Rubber Band AI: Difference between revisions

 

Compare [[Dynamic Difficulty]]. May also overlap with (or even result in) [[Fake Difficulty]]. When a game allows human players in on it, it's a [[Comeback Mechanic]].

 

* ''[[Okami]]'' features a bonus mission where you can race a character through a forest maze. Your opponent is much faster than you if you decide to take the normal route, so you must exploit every possible shortcut on the course in order to stay ahead. However, the race is split into three areas with load screens in between. If you were losing at the end of a section, the opponent will be far ahead of you at the beginning of the next section. If you were winning, no matter how far ahead you were, the opponent will suddenly be racing neck and neck with you in the next section. This leaves very little room for mistakes on any part of the course.

 

* Magazine ads for the Genesis ''[[Jurassic Park]]'' game claimed that as you played better, the dinosaurs would get smarter. It didn't seem to make much difference in the game, unless you count the raptors occasionally ducking your shots as getting smarter.

 

* In Capcom brawler ''[[God Hand]]'', enemies can "level up" depending on how well the player continues attacking and dodging counterattacks successfully, increasing in speed and strength. On the flip side, they de-level if the player gets smacked around too much or uses the "grovel" [[Limit Break|God Reel technique]].

** There is an indicator on the side of the screen which shows you what "level" you're on. The more enemies you beat at a high level, the larger the money bonus at the end of the stage.

* The arcade version of ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles|Turtles in Time]]'' adjusts the number of enemies that appear according to how well you're doing (e.g. if you got through three stages without losing a life they're everywhere, but if you had to spend several quarters it's much more lenient).

 

* The ''[[Mario Kart]]'' series does this to an exceptionally annoying and inconsistent degree. Wipe out at the start of a race and it's a straightforward task to still win. Wipe out near the end of the last lap (having raced a ''perfect'' game so far), and there will always be 3 guys right behind you to snatch all the points.

** And if you're good at hitting shortcuts, expect the computer to be able to suddenly hit a top speed well beyond what any human could do. The most blatant instance is Rainbow Road in ''[[Mario Kart 64]]'', which has a shortcut that can literally skip 40% of the course (which is, to this date, the longest course in the game series's history). Even if you hit said shortcut on all three laps, the computer is still able to catch you on the last lap.

* In ''[[Forza Motorsport]] 3'', cars in the same class as you will always have better performance than you if they have the #1 or #2 AI, even if you're fully upgraded to be one inch from the next class.

 

* In ''[[Guilty Gear]] Isuka'', the higher the level you get at Arcade, the faster and more powerful the opponents become. Sometimes they will even run towards you while you perform a special move, only to suddenly show up right behind you, making you completely miss them.

* ''[[Def Jam Series|Def Jam: Fight For NY]]'' was notorious for this. Get the computer into a corner, and suddenly the AI shoots up two or three difficulty levels, reversing and countering every single move you make.

** Another [[Truth in Television]] in that in actual WWE matches, opponents will bail out of the ring early if their opponent is rolling enough to try their finisher in the opening minutes of a match to regather themselves.

 

* ''[[Sin|Sin Episodes]]'' was released with a much-touted dynamic difficulty system—kill the enemies too quickly and they'd send more next time, get too many headshots and the next group will wear helmets, etc. Unfortunately, encounters that were ''supposed'' to be easier or harder were counted in this, resulting in situations that a hard encounter would be made virtually impossible due to how quickly you dispatched an easy one.

* 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.

**** This actually spawned the meme of Karma Charger, which came from the habit of chargers conveniently spawning and punting a player halfway across the map if they leave their group. While any infected can do this, Chargers are the hardest of them to kill, and cannot be pushed off other survivors and must be killed.

 

* Canary Mary from ''[[Banjo-Kazooie|Banjo-Tooie]]'' is a particularly bad example of this in her appearance in Cloud Cuckooland. You have to race her four times for [[Plot Coupon|Jiggies]] or Cheato Pages. The race is done by simply hitting the A button; the faster you press, the faster you go. The first three times, you can [[Button Mashing|Button Mash]] your way to victory, no sweat. The fourth time, she employs Rubber Band AI, so if you mash the A button, '''you will lose'''. The trick is to stay just a little behind her for the entire race until the very end, but [[Guide Dang It|good luck figuring that out on your own]], especially given that she's very beatable the first three times.

