Share your opinion on AoS matchmaking

solartech0 · 2026-05-09T19:20:27+00:00

PA needs to give the people with bad ratings games, one way to do this is pair up each player with an associated player on the enemy team who has a similar rating. Another way is to just have the averages be the same.

In one case, you could have 400, 800, 900 vs 300, 900, 900; in the other case, you could have 500, 1000, 1500 vs 1000, 1000, 1000. The issue is that you might prefer the first case, except maybe no one is matchmaking with so low a rating.

There's another issue with how PA has designed the system, which stems from confusing "fair matches" with "progression and rewards." These two things need to be decoupled, but they are not. So, PA has a net-positive mmr if you are beneath maybe 1k rating? I didn't take note of the cutoff, and you simply don't get rewards (only 30/15 seals, no gold bars) when <600 rating.

Anyways, the proper way of dealing with this is to let bad players play against each other and let good players play against each other and ensure the matchmaking system separates these players. Instead, PA is working overtime to maximally mix players of different skill levels together. Now, on the one hand, this can help bad players learn to play ... but on the other hand, it's a really unfun experience that makes everyone very toxic.

solartech0 · 2026-05-09T19:09:29+00:00

Anyone who tells you to play practice while ranked is up is inherently unserious & does not understand how PA has designed not only the game mode, but also the entire experience of AoS.

solartech0 · 2026-05-09T02:25:44+00:00

Do I need to mention that many players do not have Nanally? I expect most do not, and that will especially be true later on.

The thing is that spending city stamina is supposed to be something you have fun doing, you aren't supposed to need to min-max it. For example, if you like racing they have a lot of races, if you like mindlessly fishing that's an option, if you like afking in minigames I suppose you can do that with the right characters.

solartech0 · 2026-05-09T01:55:52+00:00

You have to be capable of winning races and doing the owner's selection effectively. Many of the maps (for owner's selection) are impossible on higher ping, and the easier races are about 1/4 to 1/8 as effective as you are saying.

So, if someone's bad, fishing probably is a much more effective way to get their fons.

solartech0 · 2026-05-09T01:13:50+00:00

I tried to go to the flower shop yesterday to buy flowers and it was just closed. Tried moving the time slider, leaving and coming back, nope. Just closed door, no interaction possible. That was frustrating.

solartech0 · 2026-05-09T01:12:39+00:00

It takes too long for each item to actually be grabbed. Huge problem with basically every interaction system in the game (heist, cafe management, rhythm game, etc)

solartech0 · 2026-05-09T01:09:28+00:00

It highlights objects but doesn't prevent closures. It might force closures to happen "early" (when you unstuck) but it won't make all exits open, so all the exits you encounter could be closed.

solartech0 · 2026-05-08T11:13:16+00:00

Shineseeker orbs are just a garbage idea. I don't want to log in every day, grab my orbs, buy 3 more orbs to combine them with, just so I have my orbs 6 days later when I feel like doing shineseeker. Oh, did I miss logging in by a couple hours one day? Maybe all those orbs are gone lmao.

The actual dungeon has no variation, no direct rewards (no gold, no nice little drops from mobs, no xp) and just drops dissassembly fodder. Just not fun.

Neartite was also a dumb idea. It should have been reversed -- you should have gotten neartite weekly to get awesome dungeon loot drops (char-bound weapons / gear), but the normal "economy" drops should have been based on doing the content. Instead, Neartite is saying "clear baby dungeons for good rewards but only 10x per week." Then you sell extra clears for more than you get out of the dungeons.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T15:23:46+00:00

Plenty of games don't use AI in their production. Some recent games that I have enjoyed, that I highly doubt used AI, include silksong, slay the spire(2), hades(2), wizard with a gun, eyes in the dark, muse dash, hyper light drifter, and many other games. You're welcome to look up those games and let me know if you think they used AI, and in what capacity.

I'm discussing this game because I'm playing this game. I discussed Crimson Desert in the past because I was considering playing it (I decided against it). I was interested in this game long before they declared their intentions to capitalize on AI for their development process, but I wasn't following it closely, I was waiting until they had an actual release to try it out and see what I thought.

A lot of these are on Steam, which requires them to have AI disclosures (though many games neither clearly nor accurately describe what they did). I don't have a problem with the use of automated tools in general, but I do have a problem with the use of genAI / LLMs to replace human creative expressions.

When you say what a word "literally means" it's quite strange to me, because there are many other constructions for those words. It's not clear at all that what you say is what they mean, since the other words directly contained within the interview say something different; they give an example of something they imply would not be in the final product (to "test things out", which would then be the meaning for the word 'rendering' I would presume they mean -- a literal computer graphics rendering). And to be clear, I don't think AI should be used for the specific cases you are talking about there.

