id rather play against tryhards than a bot

this seems really cool

this bot is better than half of current prem tho

Bot seemed fine on spire at first but after like 5 kills it started landing in weird spots and pencil jumping a bunch. I would love to see nosplash, blands mid, and viaduct added. This might have been a setting I couldnt find but it would also be cool to be able to limit yourself and the bot to only shotgun and rockets.

played this before and i see u added a lot more stuff which is cool & fun. i like swapping to the sniper mid air and going for no scopes, i didnt use the scope much at all even cross map cuz the bot moves so weird. i found the shotgun more useable now than before, but idk if u changed it or if i just utilised it more cuz of my poo LG aim. also the bot is better than most mge players anyway...

my only comment is splash / clipping is a bit weird on the saw map, i think its meant to be like badlands but i dont like having to jump up each log. also maybe add preview pictures of each map in the main menu?

+ to adding the maps mentioned above

also i hope that ai isnt angry with me because i shotgun switched it on scoville

Thanks for the input so far. Quite a few people gave it a try and got some valuable insights.
Started to capture my updates/release notes here: https://scoville.gg/blog/

v11.8.0 is now live:
Bot Improvements:
- Counter-sniping
- Holding the top
- Getting unstuck
- No jumping in place
- Finishing you off
- Taking the middle
- Strafing after a knock

Other updates:
- Hitbox fixes (old version was not live)
- 'Killed by HP'
- Bot weapon settings:
- Pipe is drawn a bit smaller
- Mapping visuals
- Player count

Read more details here: https://scoville.gg/blog/

Online play is also enabled so if you want to play with friends you can also give it a try.
How I am currently positioning the game is more like a training mode where "good" opponens are always on and ready to play, whilst they also play fair at the same time. Something which I find hard to find in online MGE servers most of the time.

- Spire failed jumps: I will look into it. I have observed it before as well, perhaps partially fixed with yesterdays update to reduce # of jumps and stay on top more.
- Other arenas:
-- Nosplash easily do-able, I will add it
-- Badlands mid: I try to make 'sawyard' in the same concept. Large plateau/bridge and 2 small advantage points like the trains in badlands. As someone pointed out, jumping on the log piles feels a bit blocky so might make it a bit easier/lower stack or something.
-- Viaduct: Might consider to turn 'shogun' area into Viaduct playstyle.
I am trying not to copy 1:1 arenas from TF2, but of course Spire was a must have so I did put it in as a 1:1 replica

Weapon usage of the bot: Yes this was always possible, now easier: in settings you can turn on advanced bot settings. There u can play with tweaking the difficulty and which weapons the bot is allowed to use.

- Sniping & movement: The bot should try to move faster left and right when he knows you have the sniper rifle out, but its not perfect yet. Also I personally feel like I am "sliding" a bit when I zoom in and move left & right, not sure what is causing this yet

- Shotgun: Yes a few weeks ago I changed the spread and damage fall-off to be more like in tf2. Also if you go to hud settings you can select to 'bundle' together damage text so you can see easier how much dmg u do per shot, instead of seeing a bunch of -7's per bullet

- Map previews: On my to do list to add both loading screens (like shoreline II) and screenshots of each arena

Btw the tryhard detection mode normally includes LG tryhard, prefire, shotgun switching and sniping 2+ shots.
He 'should' counter it with the same playstyle for 3 Kills and then ask you if you want to play normal again.
Although it seems he is always falling back to LG tryhard despite being triggered by the rail gun for example...

Any other feedback happy to receive it!

why are you making a new thread and pretending that this is a new thing when it's the exact same shit you were advertising a month back that you stopped giving updates for like three weeks ago

just played multiplayer for the first time vs lander and he rage quit after 10-1

keep it up

It's a lot better now than it was in the last thread, although a whole new one wasn't warranted. It's actually pretty fun to play now, I would consider playing with friends at this point. Having played spire up to the ghost level, here's what I noticed:

- The bot's ability to blind prefire airshot you without being able to see where you jumped feels unfair. This and the precision at which the bot can juggle you while being knocked around himself disincentivizes jumping a bit compared to more cheesy strategies. I don't mind the superhuman capabilities on the hard bots but it doesn't seem appropriate for the jalapeño tier at the very least
- The bot is good enough at shooting where the mid level bots seemed relatively similar to the hard ones when the bot has the high ground but much much more disparate once you have the high ground, since the lower skill bots seem to have trouble rocket jumping and worse movement in general. Imo the easier bots would be more fun for new players with better movement and slightly worse aim.
- The bot was pretty poor at countering noob strategies like spamming grenades/rail/LG from the ground, at least on spire. I don't know if something like this already exists in some capacity, but the bot could stand to be more aggressive when it knows you're low.
- I don't like the idea of tryhard mode, especially when it triggers seemingly at random and never when you're actually doing something that feels like cheesing the game. Why simulate whiny opponents in a singleplayer game anyway? It would be much more fun from the player's perspective for the bot to adapt to your strategy in a natural way, although obviously that isn't trivial.
- I would replace the LLMese in the menus ("a human, or the ladder", "fly this arena, no bot", etc.) with something more natural if you want to avoid the perception of it being a lazy slop game

Hello. While consuming this content I am frequently pressing things like CTRL+W or CTRL+D, causing me to e.g. close the tab or save a book mark. Please advise. Thank you.

then i'll play the real thing instead of temu mge

Wanted to move it to the off-topic section outside of tf2.

If you have constructive feedback or criticism to share feel free to contribute, otherwise feel free to ignore this project and move on. It's not for everybody and I don't want to 'convince' everybody. Happy to receive input to make it better, I know there are many points to improve still.