** Actually, it ''is'' possible to beat her by button mashing, if you mash, pause, mash, etc. until you win.

* Freeware game ''[[I Wanna Be the Boshy]]'' has a particularly unforgiving one in {{spoiler|Sonic the Hedgehog}}. It is only at the start of his second phase, but one slip up will kill you, and it only gets worse when bombs start falling on you. Fortunately if you can survive this, the rest of the fight is (relatively) easy. Still, that one little section makes this [[That One Boss]] when the whole thing is already [[Nintendo Hard|That One Game]]

 

* The ''[[Match Three Game|Puyo Puyo]]'' GBA game's first level's opponent always gangs up on you with garbage ''late in the level and just as you think you're doing good''.

** Similar things occur in ''[[Pokémon]] Puzzle League'' at the higher difficulty levels, particularly if he/she is on their last Pokemon. You might think you have the match, and then they will not only [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|get out the corner]], but [[Oh Crap|send a monstrous cascade of garbage blocks your way]].

* ''[http://exocubes.en.softonic.com/ Exocubes]'' is a match-3 game, where you can freely move blocks within a column, but needed to prevent them from touching the bottom (aside from a clear causing blocks to hit the bottom, but you had to wait when said blocks get "scanned"). The row generation based on how well you perform. If you performed well enough to clear a significant portion of the board, you could potentially fail that level faster than simply waiting. [[Fake Difficulty|Even when a set of blocks in the process of being cleared touches the bottom of the screen.]]

 

* ''[[Homeworld]] 2'' is notorious in some circles for doing this trope badly. Each level's enemy fleet is based solely on the makeup of your fleet as you start the level. This has the obvious abuse potential of selling all or most of your fleet at the end of each level, leaving you with enough resources to buy a new fleet in the next level capable of defeating the much weaker enemy fleet.

** What is truly bad however, is how far this overadjusts the enemy, especially towards the last missions. If the player has a cap-sized fleet, in one mission, the enemy might as well destroy what the player is to protect before his heavy ships are even in firing range, and even then, are badly outnumbered, without the targets hp getting adjusted at all; a later mission lets the enemy start with as much as ''seven'' battlecruisers, while the player is capped at ''two'' ...

* In ''[[Eight Realms]]'', barbarian hordes attack players with a scaling frequency depending on how far into the game they've progressed.

 

* 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!]]

* Many games in ''[[SaGa]]'' series, especially ''[[Romancing SaGa]]'', are open-ended games where you go anywhere you want at anytime, so random monsters are designed to suit your team's power level at the moment you face them.

 

* In [[Shoot Em Ups]], which don't feature a player going up against apparently identical computer opponents, the feature where the machine becomes more efficient if the player does better is known as "rank" and is often an expected part of the game.

** 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.

* 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.

 

* 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 mph and they are doing 150, as soon as you turn around, they are right there in your face.

* ''[[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.

 

* 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 Rubber Band AI in the game, arguing that this is more likely the perception of players who are unable to adjust to the AI's late-game all-out offensive strategy, so [[Your Mileage May Vary]]. It may also be possible that the difficulty level may have something to do with it.

** 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.

* ''[[Tecmo Super Bowl]]'' for the NES was pretty open about featuring the Simmons effect ("computer is pissed") manifestation of Rubberband AI. The more consecutive games you won in season mode, the more difficult the AI would become until it eventually entered what modders call "juice mode". In juice mode, every opposing RB is nearly at Bo Jackson's skill level, and the defense will either anticipate your play, sack you with no resistance, or intercept your weak passes about ten thousand times as frequently as they did in the 1st game of the season. Experienced Tecmo-ers learned to intentionally tank the final game of the regular season in order to tone the AI down to easy levels for the playoffs. Funnily enough, this ends up being like real-life NFL teams learned to do this in the 2000s, benching their key players for the last week of the regular season to avoid injury and give everyone a week off).

 

* The first ''[[Max Payne (series)|Max Payne]]'' proudly touted this as one of its features, with arguably less-than-optimal results. Even on the "easy" difficulty setting it ramped up the durability, accuracy and reflexes of the enemies until you died at least once per level.

{{quote|''"Why did they even bother giving you difficulty options? As far as I could tell your options were "insane / insane / impossible / impossible with a time limit."'' -- curst, Quarter to Three forums}}

** Of course, name any first or third person shooter where you ''didn't'' die once per level. All in the name of fun, of course.

 

* 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]]s. The better you are at handling terror sites, shooting down UFOs, putting alien bases out of commission, and keeping your sponsors happy, the angrier the aliens will be. This may range from them sending more ships to annoy your sponsors, sending bigger ships for tasks that they usually do with smaller ships, down to trying to attack your bases.

