Rubber Band AI: Difference between revisions
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Of course, to be fair, this sometimes happens ''in reverse'', with the AI easing up when winning to give you a chance to come back, stealing any satisfaction the player might gain from "victory." The classic example is a [[Mario Kart|racing game]] in which opponents never gain a substantial lead on slow players but cling to the tails of even superhumanly skilled players, creating the impression of the AI's car being attached to yours by a literal rubber band! Sometimes gamers notice proof of rubber band AI (particularly in Mario Kart-style racing games) when their actual racing time in seconds when they take 1st place may be the same or similar when they race the exact same track and take as low as 6th place. Even though the times were the same, the racer's rank can fluctuate wildly due to rubber banding competitors.
Also seen in a few [[RPG
Casually, [[The Other Wiki]] has [[wikipedia:Rubberband AI|a comprehensive article]] about Rubberband AI.
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*** By turning on the map-view in Mario Kart 64 it's possible to watch opponents suddenly accelerate to unrealistic speed when they are far behind.
*** Similar to the example above for Rainbow Road, Maka Wuhu in ''Mario Kart 7'' has an exploitable glitch that lets you skip at least half the track. If you do this while racing against the AI, they will magically catch up to you without fail. [[No Fair Cheating|Then again]] you ''were'' cheating...
** ''Mario Kart Wii'', unfortunately, takes the rubber-banding to a new low (high?) after the [[Blatant Lies|fairly cheating-free DS game]]. The computer racers change their speed depending on your position in the race, and they also get much better items than you if you're ahead. This is all par for the series, though...until you realize that there are more drivers in
** One of Mario Kart Wii's tournaments had players race Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong while they had an infinite supply of banana peels. If you tried to get ahead of them, they would '''ROCKET''' up to you to make sure you couldn't stay ahead. While the AI never does this in a regular race, the two in this tourney outright broke that rubber band.
*** This happens again if you race against someone's Mii with the Street Pass feature in ''[[Mario Kart]] 7''. The Mii you race against seem to be only focused in making your race difficult as possible. Are you driving in a kart with nearly maxed out top speed while the Mii is driving with mediocre stats all around? That Mii will always stay on your tail no matter how perfectly you race or how many times the Mii is attacked. Watching the map screen, you can see the Mii's AI gaining a big boost in speed to catch up to you while the other AI racers have their "normal" variances in rubber banding. If you fall behind, the Mii will then go very slow to let you catch up.
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** Nothing will drive the point home more than seeing your A.I. opponents crash full-speed into a wall, back up, and re-accelerate to full throttle in the span of 0.5 seconds.
* The four words most often screamed by ''[[RC Pro-Am]]'' players: "[[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|The yellow car cheats!]]" If you get too far ahead in some races, or use your weapons to destroy the other cars, one of them (almost always the yellow one) will drive the rest of the course at ultra high speed, making it impossible for you to get first place.
** The blue car was a more traditional example of
** Later on, each of the opponent cars do this a little bit after the start of the race. This fact is the reason that you want to upgrade your car as much as possible, because if it isn't at full performance by the time this happens, you're screwed.
*** There are two separate effects at work here. There the "super turbo yellow car", which nearly always kicks in only if you use your weapons enough times (roll cages don't trigger it, because they can use them too). This super turbo is faster than your maximum possible top speed. Then there are the late game tracks where any car that gets ahead of you after you get out of the starting block will instantly super turbo. Either way, a missile or bomb will stop the madness, and bring the car back down to earth, for now.
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** ''Initial D Arcade Stage 6'' has a strange way of applying this in Legend of the Streets mode: while the difficulty of your next opponent depended on what chapter you were, it was also controlled by how far ahead or behind you ended up at the end of the race. It is quite possible to beat Takumi with an aura with a one kilometer (!) advantage, only to get smoked by [[You Suck|Itsuki]] of all people in the next race on the same course.
* The first ''[[Wangan Midnight]]'' arcade game (and its revision ''Wangan Midnight R'', which was eventually ported to [[PlayStation 2]]) has rubber band AI that's especially present during the final battle against Akio. If you get ahead of him you better be good at blocking because the Devil Z will be on your ass the whole time.