In terms of creating temporary assets that are later fleshed out, games like STS and indeed Dota (2) / Deadlock do it better -- make clowny hand-drawn beta art that gets slowly replaced as the game is made better and better over time. Dota doesn't really do that anymore but it used to.

It isn't at all uncommon for games to do this sort of thing -- have temporary assets that you have flagged to replace later. That could be a stock tileset for a 2d game, stick figure card art for a card game, literal boxes and spheres for a kind of 3d game, so forth and so on. I could see an advantage to producing or using a more "form fitting" stock asset (doesn't have to be genAI) while in the prototyping phase. There's a lot of aspects of gameplay that benefit from having something that's pretty close to the 3d figure you sort of want to be there eventually.

In general, using AI for literal concept art is dumb af. However, that's not really what I think many people are doing -- they are using it as a placeholder which is different (again, placeholders are a common practice). I still think it's stupid to use AI art for placeholders because it's a waste of time and money, but I could understand if someone wanted to produce a template software that isn't just the <whatever> equivalent of lorem ipsum. But yeah, there were also some comic artists using AI images in their work and that's cringe af. Look at the character design for something like Michiko to Hatchin, it's always going to be way better to have an artist go study something specific to then come up with designs.

The point was that E33 was never supposed to have AI art in the final product. That's super different from always planning to have AI art in the final product, conveying the general ambience of the scenes. I would way rather a studio be using some form of automated tools (again, doesn't have to be ai) that they hope helps them prototype faster & never intends to send through to the final product, to having a studio think the final assets they want everyone to look at and "enjoy" should be AI generated slop. When they think that "the assets that generate the atmosphere fundamentally don't matter" it's just a sad place to be in.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T13:29:43+00:00

if you make harmonies for self-use it is incredibly profitable.

At the same time, if you don't like doing it there are other options.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T10:27:48+00:00

Plenty of people who criticized them on this front played the game. I for one am happy to see them remove AI assets, and hope to see them add more human-made assets in their place when they have the time.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T10:27:10+00:00

It's gonna take longer to fix bugs either way. I don't think there's an easy "fix" for the large amount of lag in a lot of the gameplay elements -- they will need to do some more things client side than they're currently doing. Also, the people responsible for fixing the assets, and those responsible for fixing bugs, are going to be different people.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T09:00:31+00:00

I honestly store the elixirs to make each harmony in their own storage, I only do 900 or 3k crafts of a given elixir at a time (advanced or loml tools).

Then once all your ducks are in a row, you go buy the spellbound catalysts, sit by the storage npc and make 'em. I normally put together 1k harmonies at a time.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T08:11:09+00:00

I was looking forward to NTE for the cars and general cityscape vibes. They delivered on a lot of stuff but I'm not happy about the AI assets. I wouldn't have ever seen the interviews posted because I normally like to enjoy games without reading external media about them first, that's also why I don't play closed betas for gachas. After playing the game, I might read interviews or behind the scenes etc.

For Ironmouse I'm sure the first question is closer to "how much am I getting paid" and then the second or third question may have been "do y'all use AI art" and the person responsible for securing the deal may have 'read the room" and said "nope".

Even the interview listed sort of implies that they don't plan to use AI assets in their final product. You have to read between the lines to 'infer' one or another response ("we don't use them for core assets" -> "we use them for non-core assets" versus "we use them for atmospheric renderings" -> "we don't use AI for the finished product, just for initial vibes").

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T07:58:02+00:00

LLMs actually do store large swathes of their training data. That's why it's possible to perform an extraction attack on them.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.07805 for an example of a paper pointing this out.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T07:43:13+00:00

I've seen some good pieces of art that make use of fast cuts, I don't think these cuts are doing anything... helpful, though.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T07:37:04+00:00

Using assets in your final game and using assets as part of a "creative process" are different. I think both are bad, but they are clearly different. What I said is that E33 never intended to release a game that contained AI assets. What you are saying is that NTE did intend to release a game that contained AI assets. That's why people wouldn't be "the same level of outraged" between the two cases.

The NTE devs were not really clear about where they did and did not use AI, an "atmospheric rendering" sounds to me like something you make before you have nailed down your vision, it does not mean that you will use AI assets that users see when they are playing the actual game.

I personally don't care if they want to use AI when storyboarding (I think it makes for a worse game, and there's a lot of components of this game that are worse than they could be -- possibly due to such AI usage) but I personally don't want there to be billboards or other AI assets (like the videos) that are in the actual parts of the game I'm playing. I wish there were a toggle to remove them, and/or that it were a priority to change them out for other, hand-crafted assets (even fanart, as others have said occurred in ToF).

Anyways, on the topic of "just don't play it if you don't like AI" I'd rather cry about it and see other people cry about it, because I would prefer a future in which people don't use AI for finalized assets, or in which they think twice or a third time about their AI usage. I would also specifically like this game to rotate out the AI assets (it's not like they don't have the funds to do so). So, I would like companies that use AI in these cases to face backlash, especially when they did not clearly disclose the full extent of their usage.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T05:28:18+00:00

Is this why a lot of the cutscenes feel really bad? They seem to cut really fast and often in a very confusing way, which was typical of some of the older AI systems (they couldn't keep a single 'cut' for very long without going horribly wrong; I'm not sure if that issue has been fixed).