 

* A racing sequence early on in ''[[The Saboteur]]'' uses rubber-banding very, very obviously: The developers intended for the player to feel like they were steadily progressing from last place to second throughout the race, but the result is that for the first lap of the race, the player becomes perpetually stuck in 8th place, until the second lap when the other racers suddenly start driving much slower and the player can catch up and move up to 4th place for the rest of the lap, etc.

** Though you can simply just cheat. Before each race you just aim a gun at each racer and they will get out of their vehicle with no penalty to you. After doing so to all the vehicles you can race with no competition.

*** Or just use the machine gun upgrade to your Aurora to destroy the competition.

 

* For various reasons, the producers of ''[[The Amazing Race]]'' create what are known as "bunching points" or "equalizers," usually involving operating hours of businesses or transport schedules, so that no team gets too far ahead or behind: Logistically, it's easier to keep the crew in a single country at a time and you don't want to tie up locals in assisting/judging tasks for days on end. Dramatically, having wins or losses be a [[Foregone Conclusion]] every week [[Boring Invincible Hero|is]] [[Boring Failure Hero|boring]]. The one season they didn't set up these equalizers, two teams got so far ahead on leg 9, that it was impossible for the other teams to catch up, and the next three legs before the finale were pretty much pointless.

* Teal'c faces a Rubberband AI in an episode of ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' - every time it looks like he's winning, the game throws in a new twist. New twists include more enemies (and making those enemies tougher by making the usual method of killing them ineffective and giving one of them the power to turn invisible), and having NPCs who are supposed to be on Teal'c's side suddenly turn on him at the worst possible moment.

 

* Used frequently in ''The [[Hunger Games]]'', where the sadistic game makers will introduce disasters to the arena whenever the tributes aren't fighting each other. Katniss even makes her plans around such events, basing her decisions to move or not on how many days it's been since a kill and whether the audience will be bored enough for a pull on the rubberband.

 

* 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.

** Of course, like in any other game with Rubber Band AI, you can abuse the system. This is sandbagging. The essence of sandbagging is to win small and lose big. Once it is clear that your team is not going to win this time after handicap, then it is in your best interest to tank every shot. When victory seems possible, then it is in your best interest to keep it close, so as not to raise your handicap too much. The natural tendency of players to give up when they know they can't win doesn't help matters, so accusations are difficult to prove. The only sure way to spot one is if a team continues to win small and lose big. In theory anyone who would want to sandbag should move to a scratch league, but there are plenty who know they aren't good enough to get the money in one, but who can sandbag and get away with it in a money handicap league.

 

* The ''[[Old World of Darkness]]'' games had something like this at one point. Success of an action was determined by rolling a number of dice corresponding to one's skill. Rolls higher than a target number were successes, lower were failures, and 1's cancelled out successes. Having more 1's than successes constituted a botch, in which the action not only failed, but led to disastrous consequences. A character with more dice, constituting more experience and power, would therefore be more likely to ''spectacularly'' fail than an inexperienced one. This was thankfully revised in later editions, to where a botch also required that no successes at all had been rolled. A simple example follows. Say you have a difficulty 7 roll, where 7 or greater is a success. With one die, your odds of a botch are 1 in 10 if you don't get to reroll your 10. Odds of success are 4 in 10. If you are rolling two dice, then there are 100 possible outcomes. ELEVEN of them are botches, for 11/100. (11,12,13,14,15,16,21,31,41,51,61) However, 56 of them are successes, for 23/50 chance of success. The chance of success went up 16%, but the chance of a botch went up 1%. The effect of rerolling 10s is really hard to calculate, but at higher difficulties, it was not enough to make up for it.

** And the ''[[New World of Darkness]]'' discarded the "botch" rule for just that reason. "[[Critical Failure|Dramatic Failure]]" requires that penalties ''completely'' erase your dice pool, ''and'' that you roll a 1 on the "chance die" you get instead (which only succeeds on a 10). Instead of "The better you are, the harder you fall", it becomes "If things go against you, you're going to suffer".

* ''[[Shadowrun]]'' mirrors the ''World of Darkness'' system considerably (Shadowrun, however, uses standard six-sided dice rather than ten-siders). Earlier editions, you rolled dice so as to get at least a target number (if it's more than 6, you had to roll for 6's and then reroll to add onto their total, hoping to eventually reach the number), and 1s were always considered a fail. The 4th Edition changed it so that "hit" was simply anything at least a 5 and you tried to get a requisite number. 1s are still bad as a majority of 1s results in a "glitch", a setback that occurs even if you succeed (unless of course, you roll a majority of 1s and no "hits": the dreaded "critical glitch").

 

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D31rhjKHytg Jalyss] weighs in re: [[Empty Levels|scaled levelling]]. (Spoiler: She doesn't like it any more than the rest of us)