** All the ''Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune'' games have rubberbanding which gets more severe the farther behind or ahead the computer gets. This is often counteracted by the individual stage quirks (slippery course, opponent will try to block you, opponent can't catch you on straightaway, etc.), but not always. It was by far the most blatant in the third cycle of the first game, to the point where ''everything'' before about the last
* ''[[Burnout]]''. At least in ''Burnout 3'' you can ram the caught-up cars, steal their boost, and regain your lead....
** ''Burnout 3'' had an abusable and abusive AI at the same time. The AI cars would move at considerably faster speeds than their stats would allow, having even the lowest series of cars keep up with the best cars in the game. However, beyond a certain distance, the AI opponents were logged as an order of numbers, not actually tracked. So if you could glitch out the car in second place (usually getting them hung on a wall) then outpace them, you could pull out a 1 minute+ lead on the entire field, as no cars would pass the second place car. This had the unfortunate effect that if the second place car DID get free, it would close that 1 minute+ gap in a matter of seconds, by having the cars move at you at several times the speed of sound. There's nothing more embarrassing than having your sports car passed by a 4 cylinder compact car while you're doing top speed and boosting.
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* In ''[[Sonic Riders]]'' for the 'Cube, AI controlled racers vanish from their positions well behind you on the track in order to suddenly zoom by without apparently passing through the intervening space.
** Most of the time, the AI are actually taking shortcuts, and when you take these shortcuts, the AI struggle to catch up. Although the AI does have a notorious habit of taking shortcuts more often in 2nd place than in 1st.
*** Note that the
*** Rubberbanding happens on it's finest in Story mode where AI can pull out anykind of tricks from it's sleeves. From recovering from your super attack in second to do super attack for you when it ran out all of the rings.
* In ''[[Sonic Adventure Series|Sonic Adventure]]'', during Windy Valley, Sonic is way behind you, then suddenly is right behind you. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0dvqK9_1Gg And no, flying doesn't help.]
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*** How much did Kawasaki pay to make the game do that?
* ''[[Road Rash]]'' made good use of this trope: Whenever you fell from your bike and were left several hundred meters behind you'd catch up with a speed of 50 meters per second - but the closer you came to the lead the faster the AI driver was going (also happened when you got rid of computer bikes; they came back faster than the laws of acceleration would've allowed...).
* ''[[Ridge Racer]] 1'' and ''2'' for the PSP. On the [[Nintendo Hard|already difficult MAX Tours]], Namco lets the 3 AI cars spam [[Nitro Boost
* In ''[[Carmageddon]]'', opponents will constantly respawn somewhere nearby, never actually going around the course. This means that it is impossible to lose the race to an enemy - you can only lose if your car is destroyed or you run out of time on the clock. However, it should be noted that this is probably intentional, as the point of the game is clearly to destroy your opponents rather than race them to the finish line. Destruction of opponents gives massive rewards, including sometimes the ability to steal an opponent's car and add it to your collection, so that it can be driven in future races. Also, destroying opponents, or seeking and running down pedestrians, adds time to your clock, allowing you to either finish the race more comfortably or (you guessed it) to destroy your opponents thoroughly.
* ''Top Gear'' (or ''Top Racer'' in Japan) has this with your partner, if you have the red car (the fastest and oil-waster in the game) and your white car (the most slower but oil-economic car) partner goes way behind, the partner AI can go even to 240
* ''[[Diddy Kong Racing]]'' averts this... at least, from the outset. While the original game's racers did not initially rubberband or gang up on you, there was a secret code,<ref>TIMETOLOSE</ref>
** It also doesn't help that on some emulators, computers will drive through the walls of the first track at random intervals if they're straggling (and they will).
* ''[[Homestar Runner]]'' [[Stylistic Suck]] game ''Kid Speedy'' has two racers that run at constant paces and one that employs Rubber Band AI. Since Kid Speedy is... well, [[Ironic Nickname|not speedy]], the object is simply to not get last place, and the Rubber Banding competitor is typically (but not always) the only one you even ''can'' beat. Homestar is a [[Secret Character]] in the game, and humorously, the opposite happens: Homestar is ''[[Meaningful Name|a runner]]'', so the Rubber Banding competitor is actually the only one Homestar has any trouble beating.
