[MUD-Dev] FEAR Animat style AI for Quake 2

[Frank Crowell]

From: "Amanda Walker" <amanda at alfar.com>
> On 12/2/02 12:14 PM, Freeman, Jeff <jfreeman at soe.sony.com> wrote:

>> In my experience, players don't even like it when AI is given the
>> ability to determine that a given battle is a lost cause, that
>> the AI ought to just run away.  They like the AI to be a bit
>> stupid.

> Indeed.  They want opponents to be challenging but generally
> beatable.  This translates to "I don't want to lose more than 1 in
> 5."  It's weird how 20% pops in people's assessments of how
> prevalent something is.  If you give someone a perfectly evenly
> matched opponent, they will interpret themselves as being at a
> disadvantage, and will go to quite impressive lengths to "even the
> odds", where "even" seems to happen at about that "lose 20% of the
> time" boundary.

> Parallels to real world arms races are left as an exercise for the
> reader.

PVP seems to show this behavior.  The initial argument for PVP is a
desire for a more challenging opponent.  However very rarely are
fights demonstrations of the best of the best.  Instead the victim
is someone at the bank, away from the keyboard, or someone that
recently was in a fight -- or even better currently in a fight. The
professional PVPers have insane armor, insane weapons, and insane
resists.

Most people on PVP servers don't want to PVP.  But that doesn't make
them leave either.  There is a tension there that you don't get on
the nonPVP server.  I believe that you would get the same tension if
you had ultrasmart, unltrahard mobs.

frank


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