Poll: Rubber Band AI: Yay or Nay?

[PainInTheAssInternet]

After playing Need for Speed again, I've become acutely aware of Rubber Band AI again.

For those who don't know, Rubber Band AI is the term given to artificial intelligence in video games that bases its performance on yours. It is supposed to make the game fine-tune itself to the player's capabilities and therefore provide a better challenge. Unfortunately, people and therefore computer coding is imperfect so there's often the effect that a game can become extremely difficult to win for reasons that are beyond your control. The better you are, the harder the AI will fight back. Just like tying two objects together, the further you try to get from that other object, the harder it snaps back at you.

A few examples I personally know of are ones that drive me right up the friggin' wall.
In DRIV3R, it is literally impossible to lose the cops. No matter what car you drive at whatever speed, they will go twice your speed to catch up with you. The AI isn't programmed to be good at driving (in fact, they are utterly atrocious), they just have a literal "double-speed" line of code.

In Need for Speed and Midnight Club, the AI can be impossibly good and the definition of a cheating bastard. These games are heavily reliant on stats of the vehicles so you may be surprised when you are in the fastest car in the game and you are getting demolished by middle-of-the-road cars. In this context, I just cannot forgive rubber band AI.

I've heard about it being in sports games where the better you do, the more likely your team will screw up for no real reason and the enemy team will start playing as if they were superhuman.

The thing is, it sounds so good in theory; a game that caters to your specific abilities. Better than just slapping arbitrary, immobile numbers and calling it a day. On the other hand, I've yet to see it implemented in a way where I didn't get upset.

So, what are your personal encounters with Rubber Band AI and what's your opinion on it?

EDIT: You're either for it or against it, mongrel. This is an important issue and also I completely forgot to add any other options.

 

[totheendofsin]

I think it depends on how it's implemented, I'd agree that letting the CPU break the rules of the game (ie: cars going faster than the game allows) is bullshit, but simply increasing the intelligence so they don't crash as often, or in games with items give racers further back better items

 

[Mezahmay]

I think there's a mine cart race in Banjo-Tooie where the trick is to game the AI by going really slow for the first 3/4ths of the race, then mash the A button to accelerate faster than the AI can adjust for. That sounds like textbook rubber band AI exploiting to me.

 

[Prime_Hunter_H01]

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

As soon as I found out about the concept of Rubber-band AI it pissed me off because I retroactively recognized its use in many game that gave me trouble when I was younger.

I'm fine with adaptive difficulty but it that is when from match to match, level to level, it increases.

Rubber band AI only exist to rip victory from you at the last second to inflate the length of a game and make the difficulty fake difficulty.
I get that it was a compensation earlier when AI was not as good but since it still persists it is bullshit.

Good Adaptive difficulty to would at least let you keep your win if you earned it and bump the difficulty in the next level so it feels like a real progression in skill, not tease you with victory and then snatch it from you in the end.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

If you're far ahead of a race, the opponents are so behind you could idle on the side of the road for about twenty seconds and still not lose first place (Mario Kart), and the game gives you a bit more challenge by flinging the AI closer to you to keep you engaged in the race: yeah, it's fine.

The game outright breaking its own rules just to shit on your day: no.

 

[Aurion]

Nay.

It's pretty rare for AI rubberbanding to be anything other than gold-star bullshit.

It doesn't get better over time either; once you figure out where the line is for the AI to go nuts, it becomes a very strange, unfun metagame of staying juuuuust under that line.

 

[StriderShinryu]

There's almost nothing I hate more in AI than rubberbanding. I can even accept the AI being better statistically than the player or having access to moves/weapons/etc. that the player doesn't because, hey, a good player is always going to end up being strategically better than an AI could be without enhancements. Rubberbanding, on the other hand, is just garbage and is a cheap and terrible way to design your AI. It's a crap shortcut for actually trying to make the AI better.

 

[mezorin]

Say what you will about Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, but when you get good at that game the game actively rewards you for being awesome. If you get as good as Batman and can make it through Sen's Fortress in one life, the game will reward you as such and let you be Batman. In comparison, the Mario Kart is the biggest crock of shit ever with its rubber band AI. The game actively PUNISHES you for being a good racer, period. If Dark Souls was like Mario Kart, if you did not die in the last 15 minutes a ship launched Cruise Missile you cannot avoid would drop on your position and kill you, because its 'fair' to the bad guys.

Mario Kart is the absolute worst at this, and doesn't even try to hide it. You can actually see the enemy CPU racers enter a "non aggression pact" once you hit first place as they stop flinging stuff at each other and go straight after you. Its almost like the recent Speed Racer movie where every damn character in the Mushroom Kingdom is on the take from Bowser (unless you're playing as him, then he's enemy #1) and is out to kill you/fling blue shells at you 10 meters from the finish. No matter how fast you drive or know the tracks, the CPU is on your ass just a few lengths behind, waiting for that blueshell/thunder bolt to knock you back to 8th place. Winning cups and getting unlocks is pure damn luck under this system. Your 5 year old cousin could luck into winning a race just as well as the world's top five players in single player. This is horrid design, as while I can get making things even and fun in multiplayer (we all have shots when a blue shell is used, good times), punishing players for actually getting good at the game is against everything gaming is about.