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== [[First-Person Shooter]] ==
* ''[[Sin|Sin Episodes]]'' was released with a much-touted dynamic difficulty
* The original ''[[Unreal Tournament]]'' had this with the final boss, a 1v1 to 15 kills. The boss would start at an AI level matching the difficulty you were playing on, and every time you killed him, he'd pop up a skill level. Thus, getting a killing spree was a very bad idea, as the boss would be up at Godlike skill in no time, and even when he got back down to your level after getting a killing spree on you, he'd be loaded with every weapon and full armor, while you'd have nothing because you just respawned. However, the converse is true too: every time you die, he goes back down one, to a minimum of where he started.
* ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'' has this, thanks to the AI Director. If the group is doing very well, there will be less pills and med kits to find (not counting the ones in the safe room and the finales) and special infected will spawn at a more frequent rate. Also, a Tank is likely to appear if the group is playing too well and there's usually a high chance that after you killed a Tank, the director will spawn a Boomer, Smoker, and Hunter right after that to make sure you don't have it easy. Naturally, if the team is doing poorly, there will be more health items to find and enemy count is lessened somewhat. On Expert, the director will punish you every step of the way if you even spend as much as 10 seconds in one area.
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* In ''[[Final Fantasy VII]],'' Bizarro & Safer Sephiroth's stats are based on a ton of variables, one of which is your party members' levels. Having all of your characters at level 99 makes him one of the strongest final bosses in the series, only surpassed by [[Final Fantasy XIII|Orphan]]. Of course, by that point, you probably have [[Game Breaker|Knights of the Round]]...
** Knights Of The Round ''and'' Supernova? In the same battle? [[Overly-Long Fighting Animation|You'll die before you reach the end!]]
* ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]''. However, since the ability to draw magic and junction it to your stats was technically separate from the [[Character Level
** The combat level of enemies was determined by the levels based off your active party members. Predictably, the game is not even remotely difficult in this case. But for most bosses, they have a level cap.
*** Of course, the first-time players and people who didn't know how to exploit the system were horrendously screwed. Normal enemies became insanely powerful, and [[Bonus Boss]] Omega Weapon was nigh-unstoppable at level 100 (and the game would cheat and punch Omega up ten or so levels if the character average was 90 or so).
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** The Shoot Em Up ''[[Warning Forever]]'' is '''based''' off this trope, being nothing but a [[Boss Rush]] with the boss changing depending on how you beat it the last time, how well the different weapons worked against you, how fast you beat it, etc.
*** Rank was designed originally to avoid [[Unstable Equilibrium]]. When they started putting powerups into shooters, you'd get to the point where it was easy with the powerups, but impossible without them. So someone came up with the bright idea of making the enemies more aggressive if you powered up, so they would still be a threat to your powered ship, and then when you died, they would go back down to normal so you had a chance at recovery. Before, they instead had to balance the enemy power to what you'd have if you didn't die, meaning that if you die once you might as well restart. Hence, rank. This is not usually considered a bad thing, as making recovery from death impossible is considered worse. The real hate is only when it ratchets up too much when you powerup, meaning that not powering up in the first place was preferable. Fortunately this is rare, but see Battle Garegga below.
** ''[[Battle Garegga]]'' is a particularly guilty offender. You have to keep your shot power and number of [[Attack Drone
*** Razing games are designed to punish the player for playing them wrong. In this case, you are supposed to play the game for score, to give you extra lives so you could die more often to lower the rank. Fortunately, most of them aren't that bad... Battle Bakraid actually lets you beat it by playing the game traditionally for survival.
* In the arcade ''Lethal Enforcers'', enemies started out taking a long time to shoot you, then gradually getting faster and faster until you'd need truly superhuman reflexes to get them in time, slowing down only after you took a hit. Lethal Enforcers II was even worse. This was removed from the SNES port, and the PSX port resolved the issue by fixing everyone at a ridiculously fast level.
