Ghostcrawler parle de l'intelligence artificielle des familiers
Ghostcrawler poste pas mal de messages à propos de l'équilibrage des classes dans Mists of Pandaria sur les forums US. Après le message à propos du Pet Scaling dont je vous ai parlé ce matin, le monsieur revient maintenant sur l'intelligence artificielle des familiers.
Le responsable de la conception des systèmes de World of Warcraft nous indique que l'IA est une chose très délicate à concevoir, notamment parce que les joueurs s'attendent à avoir un familier qui lit dans leurs pensées et prend les décisions appropriées. Hélas, comme la science n'a pas encore réussi à pondre des ordinateurs capables de prendre de grandes décisions de manière générale, nous ne sommes pas prêts de trouver cela en jeu. Ghostcrawler n'aime pas prendre ce genre d'excuse, entre-autres car elle clôt la conversation, mais il travaille depuis suffisamment longtemps sur l'IA dans les jeux vidéo pour savoir que l'IA est un domaine extrêmement complexe qui doit tenir compte de nombreux paramètres.
Du côté de Blizzard, les développeurs préfèrent se concentrer sur des comportement simples qui, au moins, sont prévisibles. Votre familier est certes parfois stupide, mais au moins il sera toujours stupide au lieu d'essayer de choper le bon monstre et de toujours choisir le mauvais.
Ghostcrawler vous invite néanmoins à partager votre expérience à propos des familiers. Si vous connaissez des situations spécifiques où un familier se trompe, n'hésitez pas à le signaler. Gardez également en tête que lors de certains combats avec des boss, il existe des particularités où certains familiers seront moins efficaces que d'autres. Cela ne pose aucun souci à Blizzard, il ne faut pas que chaque spécialisations fassent le même DPS à chaque combat, ce serait trop ennuyant.
AI is a really tricky thing to design, because what players really want (usually) is for the pet to read their mind and do the appropriate thing. :) Since science hasn't made computers with great decision-making ability in general yet, you're certainly not going to find it in a game. I hate to drag this out as an excuse, because it sort of shuts down the conversation, but I've been doing game design long enough to know that AI is never just as easy as "Well, it should just do this and this and then it will be perfect."
Instead, we try to err on the side of very simple behavior so at the very least it's predictable. Your pet or guardian may be stupid, but at least it will be consistently stupid instead of trying to say pick the right target and always picking the wrong target.
That said, if you can describe specific situations where you think a pet or guardian are doing the wrong thing, please let us know. (The bug thread would be a better location for that feedback than this one.)
As an aside, several of the situations you describe are encounters were the peculiarities of the fight make a pet less optimal than on others. We are totally fine with that -- it's along the same lines as not every single boss is going to be backstab-able. We don't want every spec to do identical DPS on every fight. We think that would be boring. If pet classes did sub-standard DPS on a whole lot of fights, then we think it would be a problem.
Instead, we try to err on the side of very simple behavior so at the very least it's predictable. Your pet or guardian may be stupid, but at least it will be consistently stupid instead of trying to say pick the right target and always picking the wrong target.
That said, if you can describe specific situations where you think a pet or guardian are doing the wrong thing, please let us know. (The bug thread would be a better location for that feedback than this one.)
As an aside, several of the situations you describe are encounters were the peculiarities of the fight make a pet less optimal than on others. We are totally fine with that -- it's along the same lines as not every single boss is going to be backstab-able. We don't want every spec to do identical DPS on every fight. We think that would be boring. If pet classes did sub-standard DPS on a whole lot of fights, then we think it would be a problem.
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