General Pokémon

[mikey]

the only way to make the AI actually able to beat humans consistently is with hax

[BlackDragonSlayer]

i appreciate the reference but there isnt any cheating hax. unless you were agreeing with me lmao

Anything that gives the AI an advantage that players don't normally get (which includes ridiculously high accuracy, "convenient" crits, or just generally taking advantage of RNG) would fall under the definition.

[Altissimo]

Anything that gives the AI an advantage that players don't normally get (which includes ridiculously high accuracy, "convenient" crits, or just generally taking advantage of RNG) would fall under the definition.

That doesn't happen. It's a mix of confirmation bias and bad luck. Again, I've played upwards of 600 battles in the Maison and spent a lot of time around people who have clocked thousands in a row and seen NONE OF THIS.

Actually, no. Let me use the thing they always tell me to use when people say shit like this. Produce a replay. Give me a Battle Video or a Youtube Video where there is literally no explanation except "the AI cheated". And I mean "literally no explanation": Quick Claw activating three times in a row is not likely but it is still possible.

[mikey]

that freaking mono-OHKO Dewgong in the Battle Factory
not saying not missing is through cheats, just saying I've lost too many games to it for it to be a coincidence

[Dude]

Where's the replay

[Nebbles]

Okay, but you getting lucky and the AI lucky is the same thing. Same odds, same chances, etc. Alti's absolutely correct. Bad luck happens all the time in any game. I've had horrible luck in Pokemon, Fire Emblem, multiple turn-based RPGs and such. And it's not "hax". It's shitty luck from a bad RNG roll. It happens to anyone, but it's by no means the AI cheating. Would you be "cheating" if you got all the lucky stuff?

[Altissimo]

I fucking hate OHKO users and I won't deny that they suck
But it really, truly is just straight up coincidence, i know we all want to believe the maison/frontier is out to get us so we can feel better about fighting it but shit happens. I literally just lost a 118-streak in Maison doubles right before making this post to a Gourgeist so it's not as though I'm above losing

@Nebbles yes thanks

[mikey]

it would be hacking if it happened to me because it doesn't

[Dude]

Sounds more like people being sore losers to RNG

[Altissimo]

confirmation bias. We miss the times we crit and get lucky with hits and not misses because they're "unspectacular" but the times THEY crit and the times THEY hit and not miss and WE miss are more meaningful.

Actually, no, here, let me post my own replay.

EZRW-WWWW-WWXT-JGZR

I fucked up with Aegislash. I should have paid the price and died to Moltres. The AI should have punished me brutally for fucking up with Aegislash. Instead, it missed with Overheat. There is no reason that attack "should" have missed in a hax game because it would have lost me the battle against the Chatelaine if it had hit.

[Nebbles]

Let me bring up something from Fire Emblem to push my point.

In games 6-12, there was this thing called "true hit". What was it, exactly? Well, when your unit went to go face another, the numbers displayed for the hit weren't entirely accurate. The way the games calculated the hit chances was basically a dice roll of two numbers together. I got hit by a ridiculously low chance once. I missed some really high hits. It's not hacks, it's just horrifically bad luck.

And that's just shit that happens sometimes in games that rely on RNG based battle system.

[Nitro Indigo]

The AI gets affected by paralysis and confusion less than I do for some reason in multiple games. RNG indeed...

[BlackDragonSlayer]

1: Saying "it's not likely, but it's possible" is not an argument (though you could argue that, given a series of infinite battles, encountering hax is inevitable, mass hax of this variety is incredibly uncommon, saying this as someone who has faced a lot of RNG on Showdown). Judging by the commonly accepted guidelines for AI having an unfair advantage over the player (let's use this as an example, since it's a quick and easy reference; there's even a section dedicated to Pokemon. For a summary with slightly less jargon, see Wikipedia's section on Cheating AI), the AI does not need to be perfect in order to be considered as "cheating" ("This can be a quick-and-dirty method of achieving a 'level' playing field against a skilled human player, but can also create Fake Difficulty when the computer has access to moves that a human player clearly does not."). Thus, being repeatedly improbable would be good enough to fit the definition. If the AI were always perfect in terms of RNG and prediction, it would pretty much be completely unbeatable, which wouldn't be very fun or enticing for the player. This need for a slight imperfection is also the reason why it is sometimes possible to exploit the AI. On the other hand, if the AI didn't have any sort of enhancements, it would likely be way too easy or exploitable. The problem is finding the right types of enhancements so that the player doesn't feel cheated- getting a multitude of BrightPowder-related misses (which seems to be a common item in the Maison) would definitely make someone feel cheated, since it's incredibly rare that a normal player would get this (i.e. if someone gets one BrightPowder miss, it can be attributed simply to bad luck, but when it happens multiple times in a row with battle-changing results it can reasonably be seen as the computer trying to get a leg up, but since, as far as we can tell, the AI is not a sentient entity, it probably doesn't do this "intentionally," so to say, hence why it doesn't happen ALL the time or even with deliberate aim; I'm just speculating here since I don't know all the fine points of AI in video games, and I may not be wording everything right because it's getting late here and I've had a long day).

There's also this, which would be a definite example of "the computer has access to moves that a human player clearly does not":

The AI of the battle facilities of Generation III onward (often either the 'Battle Tower' or the 'Battle Frontier') are designed to gain knowledge about your team as you accumulate winning streaks, despite the fact that you're facing new opponents over and over again and thus it wouldn't make sense for "Schoolgirl Jane" to know anything about the team that "Punk Sid" just battled. Specifically, you'll be forced to face teams that are increasingly designed to counter yours the higher your streak.

While this may seem like a coincidence in many instances, the most damning evidence is that players that have used hacked Pokémon, Pokémon with special abilities and sets that literally do not exist anywhere in the game and thus the computer cannot possibly have had the knowledge to counter them beforehand, will still encounter teams that are tailor made to overcome the player's strategies.

For evidence this still exists in the 6th generation's Battle Maison, try entering a Pokemon with Sand Stream as your lead plus an Aron with Sturdy and Endeavor. In the Battle Maison, you'll quickly start encountering a disproportionate number of Pokemon who are immune to sandstorms.

2: The set of definitions you are using is asking for something that is rather unquantifiable (probably not completely so, but not something any one person could do easily): you would literally have to play tens of thousands of battles, find some sort of baseline to compare it to (which wouldn't be easy considering all the other factors that might influence results, and outliers, which will occur because RNG is, well, naturally unpredictable!), and even then, you can apparently dismiss everything by simply saying "lol rng." And even then, maybe I'm missing some sort of other complex steps you'd need to do in order to find instances where "there is literally no explanation except 'the AI cheated.'" Which is kind of pointless, because, as I said above, in length, the definition is stricter than necessary.

But, regardless of whether or not this would answer your question, I found a bunch of funny/painful-to-watch replays (I'm not trying to use any of this as argument, and I don't necessarily advocate any of the opinions stated in these videos: I just thought these were some fun instances of such things happening).

Spoiler

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Bonus

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[cashwarrior1]

How about: Everyone just sucks, and Nintendo is smart.

[mikey]

thanks for that quote BDS
what we're trying to say is that without AI hax there would be no possible way for an AI to be difficult to beat