Chocobo racing: The NPC problem

[Maddonious]

During my weeks of racing atm all seemed fine but after getting into the higher ranks the difficulty of the npcs goes from stupid to extremely cold and calculating to the point where if your not blowing past first place they will do everything they can to stop you and no one else.

When your in the lower rating brackets they will use items and take what they can but as I learned later they start saving items for you and avoid using them on fellow npcs, skip items if they know you can benefit from them (removal with stam regain) and avoid taking items so you cant acquire the speed/stam boost powers entirely that is 2nd in line.

Bottom line is they need tweaked. They are not human and therefore shouldn't act like major douches every race just to focus on you out of the crowd.

Big difference between hard and cheap in terms of difficulty.

[Alexiell]

it really looks like they often skip items on purpose to give you a bad item, but they also skip good items sometimes so maybe its just random.
i think higher races are balanced for chocobos that have been trained with grade 2-3 food, but their prices are just too high to use them on anything lower than your final chocobo (in my opinion). If they made the food prices more reasonable this would solve a lot of problems.

[Maddonious]

yeah, I feed my chocobos with grade 1 food to the maximum effect and it seems to do nothing in the higher tiers. Prices for grade 2/3 are still way to high even after the price drop I will agree. It just seems that the races themselves get to difficutl to fast and they expect you to have 3-4 stars on each stat by the time you hit r100 which is hard to achieve.

[Welsper59]

There's a lot of things regarding the AI and environment that work against you, from what I've personally experienced. The Basilisks in Sagolii, for example, don't trigger until a player is within range of them (meaning the NPCs will never be affected by them unless you are within identifiable range) but will be possible to go off again without a player around, after their initial attack. NPCs will have full control over their deceleration to slowest speed, something players CANNOT do. They seem to also have certain status control elements that you don't, such as Bacchu's Water, Graviballs, or Caltrops not affecting them IF they can manage to have certain short term neutralizing events happen, such as a dash pad or stamina regen, as this seems to simply negate the remaining duration of the debuff or just reduce the impact of it dramatically.

The biggest one though, NPCs will not use items on each other without certain requirements in play. There's a bit of an RNG element to this, as it even applies to them using an item on the player (sometimes), where they will either hold onto an item until the next box comes up or they will use it 2sec after claiming it. In the case of Caltrops, they will wait until anyone is within range to use it. When it comes to the player though, the NPCs are basically a single player with numerous racers at their command. This is why you'll see the normal top 3 do odd things on occasion, such as fall back so that another NPC that is typically lower positioned catch up to use items or abilities on you before they fall back to their normal positions, and said top 3 regains their spots. I've had this happen to me MANY times, where bottom 6 will usually ignore everyone along the way, and "impossibly" speed up to me to use Caltrops before they match speeds then fall back to bottom 6 after the damage is done, and I'm down to 0 stamina. This is why you'll see any of them run into certain obstacles to trigger them if you're nearby (like Coblyns), regardless if you'd get hit or not, but will never do this purposely if you're far away.

There are other things as well, but everything may be possible to be explained in some way. I'm very sure that the NPCs have some distinct advantage over players, similar to TT and their breaking the rules that players have (such as full 4-5star decks), but it may not be as blatantly hax-like. Perhaps they just ALL have max 500/500 stats (or perhaps equivalent for a given bracket) along with highest rank abilities, and what we see is what it's like when you have said stats at those lower ranks, but the AI is just bound to rules in place that dumb their actions down drastically.

Honestly though, the AI having advantages or cheats over players is nothing new, as that's essentially how all games work lol. Even the "rival" racer in FF7's Chocobo Racing was always designed to be better than the player, regardless of stats you might have (even if it were capped). The work-around may just be to use G3 foods and have a P9 bird... although I'm fairly sure that even with that, you'll still run into problems while exping for higher rank, until you can reach high enough active stats that is (R-200+). I'm only at P7, so can't say from experience on that one.

[Maddonious]

Well you made a much more detailed post. I forgot about the "catchup" mechanic they use on your and the instant slow down. Also yeah I did notice that they negate the effects of abilities if they hit a speed pad.

You pretty much summed it all up.

[elemental10]

Woah woah wait.

NPCs in chocobo racing?

You mean those that I raced against are NPCs?

....MY LIFE IS A LIE

[RobinRethiel]

Green names = NPC
Blue names = Player

[howyman]

rigged to cheat. steals item just as i activate it? run as fast as me when i have dash 2 going? gets good item in chest when jump at same time? runs as fast as me when out of stam?
well out of blast area of the lizard?
and most of all again why are they not fixing it. because ....... move onto new content .... leave the old stuff to grow old not fun anymore.... and we pay for this!!!

[NongoZongo]

I haven't really noticed any of this..? I've put a bunch of time in to get a Pedigree 9 Rank 295 chocobo and I win almost every time; when I lose it's usually due to my own error. The only thing I can say for sure is a lot of the problems with monster attacks are due to lag. If you try to shift lanes and it takes about (for example) 1 second before the chocobo moves, that's how long it takes to communicate with the server. That means if you were inside a monster's attack radius but left it with less than 1 second to spare (on your screen) then the server sees you as inside the radius at the time of attack. Same goes for item boxes, floor panels and terrain. Usually, you have to do absolutely everything early because what you're seeing is always a little ahead of what the server is seeing.

run as fast as me when i have dash 2 going? gets good item in chest when jump at same time? runs as fast as me when out of stam?

Something people might not realise is that when you're already going as fast as your chocobo can go, using dash items or panels will not make it go any faster. Using dash just boosts your speed to 100% and keeps it there for the duration.
That's why if your chocobo is at its top speed cap, dash becomes less useful because it will no longer make you go faster, but if your chocobo's stat is for example 200 out of 300, using dash will boost your speed to 300 for the duration. Similarly, Heavy becomes more dangerous because a higher max speed stat = a bigger drop in speed.
It also takes a little while for a chocobo to slow down when it runs out of stamina, so if it's a close race, you might still not be going as fast as a 0-stamina chocobo for a few seconds.

[Bacent]

Don't forget about NPCs being able to steal your item before the game will actually let you use it. I've had many items stolen and used on me right away because I got it.

But honestly I think they don't give a diddly about chocobo racing because of how long it's been out, and them never adding anything new to it.