The state of NPCs and their blatant cheating, how to get the trust back?

Loskene

L
Vincent Starson said:
Oh cool, I haven't noticed those yet. Well that answers one of my main questions about how can we test if they take heat damage.

I do hope its just the bugged weapon and that gets fixed.

If they experience cap drain, how can they shoot that many plasmas in such a short amount of time? Shooting a plasma drains a significant amount of cap. Their other weapons are still firing while shooting the bugged weapon, seems like they don't use cap to me or the weapon is seriously bugged.
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I can't say for certain since I'm not the one with the job of debugging the system, but it appears that the bugged weapons aren't having any constraints applied to them when the NPC fires. Normally if it issues a fire command it should check several things to allow it to proceed:
-Is there available capacitor juice to allow the shot?
-Is the weapon damaged?
-How much heat will this add to the ship?
-How quickly can the weapon fire again?

It appears that every single one of these checks is being ignored by the bugged weapons and the only signal the game receives is "fire the weapon" regardless of any of the above constraints. And so the weapon fires, doesn't add any heat, doesn't drain the cap, and can fire again instantly without having to reload. It's a pretty mean bug so I hope it gets squashed soon. Must be a nightmare for the insurance companies.
 

thorn-

thorn-
avow555 said:
Which rules do you remember them saying the NPCs bend?

I'm guessing unlimited ammo/chaff and zero heat issues.
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I've seen a lot of complaints about this, but haven't personally seen a lot of evidence of it. Sometimes I fly around with 4 chaff units - not unlimited, but it certainly might seem that way to another CMDR.
 

Vincent Starson

V
Mohrgan said:
You gain this knowledge through observation. When they aren't bugged, NPC's don't cheat. There is no reason for FD to make a pact with us concerning NPC behavior. Some mystery is necessary, or at least desirable.
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Yes, by observing what the lead AI programmer posts is one of those ways, maybe the best way. I agree that before 2.1 they didn't seem to cheat. I'd argue that the NPCs having 0.0 second reaction time to you shooting a plasma/cannon that they dodge is unfair because humans have reaction time, but I think for gameplay reasons it's fine to add difficulty that way.

I've played since launch day and never thought they cheated but now I'm not so sure after seeing this. It looks like they don't take heat damage and have infinite cap. NPCs should take heat damage, and be limited by cap / pips.

If it's a bug(s), fix it and prove it to us that it's fixed.
 

DaveB

DaveB
Vincent Starson said:
Which rules do you remember them saying the NPCs bend?
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The only rule they are INTENDED to bend is infinite MC ammo. This is to avoid MC ammo depletion triggering the oversensitive "flee" response.

Anything else is a bug.

At the moment a lot of folks are conflating bugs, balance issues with the prevalence of engineer mods on NPCs etc with "cheating" or "rule bending" on the AIs part, but this is not the case. It is, however, very understandable as so many NPC changes have muddied the waters a lot in 2.1.
 

Vincent Starson

V
thorn- said:
I've seen a lot of complaints about this, but haven't personally seen a lot of evidence of it. Sometimes I fly around with 4 chaff units - not unlimited, but it certainly might seem that way to another CMDR.
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You can see the NPC's subsystems and count how many chaff units they have. I've never run into chaff being a problem but it's just one of those artificial advantages that you keep in the back of your mind when fighting them.

The main issue is heat damage, why don't they take any? Secondly, why do they appear to have infinite cap? I thought they had pip control.
 

DragoonKnight

DragoonKnight
Vincent Starson said:
You can see the NPC's subsystems and count how many chaff units they have. I've never run into chaff being a problem but it's just one of those artificial advantages that you keep in the back of your mind when fighting them.

The main issue is heat damage, why don't they take any? Secondly, why do they appear to have infinite cap? I thought they had pip control.
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Pretty sure that I fought an NPC today that was suffering from heat damage and some other problem. Not sure about the infinite cap.
 

DaveB

DaveB
Vincent Starson said:
You can see the NPC's subsystems and count how many chaff units they have. I've never run into chaff being a problem but it's just one of those artificial advantages that you keep in the back of your mind when fighting them.

The main issue is heat damage, why don't they take any? Secondly, why do they appear to have infinite cap? I thought they had pip control.
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If you can collect video evidence of that, showing their ammo count before and after they pop some (video needs to show count before, visual proof that they deployed some, count after, without cuts or edits) you should report it as a bug. Please link the bug report thread here so others can add any evidence they collect.

ETA: this is not just being dismissive. it is now absolutely CRITICAL that bug that allow NPCs to evade the rules they are supposed to follow are reported so they can be fixed. The improvements to AI flight skill make those bugs much more significant than they were before.
 
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Vincent Starson

V
DaveB said:
If you can collect video evidence of that, showing their ammo count before and after they pop some (video needs to show count before, visual proof that they deployed some, count after, without cuts or edits) you should report it as a bug. Please link the bug report thread here so others can add any evidence they collect.
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Alright, soon as FD pays me to QA their game lol
 

Hexcaliber

Hexcaliber
Seriously, oh wow.

BOO ....... HOO, why the hell does it matter; the ai are still as dumb as a house brick. Coding half decent ai is complex, but you wouldnt know it from all the "forum experts" willing to whine about it or give the devs their opinions.

The more complex your ai, the more system resources they use, you may not feel this is important living in your little bubble playing against the ai 1 V 1. However, consider what happens when you jump into a war zone with a player wing, with 20 or 30 ai fighting players and one another, then consider that that is a single instance within the game with just a handful of the players that are currently online. As the gamer you do not need to consider the resource hit, you can live in blind ignorance, but the developers cannot afford to.

There have to be compromises where ai are concerned, both so they can present a decent challenge, and do so with out becoming a resource hog.
 
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Meric

Meric
DaveB said:
The only rule they are INTENDED to bend is infinite MC ammo. This is to avoid MC ammo depletion triggering the oversensitive "flee" response.

Anything else is a bug.

At the moment a lot of folks are conflating bugs, balance issues with the prevalence of engineer mods on NPCs etc with "cheating" or "rule bending" on the AIs part, but this is not the case. It is, however, very understandable as so many NPC changes have muddied the waters a lot in 2.1.
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This is true.

Please FD, fix the rate of fire bugs before you consider any ai changes!
 
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