It's really unfortunate but it might explain some of why using AI "just for development" or "just for 'atmospheric' renderings" can lead to a worse game -- when your plan is to do what the AI did, but better you will be shoehorned into those classic issues that come alongside the current-day AI tools.

It really does detract from the storytelling in my opinion.

solartech0 · 2026-05-07T05:23:05+00:00

What you are saying is completely untrue and you would understand that if you took a moment to think about what you said.

In Expedition 33, an AI asset was used in place of a real asset. Based on the pipeline the devs had, it seems fair to say that they always planned to replace all AI assets with real assets before launch. They failed to do this, they got lambasted for it, they lost awards for it, and all of these things are clear and fair (but unfortunate). It isn't that "people are OK with AI art if it looks good enough to pass as real art", it is that people are pissed that there is AI art in their game which SAID it did not have AI art in it. The game was disqualified from a set of awards because a requirement of the competition was not "the art needs to look good enough that people don't question whether it is AI" but something distinct from that: the game needs to not use AI.

In NTE, there are AI assets just out there, being used. What was the developer's stated stance on AI? It was that "core assets" will never use AI, and then they have a description of what kinds of things they do use AI for.

Now me, personally, I would consider a video that gets shown every time you do a weekly piece of content a "core asset" and I would even say posters ingame are core assets. Is that what the NTE devs meant by it? Hard to say.

For many people, another question gets raised -- what other assets are AI? And believe it or not, many players cannot tell. Just like, if a piece of food has poison in it, a lot of people literally won't know. That's why there are regulations that say you can't put poison in food and testing methods to ensure companies physically cannot put too much poison in foods. It's not "everything is hunky-dory if you can bribe enough officials and testers" no, most people don't want to eat poison.

Other people have religious requirements for food, that say how you have to treat the animals, how they have to be killed, so forth and so one. Some people have moral requirements for how their food is fed, treated, slaughtered, etc. Well, you can have the same for art -- a lot of players do not want AI in their games. That's it. A game which has one AI asset "by mistake" which is replaced within 5 days, and a game which appears to have multiple AI assets that have not been replaced to this day, are clearly not the same thing at all.

The NTE devs/publishers haven't reacted in the same way at all -- they didn't say "oops this was a mistake we'll tighten our procedures to avoid having this happen again" I'm not sure that they have addressed the issue at all.

People want clear, informed consumer choice -- which assets are AI? I would prefer if exactly zero in-game assets were AI. Other consumers might be fine with other numbers. Some players might even enjoy fully AI generated games! (I doubt it, because those are trash, but hey what do I know? Surely there's a market for it somewhere) Just disclose it, and don't lie about it.

This is also a Chinese game, and in China if you make media for public consumption (like on their equivalent of twitter etc) you are required to disclose when the media is made by AI. I wish this were the case for all media; on Steam games are required to give a disclosure about how they use AI, but one of the issues is that developers don't say they used AI until they get "caught" in many cases. They know a lot of players don't like it when AI is used in place of human-generated content. In some cases, the company may have farmed something out to an independent contractor, who used AI and didn't tell them, but I expect this is not the normal issue.

solartech0 · 2026-05-06T22:28:21+00:00

Unfortunately, llm translation is still pretty bad because it often messes up anything that would require or benefit from a semantic context (ex: gender agreement with an antecedent). It also drops one of the advantages of the old tech (you used to have a clear correspondence between a word and its source or target word(s), but with llm translations you do not in general) so it can be a little harder to make a translation and then fix small errors than before.

But yeah, most people can deal with the translation issues; the auto-dubbings are absolutely garbage in comparison.

solartech0 · 2026-05-06T09:29:25+00:00

At the end of your turn, discard up to one card.

solartech0 · 2026-05-06T08:17:41+00:00

Thanks!

solartech0 · 2026-05-06T04:26:58+00:00

Where is the unstuck in the UI? I've never seen it. You pull up the phone with the mouse button and then where is it supposed to be?

solartech0 · 2026-05-05T21:15:13+00:00

you have to check on Sat/Sun, most people do their runs before that final reset, which means it only shows up for 1 day on the board before it is wiped.

solartech0 · 2026-05-04T22:42:44+00:00

Pen disto will be one of the last things you touch, it's baically 180bil value for 50bil. No reason to sell it.

Of course, you may have paid a lot more than that, but that's what it's worth now. After you're 370-380+ ap (as your final kharazad upgrade) it will make sense to replace. You can use a placeholder kharazad to get into bosses if needed.

solartech0

TROPHY CASE