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Original post by Talroth In that case it is a matter of giving the higher level (non-player) Story Tellers the data they need to actually make their choices. Basically taking the info on the actions that you would have fed into the AI, and allowing the Story Tellers to interpret that information. These people would be under the control of the developer, so it is up to them to make things work. Personally I don't think I would care for playing in a faction driven by an AI when the AI glitches out. "I declare war on you, and you and you,..." which leads to "Hey, look at fraction A, they're totally getting whipped in a 10 sided war,... hey, why haven't any A players logged on in the last week?"

2 points though.

First, this is what testing is for. (I know it doesn't solve everything).

Second, since this would be an MMO, such an extreme action could easily cause the devs to come in and over-ride such things if the need is great enough.

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Original post by Talroth Personally I don't think I would care for playing in a faction driven by an AI when the AI glitches out. "I declare war on you, and you and you,..." which leads to "Hey, look at fraction A, they're totally getting whipped in a 10 sided war,... hey, why haven't any A players logged on in the last week?"

This is why Developers would need the power to be able to control the story. It is not so the devs can force the story to go a certain way, but to fix such glitches.

From a cost-benefit stand point, I don't see how going with too strong of an AI is really going to work all that well. Unless you want every statement to be a boring canned message like you get in Civ, then you are going to want writers/voice actors pumping new content in anyway.

Why not give them the tools to look at the data and make the choices themselves from the start to make the most interesting story lines they can?

Re: robert4818

For the original question, I won't play it, because it seems to take too much time and effort to get familiar with the game world.

AI or GM

Now it seems that the main question is whether the changes should be decided by an AI or a GM.

The advantage of having an AI is that it gives the player a chance to completely understand the effects of their actions. It allows the player to justisfy spending time analyzing, planning, and organizing for changes.

This advantage is not unique to AI. You could have the same if the GM always follow the same set of rules to decide what to change. If that is the case though, chances are you want to automate it, because GM could make a mistake.

The advantage of having a GM is that you have more variety in the expression of policies, and adds a personality to the game. This advantage is not as easily replaced by AI, but I think for this situation you could do it pretty well.

So far it seems that you could have both advantages if you let the AI decide what changes to make, and ask the GM to do the speaking for the AI, and to create new rules for the AI. Everytime the GM creates a new rule, the GM could announce it so that the players know the updated rules.

So the loop is like this:
o AI collects statistics
o AI decides any change in policy
o GM reviews the AI's decision for any game-breaking flaws
o GM must accept the AI's decision if there is no flaw
o GM announces the decisions to the players
o GM announces any new rule that the AI will use in the next period
o Players do things
o AI collects statistics
o ...

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Original post by Wai Re: robert4818 For the original question, I won't play it, because it seems to take too much time and effort to get familiar with the game world. AI or GM Now it seems that the main question is whether the changes should be decided by an AI or a GM. The advantage of having an AI is that it gives the player a chance to completely understand the effects of their actions. It allows the player to justisfy spending time analyzing, planning, and organizing for changes. This advantage is not unique to AI. You could have the same if the GM always follow the same set of rules to decide what to change. If that is the case though, chances are you want to automate it, because GM could make a mistake. The advantage of having a GM is that you have more variety in the expression of policies, and adds a personality to the game. This advantage is not as easily replaced by AI, but I think for this situation you could do it pretty well. So far it seems that you could have both advantages if you let the AI decide what changes to make, and ask the GM to do the speaking for the AI, and to create new rules for the AI. Everytime the GM creates a new rule, the GM could announce it so that the players know the updated rules. So the loop is like this: o AI collects statistics o AI decides any change in policy o GM reviews the AI's decision for any game-breaking flaws o GM must accept the AI's decision if there is no flaw o GM announces the decisions to the players o GM announces any new rule that the AI will use in the next period o Players do things o AI collects statistics o ...

The other advantages of AI. It doesn't have to spend the time going over 5-12 factions over 10+ servers.... You don't have to pay it either.

I always thought MMORPGs could benefit a lot from RTS games.

It doesn't have to be a game breaking feature.

Imagine any current MMORPG, but with some events based on RTS AI:

Basics:
- Put in the world some strategic resource spots.
- Put some strategic traderoutes.
- Put some barracks scatered through the world.
- Put a rule in the AI not to allow any faction to be 'too powerful'

Actions:
- Faction A sends troops to spot X to gain control of a resource spot, currently under Faction B control.
- Faction B sends troops to spot X to defend the spot.
- Also, Faction A sends small commandos to trade routes to make attacks on Faction B traders
- Faction B has traders moving resources from Y to homebase...

This things allows for traveling NPC's through the world, changing who has control over SOME zones (frontiers), allowing players to help their faction, posibly puting boss encounters on resource spots, even instanced events. Who knows, but there could be many factions, aside from the main ones:
- bandit's faction, that roam some zones, raiding small questing towns, making the population go to other place (players would still have a neutral questing town to go, but they would have to find it :)

I think global AI should be used as an aditional way to give flavour to the world, but should never abandon the human writen lore that games have now.

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Original post by yumok I think global AI should be used as an aditional way to give flavour to the world, but should never abandon the human writen lore that games have now.

And it never should :)

Any system I propose would use such lore as a starting point. In no-way would the AI replace lore in the game. Instead it is there to create a more dynamic war. If Country A and Country B have an inherent dislike for one another, then AI's should reflect that in some way.

If the Devs decide to put out an expansion with some ground breaking event (say an outside invasion) then they would need to tweak the AI to reflect that change. This might cause the AI's to form an alliance of some sort.

The main point of the idea though is to prevent the world from becoming static.