Chocobo racing: The NPC problem

[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.