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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

I wish some of these latest AI advances went into giving us better in-game bots so I can have fun playing on my own rather than be sniped by an expert player from half the game away who thought he would play on the newbie server for (his own) fun.

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The hardest bot level on CS:GO already is more challenging than low- or mid-level players. To be fair, the level below the hardest is way easier. All non-wingman standard maps don't allow sniping over much of the map. Are you talking about a different game?

You're being too literal.

Offline play with bots lets you control the difficulty. Online play largely does not. Some people just wanna be John Wick for fun.

I suspect the concern OP was referring to was not that bots aren’t challenging, but to the sense they play differently than players do. There is overlap in what it means to be good vs players and bots, but there are also elements unique to one or the other.

Yeah this is the biggest complaint with bots. It's like a Chess AI. Sure the best Chess AI can absolutely dominate any human player, but they do it in an inhuman and un-fun way.

Like sure a Counter Strike bot can aim better and faster than me. But their positioning and overall strategic gameplay sucks.

Yeah exactly. It's the same for racing games; at the moment most bots are just allowed to cheat (racing games) or are just very good at noticing everything (cs bots), but they're not "clever" like a person is.

What we really want is a cs bot that actually has some tactics, but can also make mistakes. I'd love to feel like I've been tricked by the bot (ie they throw a smoke out a window for no good reason other than now I know they're in the building, so I approach the entrance to the building, only to be shot in the back because the bot has repositioned; it threw the smoke not to occlude, but to bait me), but also feel like I have tricked the bot now and then (ie being able to tell that the bot reasoned fairly well about what I was trying to do, but that I still outplayed it).

The CSGO ranking system is not that bad, most of the time you play with others on your skill level

Yeah the issue is how fucking toxic the CS community is. I'm usually pretty numb to people talking shit but my god, I always remember why I stopped playing CS every time I reinstall to play it again.

It has been toxic since I started playing cs way back in 2000.

Last I played was in 2018 I think. I don’t remember many problems, even on the Silver ranks I played. Maybe every third game or so, some griefer or abusive player would get voted off the team, which was fairly frustrating but not always catastrophic to the game.

Every third game one player would get voted off the team in a 5v5 game, and you don't remember many problems? That's a serious issue, it absolutely isn't normal.

They updated the game so that you don’t get a bot anymore. This greatly decreased the amount of vote kicking.

While the community is generally garbage, Valorant and LoL have even worse chats, text or voice. I get chill teammates more often in CS than elsewhere.

I might start playing FPS games again. I'm too old to compete with younger people with more time than me.

>I'm too old to compete with younger people with more time than me.

Excuse when young: No wonder I suck, I'm competing with grownups with better computers than mine.

Excuse when adult: No wonder I suck, I'm competing with youngsters with more free time than me.

Sorry, are we talking about videogaming? Or a career as a programmer?

everything is the same.

Haha, the sweet spot only lasts so long.

In CS GO you really get better with Practice.

I tried some Aim Practice Maps from the workshop. That helped improve my aim. Don't get that opportunity during the actual game.

I used to play for 30-40 mins a day, that wasn't sufficient time in game to improve. Especially against players who are playing for the better part of a day.

Have you played some of the community FFA servers? If you choose hard bots, on most servers, the bots have inhuman reaction and accuracy.

But I guess your point is fair -- it would be much nicer to see bots that cooperate as well as they aim. Would allow much more realistic takeover scenarios to be played.

Yea, I think your second paragraph captures it. "Better" doesn't mean mechanically better at aiming. It means more realistic, and player-like behavior. Maybe also more more behavioral variance, so they don't feel like a team of 5 copies of the same person.

I remember superhuman bots in Perfect Dark. It was kind of fun to play against them sometimes (by setting traps and cheesing map geometries mostly) but it was not very much like playing multiplayer at all.

I play offline with bots exclusively. I'm older, have been playing CS since the beta days and no longer have the patience to play with real people and all their inherent aggravations.

Could this also be achieved with a better rating system that automatically matches you with players of your own level?

That's game-able though, no? I know people can on CoD.

We’re a more than a decade into the arms race of “video game matchmaking is game-able” and “let’s try to counteract attempts to game the ranking system,” I wonder who is winning at the moment.

That's not a difficult problem to solve.

The difficult problem to solve is to find the right space between "Matchmaking results in the most skilled players being at the top of the ladder" and "Matchmaking results in fun matches."

The casual community for any game is much larger than the top-0.1% community, and cares a lot more about the latter than the former.

And by my understanding at least some time back the top-0.1% community is anyways outside the ladder system. On third-party services. So CSGO kinda should aim for the later.

CS does match making now. They had a few problems:

1. Small pool of active players so queue times could be long

2. They had a "gulf" where you got de-ranked down into lower tiers and it was a lot of good players in the bottom tiers that couldn't fight their way out to higher tiers with possibly equal players.

They fixed 2 with a re-calibrating a few months ago. They have 18 ranks now. I jumped up 5ish with the re-calibrate.

1. Small pool of active players so queue times could be long

CS:GO usually has 900k players online at any time? Yes not all playing MM but still...

Sounds like singleplayer games would be more your speed.

Speaking for myself: yes. The only multiplayer FPS I ever truly enjoyed was L4D, and only because it's cooperative (I did enjoy Versus mode, but coop is where it shined for me).

The problem is that many military shooters don't (or didn't) have singleplayer, or what they did have was a simple demo for the MP mode. That sucks. I enjoyed the first iterations of the CoD and Modern Warfare titles because they were all about the singleplayer campaign, full of plot twists. I got tired eventually and no longer play any CoD or MW games, but that's a different issue.

If you had very specific periods of time you were interested in, it was even worse. There was a time when there was absolutely no singleplayer 'Nam FPS, only Battlefield: Vietnam, which a- sucked, and b- was multiplayer.

More than a decade later, and I'm still playing 1 game of l4d2 each weekend with the same people. It is such a great game. (We do play Versus).

That said, many things make COD less fun to me today than in the past, but the root cause is not having dedicated servers. Running into the same people and actually having that sense of community is completely gone now.

Mostly? I like the Assassin's Creed games, Witcher 3, Far Cry etc. I'd probably play more multi-player games if I lasted more than 30s and didn't have to sit out the rest of the round.

(Yeah, yeah "git gud" etc)

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