Video Game Gripe - Text sims, My player modes

[TroyF]

The advancements in the video game world is mind boggling. You have games like Football Manager, OOTP, The Show, NBA2K14 and others that send you emails and have press interactions.

This complaint doesn't mean I don't play the games or I won't buy them anymore, but it's annoying all the same.

Media reactions that do not make sense. A couple of examples:

Football Manager: I'm 12 points up in the league with 4 games to go. I need to tie one game to win the league. I play the 18th place team and get a message like this: "Manager "xxx" said he doesn't think Arsenal have the talent to win the title this year.

Ummm, no, you're an idiot.


Last night in 2K14 I had another one. Kobe Bryant had a social media challenge for me. "You cannot stop me, I'll score over 25 points"

OK, I'm playing on easy mode and have a maxed out SG right now. (I'm going to ramp up the difficulty level massively next season) I play the game and and have 54 points, 12 assists, 10 rebounds and 3 steals. My team (the Bucks baby!!!) wins the game by 35 points. Kobe scores 27 points on 10-34 shooting.

Kobe come on twitter and gives me this gem: I told you that you couldn't stop me. Me and my team showed you how the game is played. We'll do it again next time too"

Cmon. For the love of everything holy, cmon. I know this crap is hard and I know getting perfect interactions will never happen, but do they have to be that far off? Sheesh.

[cartman]

That is actually how I'd expect Kobe to respond.

[EagleFan]

Had a similar 2K14 twitter message issue. Got taunted similarly by an opponent after we dismantled them by 30. Fine dude, hope your happy that you scored 2 more points than I did in the game...

[Flasch186]

Originally Posted by cartman

That is actually how I'd expect Kobe to respond.

LOL

[miami_fan]

Originally Posted by TroyF

The advancements in the video game world is mind boggling. You have games like Football Manager, OOTP, The Show, NBA2K14 and others that send you emails and have press interactions.

This complaint doesn't mean I don't play the games or I won't buy them anymore, but it's annoying all the same.

Media reactions that do not make sense. A couple of examples:

Football Manager: I'm 12 points up in the league with 4 games to go. I need to tie one game to win the league. I play the 18th place team and get a message like this: "Manager "xxx" said he doesn't think Arsenal have the talent to win the title this year.

Ummm, no, you're an idiot.


Last night in 2K14 I had another one. Kobe Bryant had a social media challenge for me. "You cannot stop me, I'll score over 25 points"

OK, I'm playing on easy mode and have a maxed out SG right now. (I'm going to ramp up the difficulty level massively next season) I play the game and and have 54 points, 12 assists, 10 rebounds and 3 steals. My team (the Bucks baby!!!) wins the game by 35 points. Kobe scores 27 points on 10-34 shooting.

Kobe come on twitter and gives me this gem: I told you that you couldn't stop me. Me and my team showed you how the game is played. We'll do it again next time too"

Cmon. For the love of everything holy, cmon. I know this crap is hard and I know getting perfect interactions will never happen, but do they have to be that far off? Sheesh.

FM example: I can definitely see Alan Pardew saying something like that

[Julio Riddols]

I'm no programmer, but it seems like making this type of stuff accurate would be as simple as creating a response tree that generates one of several random statements by executing a check on a specific piece of data such as win or loss, personal goal, outstanding performance/exceptionally poor performance, etc.

Then Kobe's post game comments could run a check for win or loss and for personal goal. The two random statements are generated, put together with some additional flavor text, and the game suddenly gets a lot more engaging.

[Solecismic]

I hope Marc chimes in, because his approach to this issue (and how he assigned interns to work on it) is the only approach I've heard that makes sense. This type of thing sounds wonderful in theory, but unless you keep it authentic and a little vanilla (unless you have so much variety in response that you don't see a response twice in your gaming experience) it quickly becomes a negative.

[FLC28]

From my experience of working on exactly this in FM, it is a nightmare to get right. The same goes for the press conference feature, and anything else where the user has to make some kind of public (in game) comment.

[Marc Vaughan]

Originally Posted by Julio Riddols

I'm no programmer, but it seems like making this type of stuff accurate would be as simple as creating a response tree that generates one of several random statements by executing a check on a specific piece of data such as win or loss, personal goal, outstanding performance/exceptionally poor performance, etc.

Then Kobe's post game comments could run a check for win or loss and for personal goal. The two random statements are generated, put together with some additional flavor text, and the game suddenly gets a lot more engaging.

This sort of thing is both simple and incredibly complex.

The 'more' complex side of things is the AI involved in determining which items appear and when or what would be a realistic response to such a thing happening.

For the 'Kobe' example you mention - you could check for a win/loss and personal goal ... (which would be a good starting point) ... but then really you should also look at the teams standing in the game, whether they're on a winning run etc. and bias the reaction by that because it'd be unrealistic for most players to be hugely cocky if their team has just come off a 7 game losing streak etc.