 

[LaoJim]

In Need for Speed and Midnight Club, the AI can be impossibly good and the definition of a cheating bastard. These games are heavily reliant on stats of the vehicles so you may be surprised when you are in the fastest car in the game and you are getting demolished by middle-of-the-road cars. In this context, I just cannot forgive rubber band AI.

Midnight Club is a particularly egregious example in that it is very obvious that if you screw up in the first half of the race you can easily get first place back, whereas if you screw up on the last corner you will inevitably go from first to last because all the cars bunch up and stay right behind you and no matter how well you drive its impossible to build up any kind of lead. (And given the fact you are racing through an city with a lot of obstacles means that screwing up is very difficult to avoid) The game generally is one of the most maddeningly difficult racing games out there since it makes you win (or at least top the leaderboard) for three or four races in a row in pass each section and won't allow you to restart one race without cancelling out your progress in the previous races. On its own this might be seen as being suitably hardcore but with the cheating AI it ends up infuriating. On the other hand Iis don't notice it so much with Need for Speed games because they are generally pretty easy to win. Was there a particular NfS game you are thinking of.

Since people generally seem to be against rubberbanding, maybe I can mention an alternative (and maybe opposite) problem. I call this the "F1 owners problem" after my experiences with Gran Torismo 3 years ago. In that game you got new cars at semi-random (I can't remember if it was after levelling up or after winning a cup). For the first few hours of the game I was playing happily and the difficulty seemed reasonably balanced. However after I won a F1 race car I could easily win any race in the game that didn't have vehicle limitations on it. Even if I spun out a couple of times I could easily gain 20 seconds on my opponents on each lap. Having won the main races I now had enough money to buy the best car for each of the races the F1 car was ineligible to join. At this point the game stopped being fun. Now the obvious answer to this is to say that after I'd realized the problem I should have stopped using the F1 car and used something else to race in, but what? Even if I downgraded to a Bugatti Veyron the race would have still been fairly easy. Perhaps the trick is to use exactly the same cars as the AI opponents (even then its not always clear what custom parts the cars are using), but this removes the sense of reward of unlocking new cars if you can't use them.

Forza 2 particularly has this problem in that the best way to win is to have the most powerful car and it puts the most powerful car on the start of the grid, meaning that you are generally in first place all the way. Basically the developers are handing over the choice of how difficult the game should be to the player rather than defining easy/medium/hard challenges for the player. I haven't played Forza 3 but Forza 4 'solves' the problem (at least in career mode) by tuning all the cars on the grid so they are equivalent in power. I'm not really sure how I feel about this as it seems to defeat the purpose of having so many cars in the game. The nice thing about Forza is that the driving is so fun that even if you are a lap ahead of everyone else you can still enjoy the race.

I'm wondering if there are any ways to 'save' rubber banding. That is to say to implement a system that keeps cars close to you throughout the race, but that isn't cheating and is fun for the player.

 

[Zorpheus]

Rubber Band AI is laziness at its finest. Can't make a challenging AI on your own? Let the computer cheat to stay in the game. I hate every single game it's ever been done in.

In older games:

R.C. Pro Am for Gameboy (possibly other versions) - Hitting a computer-controlled car with a rocket caused it to immediately have a burst of speed when it was done exploding, rapidly making up for any lost ground from getting hit by a rocket.

Super Off-Road for NES (possibly other versions) - In later races, computer controlled cars do not consume nitros when they use them, and they automatically use them the moment you do.

 

[Catfood220]

I hate it with a fiery passion, it has pretty much ruined all of the most recent Mario Kart games as you can be in first place by a mile and every single weapon will be blue and red shells, squids, bomb blocks and lightning bolts and then its down to dumb luck whether you win or not. I had Mario Kart on the Wii for about a week before I went "fuck it I've had enough of this" and traded it in for something fun.

Fifa games do this as well, but its funny the way it does it. You can go through most of a season, thump the likes of Man City, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Barcelona and then then you will play a match again someone like Stoke and suddenly they will be intercepting every pass you make, tackling every one of your player and all of a sudden have pinpoint passing and super speed. You can be 5-0 down in half an hour of in game time. Its so annoying.

