk, people do:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=p5LfGcDB7Ek
(the video is long but you only need to watch the first 15 minutes)
If you can't expect other players to uphold the 'spirit' of the game absent some kind of severe policing, then what is the point of being part of a 'gaming' community?
Not a new phenomena, cheating has quite the long and illustrious history in the gaming community.
But the fact that almost all games these days FORCE you play online multiplayer with randos they match you with, it's kind of an important issue if they expect people to keep playing.
With community servers, there were plenty of cheating horror stories of a different kind - people excusing/turning a blind eye to the cheating of a popular member of the community, or people turning to cheats to keep up when they care more about the community than the game.
Though I guess they were still rare enough to be stories, instead of business of usual.
I'm not sure there's ever going to be a full solution, since detection can be so difficult. Although if all game information was kept completely server-side, and the player was just receiving a datastream (like Google Stadia or Amazon Luna) it would fix a lot of the issue.
But I also place a pretty high premium on owning and controlling my own hardware, so I dislike this solution.
Another option would be a persistent, cross-platform, cross-game reputation system tied to player IDs, where proven instances of cheating would follow the player between games and games can do their best to match players with good reputations to each other.
But THAT will of course be abused for other purposes too so... I really don't know.
Oh yeah, the other problem is that cheating can be dialed up or down too. So even if someone isn't using a full-on aimbot, they can still use tools that make them just a tiny bit more accurate on average while still looking like 'natural' gameplay. So cheats can be fine-tuned to a much higher degree than detection can be.
Bring back couch-based multiplayer and LAN parties, so cheaters can immediately be nut-tapped upon detection.
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It's even interesting to play people better than you, ie win rate significantly less than 50%, if it means the matches are harder / I can learn more. Whereas with a win rate significantly greater than 50% you're just 'going through the motions', aren't learning much, aren't challenged, etc.
Agreed. although when they disparity is too great it can be very hard to notice what you're doing 'wrong' when no matter what you try you get stomped.
Because at the apex of skill level in certain games the players can pull of stuff that genuinely looks impossible.
That said, getting absolutely roflstomped by a high level player can be extremely amusing as you sit there in awe of their effortless dominance.
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Yeah, I play Dota and have a 51% lifetime winrate. It's perfectly fine and I don't mind it at all (currently on a 7 game lose streak, still gonna play a game tomorrow). You just need to have the self discipline to realise when you need to quit for the day. I would much rather lose a very close 60 minute game than win a stomp against people significantly below me in skill, that just gets boring as very little you do messes you up so you aren't incentivised to play to the best of your ability.
Yeah, DOTA and it's competitors seem to have achieved a state where there's very little that random chance can do to effect outcomes and players can either work hard at getting better and try to hang with the highest performers or slum it with people who are less interested in heavy competition.
I think the problem comes when people value winning-as-winning, vs. winning-as-having-fun and the actual outcome of the match is of secondary importance.
I could genuinely accept a 1/3 winrate, I think, if I felt
A) I was being beaten 'fairly' and closely, and
B) I was actually getting better at the game and the challenge was scaling appropriately.
That is effectively my definition of 'fun' in a competitive setting.
Obviously ANYONE can get frustrated if they aren't winning at all despite playing their best. But for me, I get a slightly masochistic thrill from losing when I can see what I did wrong and it gives me something to work on and incrementally improve for the next time, such that the later victory will be all the sweeter.
Yes, I enjoy roguelike games, why do you ask?
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