Charlie Brown v Lucy: Winning Eleven "scripting" debate

[Sload Soap]

I've had an undefeated season in PES5 Master League on Extreme...but that took me a lot of coming back to the game from time to time to see if it was possible. It is.

Some of the cheating I encountered was hilarious at some points. Almost like a wind blowing the ball in the wrong direction...and defenders and goalies practically throwing the ball into my own goal.

I've never encountered anything that bad. I too managed a few undefeated seasons over various PES and FIFA games on the hardest difficulty back in t'day. With football games though I feel the stat manipulation is there to reflect the nature of the sport; that is anything can happen, a great team can lose to a bad team if they have a bad day.

I hear what you are saying about "cheating" AI though and I'd say it is a useful, if lazy, tool a developer has to create difficulty. Aside from the RTS examples mentioned the most egregious uses of this type of difficulty come from fighting and kart racing games. In fighting games we have opponents reading your moves, blocking or breaking unblockable moves, performing complicated command inputs in a single frame and SNK bosses. Kart racers still have rubber banding and enemies will fire on the player even if it makes no tactical sense to do so (Allstars Transformed, I'm looking at you!).

So what we want here is the COM to be more creative, more human.

[vic oakland]

RTSs also cheat by giving the AI perfect knowledge of everything everywhere at all times. e.g. It takes me time to find all my idle villagers and assign them new tasks. The AI can do it instantly.

I would tend to prefer games where AI is separate from game mechanics to avoid this kind of cheating. Chess is a great example. The AI has exactly as much information as you do, and follows all the same rules. More games should be like that.

I hear you on the villagers, but it is possible to "surprise" the Com in Age of Empires, right? The AI can't see your scouts and raids until they happen...right?

Your chess analogy is really interesting. I heard an anecdote about grandmasters playing early computers who would deliberately create unusual positions so that the COM would have a hard time calculating what was for the human a fairly easy to read position.

The same could go for Winning Eleven / PES but on a simpler level. Players who pass and shoot at 45 degree angles create more confusion/possibility sets for the COM AI...and players who take advantange of COM confusion score more goals.

[vic oakland]

So what we want here is the COM to be more creative, more human.

Yes, but also, different from human v human gameplay...more fair and neutral and unemotional.

No rage quitting, trash talking or human cheating. Just more subtle and nuanced in how it creates gameplay challenge.

It's funny, some oldschool RPG's (and even some recent ones) were fairly brutal in creating instant death game overs. That was/is part of the joy of it I guess.

My problem with Pro Evo is just the enormous time investment in order to get to the defining match of a Master League season...it's like 30 hours of gameplay loaded into one 10 minute match set to Auto Save with an automatic loss if you disconnect or quit mid game. Argh.