Every MMO game I ever played, I quit because the hacks/cheats/bots/pay-to-win just ruined it to the point where it wasn't fun anymore. I used to think f*ck 'em, I'm not going to let them ruin my game. But once you realise you're basically being farmed...

I have thought for a while now that something needs to be done. Something needs to change. Perhaps this is the straw that broke the camel's back, and something better will emerge from the other side. It helps to remain optimistic in these dark days. I think your timeline is off, but the AI 'singularity' is certainly on the horizon. In the words of Lt. Coffey (The Abyss): "We can't trust them. We may have to take steps. We're gonna have to take steps."

It won't be, as outside the MP arena there's not much point to such a thing.

Musing: I always wondered why people(I mean beyond those with physical handicaps/etc) would bother with such things. Imo those into such should perhaps just stick to let's plays, if they're going to take all the interaction out of gaming.

1: Some people are just assholes/griefers.
2: (The bigger part.) Since the explosion of "engagement" [rather than actual fun] as the goal of games, and they've been re-designed to have hamster wheels of content (often missable content in "seasons"), considerable value has been placed on accounts that have things, and there's a black market on it too. See also: "gold farming" in MMOs. But even for the individual, there's incentive to fire something up to get your daily 25 kills toward this month's skin. (I feel gross even typing that.) See arena games like Fortnight, or that recent Doom service.

Related: Jim Sterling's video this week was about just this, the black market of FIFA currency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb8_ztzJivM


We can hope this shit PROLIFERATES and games can return to more sensible design with fun as its goal rather than "engagement-for-microtransaction-opportunities".

By the "FPS genre", you mean only competitive online FPS games?

If so, maybe it is good news to single-player FPS games, and single-player games in general?

You're quite far off there, this type of stuff is easy enough for a 6 year old to train a network and do. We are very far off from anything resembling a general intelligence.

Yes and to everyone else, I meant online MP FPS. Thanks for the correction.

Sony or some other company was recently patenting bots that the user programmed through " machine learning" . Other companies were probably stealing peoples gameplay to program their own A.I with before that. So now players get to benefit.
I am surprised there weren't programmable boxes to perform basic task and moves for stuff like machinima. There seems to be something similar for consoles but it's aimed at cheaters aim assist instead of machinima or the disabled. I don't like cheaters taking the fun out of gaming but gaming has been ruined more by shit companies and games cheating and harming players. He should have released it for free and screwed over activison and blizzard. The good skins are bought instead of farmed and ironically cheats like these expose Counter Strikes broken* game engine so it and other games shouldn't even be competitive FPS because they are taking advantage of its players.


* perhaps on purpose

MMOs were ruined by the companies making them, treating players like mugs. Ironically levelling bots protected customers interests because if companies dicked people about then they could they could quit without having wasted so much of their time.


That's how it was done 20 years ago when there such things as GSPs. Staff and some volunteers would review recorded game demos people sent them with off line cheats to try and see if people were cheating i.e wallhacking.

Concerning for who? I, for one, would be extatic if going forward companies were forced to focus on a great single-player experience, and games that somehow rely for e-sports for their profitability or longevity can all go fuck themselves for all I care.

'Forced' is a strong word. A fighting word!

I agree that single-player should be favoured by the devs. But gold has its luster.


Of course. But there is a lot of money in esports. Enough to get on mainstream TV. Enough to get adverts to millions of eyes and ears.

I guess if you only play single player games, this isn't a relevant issue.

It's concerning regarding the unpredictability of these big companies like Blizzard-Activision, EA, Valve, etc. finding other ways of maintaining the same profitability by increasing revenue elsewhere - not necessarily in the form of more single player games or new IPs unless it includes microtransactions. Or I guess they could lay off gamedevs and maybe those laid off staff will release indie games in a couple years, but I don't know enough about likelihood to comment.

At least with a status quo, you can map out the clear trajectory of what they're doing through their annual reports and news reports than with all this uncertainty. I could just be overblowing it, though.

Really scary... and this is the end of video gaming:
"University of Maryland Engineers Have 3D Printed a Soft Robotic Hand That Can Play Nintendo"

https://eng.umd.edu/news/story/university-of-maryland-engineers-have-3d-printed-a-soft-robotic-hand-that-can-play-nintendo

Activision / Nintendo: Act fast!

(Disclaimer - Yeah I am exaggerating: The 101 method to get views...)

So instead of using aim bots which already exist, we're dealing with an AI so it can play like humans and have the same problems as humans, and this is a bad thing, because i'll get bullied by an AI that's indistinguishable from humans?

When has another hack been C&D'd by a major company 6 days after release? Was it simply because they used Warzone in its product trailers?

No, because the consequences are a loss of interest in online MP and ultimately, the game. There's nothing about bullying here.

Ok, but instead of this nebulous loss of interest in MP, i'm actually more interested in how it can increase interest. We're talking about new bot technology that could be used to accurately emulate a human, to deal with the problem of games not having enough human players. By the point that the opponents are convincingly human, we've then increased the quality of both single-player games as well as official bots in games. This seems more like a boon, to me.

If we're going to say it's going to result in a loss of interest, we kinda have to define why. Why would people loose interest in a game where the bots don't suck as much and are convincingly human-like? Oh no, pillowman1996 is actually a bot, and scores are earned from playing like a human just he can't coordinate with other players like humans do. Oh no, for shame, i got killed by a bot that can miss shots in call of duty! Right? I mean, what's the argument?