 

[Quellist]

Fuck rubberband AI! Give us selectable difficulty levels and maybe an 'Adaptive difficulty' on/off switch but don't force it on players and definitely don't use it to disguise shitty game mechanics and poor gameplay

 

[VincentX3]

No.
No matter what the game, having rubberband AI shouldn't be "the easy way out"

Simple fact, Its 2014, approaching 2015 and AI in games in general hasnt changed AT ALL in the past 10-11 years.
Its either gimmicks (Bioshock infinite/The last of Us for example, she cant die at all and enemy's wont target her)
Or it's just plain bad (All the Dynasty Warriors games for example, not a single real AI change since the first to last game other than some new moveset or gimmick)


Yet alas, why make an intelligent AI in games when you can just make them look pretty and sell on brand name alone.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Fifa games do this as well, but its funny the way it does it. You can go through most of a season, thump the likes of Man City, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Barcelona and then then you will play a match again someone like Stoke and suddenly they will be intercepting every pass you make, tackling every one of your player and all of a sudden have pinpoint passing and super speed. You can be 5-0 down in half an hour of in game time. Its so annoying.

Yeah, many people in this thread are mentioning Mario Kart or other racing games as particularly notable examples (and they are), but traditional sports games actually also feature some of the worst in rubberbanding. I used to play a lot of basketball games and it was absolutely terrible there. Suddenly your team would go from shooting the lights out to missing 2/3 of their shots and the AI team would be able to steal the ball at will, block 90% of your shots (that were probably going to miss anyway) and sink every shot they took (often from 3 point range).

 

[Something Amyss]

It's a cheap way to cover up bad game design.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

I'm not sure how you feel on the subject.

 

[Aethien]

I hate it with a fiery passion, it has pretty much ruined all of the most recent Mario Kart games as you can be in first place by a mile and every single weapon will be blue and red shells, squids, bomb blocks and lightning bolts and then its down to dumb luck whether you win or not. I had Mario Kart on the Wii for about a week before I went "fuck it I've had enough of this" and traded it in for something fun.

I haven't played any Mario Kart games beyond Double Dash but I never really noticed it in there (other than blue shields and such). Is it that bad in the newer/newest Mario Kart games?

If only they brought F-Zero back, with the brutal difficulties. That was frustrating as all hell but at least it wasn't because of rubber banding.

 

[DEAD34345]

Rubber band AI is just bad. It's a bad idea right from inception. In a game you generally want a player to play to the best of their abilities, and all this does is punish them for doing exactly that. Really, it doesn't change the game to match the difficulty to your skill level at all, it just changes what it means to be good at the game, and this change is always for the worse.

In racing games for example driving well is no longer the best strategy, as it will just give lightning speed powers to all of your competitors. To maximise your chances of winning, you have to drive well enough to remain close to (or just barely) leading but not so well that you supercharge all of your enemies, until the last second when you can safely speed ahead and win the race. No one who buys a racing game wants to play like this.

It also outright removes all sense of achievement or progress in the game. If I win in a game with rubber banding, did I really win, or did the AI just realise I was shit and let me win? Did I lose that game because I played poorly, or did I lose it because I played the game so well that the AI gave itself superpowers and slaughtered me? It's impossible to tell.

 

[Fishyash]

I understand completely why rubber band AI is there. Let's face it, without rubber banding, the AI drive like shit. I haven't played a single racing game with good AI, it is ridiculously easy to out-drive them in fair circumstances.

However rubber band AI is a poor fix. The worst case I can think of is Mario Kart 64, where you could be the best driver in the world and the karts will still occasionally overtake you, and they don't follow the rules of the game once they are off-screen.

The worst is when it's applied to multiplayer games. For example Sega Rally Championship's[footnote]I have to say though that Sega Rally Championship is a fantastic arcade racing game)[/footnote] 2 player mode. I was playing it with a friend at the arcade, we're both fairly good at the game. However once one of us got a lead, the driver in 2nd would suddenly be able to drive much faster than the one in 1st, therefore if both players can drive competently, they would be able to catch up to each other due to bullshit rubber banding, even if one was a clearly better driver than the other. It ruined the competition of it, so we mainly played championship mode seperately to try and get the best time instead.

It's a difficult situation really. As it is, the AI just isn't good enough to keep up with skilled drivers without rubber banding. The answer lies in better AI or putting the odds against a player (rubber banding, starting far behind the leader or driving a slower car). Obviously we want the former but we haven't reached it yet.

 

[MetalDooley]

I haven't played any Mario Kart games beyond Double Dash but I never really noticed it in there (other than blue shields and such). Is it that bad in the newer/newest Mario Kart games?

Honestly I thought it was a lot worse in the older games with MK64 being the most egregious example.You'd hit an AI racer with an item and overtake them only for them to zoom past you like 2 seconds later.Or if you actually managed to build up a lead you could see the AI racers suddenly going double speed on the mini-map.Absolutely frustrating stuff.The newer games are nowhere near as bad in my opinion

OT:I'm against it.It's just the cheapest way of making a game more difficult.Been playing Split/Second recently and that suffers from some pretty bad rubberbanding.You'll be driving top speed and not making a single mistake only for 2 or 3 cars to overtake you like you're not even moving.And it's almost impossible to build up a lead of more than 1-2 seconds whereas the AI seems to have no problem building up leads of 8-10 seconds.What's worse is that every time you collect a certain number of credits you unlock new cars but the better your car the worse the rubberbanding is so you're actually better off using the slower cars half the time