Getting this right takes a huge amount of patience, some experience with the simulation in question and a lot of play-testing to catch cases which might be obscure - to give a simple example from Football Manager Handheld:

	if( p_club -> is_in_season( NULL, TRUE ) )
	{
		if( !is_injured &&
			!unhappiness_added && 
			!( p_contract -> get_reasons_for_unhappiness() & PH_EXPECTS_TO_PLAY_IN_FIRST_TEAM ) &&
			pseudo_random % 4 == 0 &&
			p_player -> get_world_reputation() > (SHORT)( 6750 + ( (SHORT)get_professionalism() * 50 ) ) &&
			( p_contract -> get_current_squad_status() == SM_KEY_PLAYER ||
              p_contract -> get_current_squad_status() == SM_FIRST_TEAM_REGULAR ||
              ( age < 36 && p_player -> get_current_ability() > 135 ) ) &&
			p_contract -> get_number_of_games_played_in_a_row() == 0 &&
			( p_contract -> get_number_of_games_missed_in_a_row() > MAX( 5, ( 1 + (CHAR)( ( ( get_professionalism() + 8 ) - get_ambition() ) / 4 ) ) ) ||
			  ( get_professionalism() < 10 && get_ambition() > 15 && get_loyalty() < 6 && p_contract -> get_number_of_games_missed_in_a_row() > 1 ) ) &&
			get_random_number( get_ambition() + 1 ) + p_contract -> get_number_of_games_missed_in_a_row() > get_random_number( get_professionalism() ) )
		{
			p_contract -> adjust_player_happiness( -50 );
			p_contract -> add_reason_for_unhappiness( PH_EXPECTS_TO_PLAY_IN_FIRST_TEAM );
			unhappiness_added = TRUE;
		}

This is PART of the code involved in triggering a players unhappiness at not playing first team football (and doesn't show the huge wadge of code involved in what text is displayed etc.).

The first 'if' determines whether we're in the middle of a season - this is important because a player asking for first team football while on holiday would 'feel' wrong (the reason thats 'split out' is efficiency its a fairly intensive function and there are a few happiness triggers which are checked in that if).

The secondary if looks at other 'blockers' to this triggering - is the player injured, has he already moaned about something today (as multiple moans on the same day feels weird), is he already moaning about this, how professional is he, would it be realistic for him to expect first team football (ie. stop 16 year olds moaning), how many matches has he missed, how ambitious is he etc. ....

Then bear in mind this trigger is for 'impatient' players who see themselves as important there is another one for more vanilla players (and again a separate trigger used around international tournaments for specific players who might be wanting to be involved in their national sides) and again there are similar sections of code elsewhere which are used to determine if the player should have that happiness removed etc. and what

Now FMH is a far simpler game than FM so we only 32 different types of unhappiness triggering within the game but hopefully you can see from this code that implementing and testing such things takes a fair bit of time and patience to undertake.

This 'example' also ignores the code which is present in my games to try and encourage variety in the messages which appear and that they're 'sane' at that time.

Nothing I do in my games for these are particularly 'rocket science' to be honest, there isn't a magical technique involved apart from the patience to get things feeling right and have enough variants to model the various personalities etc.

To be quite honest all of the areas of my games which can be most improved and I have LOTS of ideas in this area, unfortunately its a balancing act as we only have a limited team size and have to release a product each annum.

PS - I've looked at moving triggers and handling for happiness in my games sporadically from code to scripting, but have always found it ends up being less 'flexible/tunable' and doesn't feel quite right at times ... hence for now mine has remained in code.

PPS - Sorry for the lengthy post.

[FLC28]

Thanks Marc, I thought I had finally forgotten media corner code

[sterlingice]

Love the lengthy post from Marc.

The problem I would see is the same problem with announcer immersion. Your You can either spend a ton of time bulking up the logic (making a giant tree, essentially) or else is gets repetitive or silly.

For every third down in the first half, you have John Madden say "On the year, Team.Name is successful on Team.Yearly_3rd_Down_Completion percent of their 3rd downs."

For the second half, you have a decision to make. Let's say you have time to write a single if-then-else statements of code for this.

If you decide you want to go for a more variety, you can check if the game is a touchdown or closer, Madden belts out "This is a critical 3rd down" but if not Summerall reports the score of another game in the league.

Or you can opt for more precision, you can have the game check if it's 3rd and short or third and long and pick the response based on how the team in question has fared in whichever situation is accurate. You'd get a more accurate picture but it would always be about 3rd down percentage.

I'm going to assume that interaction is a fairly low programming priority so you can better the game engine, improve the interface, etc. If you don't put a lot of time in it and make it more complex, it's precise but repetitious. If, instead, you work on reducing repetition, you pay in complexity.

SI

[ColtCrazy]

I will say the one interaction I did love was in FM. I was in my second year at Crystal Palace going up against a team managed Tony Pulis, who interesting is Palace's current manager. He was going on in the media about how we were overachieving, didn't think much of me, and was going to show who was better in the upcoming match. We ended up having our best game of the year to that point and won 5-0. Pulis proceeded to storm out of the post game presser. Needless to say he's #1 on my list of people with the worst opinions of me. Harry Rednapp and I tend to get into it too.

On the flip side of that, I had a player who was set to leave on a free. I managed to get him to stay, but I still get questions about how I'll feel once the player leaves. Uh, he's not leaving. That one is annoying.

[TroyF]

Originally Posted by ColtCrazy

I will say the one interaction I did love was in FM. I was in my second year at Crystal Palace going up against a team managed Tony Pulis, who interesting is Palace's current manager. He was going on in the media about how we were overachieving, didn't think much of me, and was going to show who was better in the upcoming match. We ended up having our best game of the year to that point and won 5-0. Pulis proceeded to storm out of the post game presser. Needless to say he's #1 on my list of people with the worst opinions of me. Harry Rednapp and I tend to get into it too.

On the flip side of that, I had a player who was set to leave on a free. I managed to get him to stay, but I still get questions about how I'll feel once the player leaves. Uh, he's not leaving. That one is annoying.

For every one of the things I mentioned, there are another 5 or 6 that just rope me into games like FM more. A player thanking me after getting his first international cap. A manager playing mind games with me. A tweet from Gary Payton stating he's going to keep his eye on me after I have a five steal game. Really, really cool things that make the game mean something a little bit more. But when you get something that is way off, it is REALLY way off and it does hurt the experience a tad.