== [[Simulation Game]] ==
* There is a minor version of this in the ''Crimson Skies'' PC game. Even if you are flying a much faster plane than your computer opponent, you can't fly 'away' from them. You will get a certain distance ahead, but even if you are pulling 400
* ''[[Wing Commander (video game)|Wing Commander]]'' had a "dynamic difficulty" system that scaled the enemy's abilities based on how well the player was doing. It did ''not'', however, change the wingman's performance or take it into account. So if for some reason the wingman was doing poorly (making the mission hard to start with), and the player pulled off a miraculous save, things got a whole lot worse for the player. And wingman.
== [[Sports Game]] ==
* Perhaps the most noticeable example is the ''[[Madden NFL]]'' games, which are often accused of featuring an "AI catch-up mode", in which opposing teams inexplicably become drastically more potent in the final minutes of a close game, often to the point where preventing them from completing long bombs and scoring touchdowns seems like an impossible task (sometimes called "Robo QB"). Some Madden players, however, dispute the existence of
** In most cases, the AI level of rubberbanding is directly related to the difficulty level, particularly in EA Sports games. On the easiest difficulty level, the AI doesn't rubberband at all: the same tactics, the same plays, over and over. As difficulty level goes up, so does the degree of rubberbanding: on the highest difficulty level, as soon as the player reaches anything approaching a lead, the AI responds aggressively to shut down any hope of winning...much like what sports teams do in real life. The rubberbanding does ''not'' work in the opposite direction, however. The AI just goes back to the normal difficulty.
*** ''NBA 2k'' and ''NBA Live'' actually have this as a feature, Clutch Factor and CPU Assistance respectively. It does work both ways, though. Doesn't make it any less irritating to see Kobe Bryant missing clutch layup after clutch layup.
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* The multiplayer game ''[[MULE]]'' will inflict whichever player currently has the highest score with with bad "random" events, while whoever is bringing up the rear will only have good things happen to them.
** At least, that's the way it's supposed to work. Leading players can still receive good random events, but it's true that when there is a bad event during production, it ALWAYS hits the lead player. Also, whoever is in the lead loses the tie, barring racial exceptions, like the long-necked one always winning ties in land auctions.
* Common in ''[[X-COM]]'' games and its [[Spiritual Successor
== [[Wide Open Sandbox]] ==
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*** Or just use the machine gun upgrade to your Aurora to destroy the competition.
=== Non-video game examples
== Computing ==
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* This can actually happen in the real world, in certain economic systems. There, it's called the "ratchet effect", and the AI is your competitors or some third-party agency. A good example: In the former USSR, the planning agency would reward the enterprises that made more than their quota. However, they'd base the next quota upon how well the enterprise did, so the harder you worked, the worse it got. The right strategy, of course, was to produce ever so slightly more than the quota.
** For publicly traded companies, stock analysts' quarterly earnings forecasts work much the same way. A company that misses the forecast by even a trivial sum loses market value, but beating the forecast by a wide margin raises next quarter's forecast.
** In Macro-Economics, there is a concept called the Catch-Up Effect where poorer nations will have Real GDP growth rates at something like 9.5% or even 10%, that leads to the country overall moving towards a first world economy status at a faster rate, than those countries closer to that status than itself. However that also means that when it screws up and you get high inflation rates or even hyperinflation, which pretty much means the currency will lose something like 10% of its value in an hour, Zimbabwe being the best example at the moment with the treasury releasing a $100 Billion Zimbabwean Dollar note which will expire on December 31, 2008 (notes traditionally don't expire they just don't get replaced), which ironically will lead to further devaluing of the Zimbabwean Dollar.
** And you white collar workers thought you were safe? There is a
*** Which has led to "the [[Dilbert]] principle", named by Scott Adams. Companies now leave good workers in their current positions, and only promote incompetents, because they can hurt the company less as management. Adams snarks that this does not prove to be [[Sarcasm Mode|the winning strategy one would imagine it to be]].
** A similar problem is when a higher power allocates a budget to your service. If you're under-budget at the end of the term, some managers will "reward" your service by ''cutting'' the surplus from next term's budget, so people usually waste company money on trivialities to prevent this.
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