Thanks for playing and thanks for the input, couple of points:
- 'Superhuman capabilities': It is true that the bot is 'all-knowing' in the sense that he knows your position regardless if you are visible or not. I can tweak the lower tier bots to only act upon seeing you in their line of sight. 2nd point; let me also see if I can nerve the bot tiers below Reaper more when it comes to juggling and airshots. If you airstrafe fast enough the Reaper is still dodge-able, he mainly hits all the shots when you are predictable or moving in a simple Arc
- Lower bots & movement: I'll improve the rocket jumping skills of the lower bots and keep their aim at a lower skill vs the Reaper, see if it makes it more fun
- Countering spam tactics: So in the latest release I did make the bot be more agressive when you are hiding behind a ledge whilst sniping at him, and the bot does have specific movement vs projectiles when holding a high ground (at least the Reaper). 2 points here:
1) I think lower tier bots need to improve their dodging skills a bit perhaps
2) Will try to think of the best approach how to be agressive in the right situation when the player is low on health. It's a bit tricky to build because quite often making these changes turns out to be worse statistically (e.g. running N=1000 test games) shows holding the high ground and waiting is better, so I think I need to tighten the scenario more when he should actually be aggro despite holding high ground
- Tryhard mode: I'm working on an update now where the bot actually mirrors your 'try-hard' mode instead of just defaulting to LG. You can see a bit more details in my latest post and the 'principles'
- LLM text: Definitely on my to-do-list to overhaul the whole UX/UI including the text

When you play in full-screen mode the CTRL + other buttons doesn't happen.
Need to investigate more if there are other ways to solve the shortcut buttons being disabled when not in full-screen mode, if this is even possible.

---

Wrote down some more of my thoughts in latest blog post: https://scoville.gg/blog/

Currently working on the following improvements for the next release:
- Text pop up to inform people to enable hardware acceleration (current text shows if you use integrated GPU but not clear enough about hardware accel)
- Bot tryhard mirroring
- Reaper leaderboard (who killed him, the score, and time it took)
- ELO leaderboard (placeholder)
- Stats e.g. K/D, accuracy etc
- UI/UX visual improvements
- Character improvements (clothing seperation from the character, textures and recolouring)
- Loading screens for each arena (same as Shoreline II)
- Small preview of each arena in main menu
- Tweaking bot tiers and difficulties (as per above comments)

If you give the bot a slight incentive to kill someone as fast as possible that might help it not camp when someone is low health. Actually does have a real advantage because your opponent will get tilted/feel overwhelmed which is a variable the bot will likely never account for no matter how many simulated games it goes through. Maybe also give it some incentive to mix up its strafing/dodges by pausing or using WS since it kinda just ADs to dodge which makes it very easy to direct sometimes. I have not mastered this yet and the best I have done was 11-20 vs the reaper but these are just my current observations. Also I would love to see a scout bot added eventually although that would probably be a ton of work to implement.

Update v12.0.0 now live:
- Reaper leaderboard
- Tryhard techniques mirrored by bot
- Direct hits arena, sawyard logs pile fixed
- Mouse fixes
- Pop-up + instructions for hardware accel + integrated GPU selection
- Other small fixes

Full write-up here: https://scoville.gg/blog/#post-4

Thank you for your reply! Unfortunately I just double checked and confirmed that it does happen in full-screen mode. I am using Mozilla Firefox.

Hey, it seems this is more tricky than I thought. Apparently it's a restriction on Firefox that has not changed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1514004

I tried to allow the 'Override Keyboard Shortcuts' settings in Firefox (Ctrl+i) but that didn't work for me.

Best advice at this stage is to use a different browser or rebind Ctrl to Shift... Maybe alternatively is to use a jailbreak version of firefox without these shortcuts when in fullscreen mode. I could probably build it but dont know if that's what you want. I also have a jailbreak version of MS Edge which runs on unlimited FPS which is nice (standard is capped)

Can you add steam integration so the leaderboard has actual identifiers to it, also don't think you need to "verify" each match, I can't imagine anyone is cheating on the site. I won reaper 20-10/20-7/20-5 but its not in there, and once its in there it will be under "guest #613071".

The logs on saw aren't fully fixed, there is splash issues on the logs themselves, though lowering them is definitely better. The bot seems to be aware of the kill saw at all times so never dies to it, meaning its just a hazard for the player. Sometimes the bot gets stuck on the logs on the side of the maps, and sometimes he gets waddles around on the grass on the sides of the raised bit without coming up, so you have to cheese spam him or he will prefire you peaking him.

I think having the bigger maps like warehouse and sawyard are more fun to play than the smaller ones like arcadium, that feels just a little to small for some weapons (like sniper) to be useful but too close so LG is a bit OP. I did cheese the bots a few times, but I don't think this plays like normal MGE with the variety of weapons so its ok.

I think the tryhard mode is still a bit odd as it triggers on some random things. I figured out if I shot at the bot twice with the sniper at the start of the round that was considered tryhard mode. Though, I think you have changed it a bit because the last time I played "tryhard mode" meant the bot would camp high ground with LG. To me the tryhard mode didn't seem to have much impact on the bots behaviour, except a few times it would double headshot me out of nowhere.

It would also be cool if there was more things to strive for. So far if I want to try scoville I do like 3-4 rounds of Reaper, try a couple maps and I'm bored. I think the leaderboard will help, could be cool if this is there is subsections of each map. If there was a way to enable perma tryhard without it swapping off after a few rounds could also be good, or an option to turn it off if people don't want to play vs it. Some badges or awards you could get would be nice. I saw the Road to Reaper thing, but once you have beat the harder bots it just seems tedious to have to play each of those. Running a tournament or cup could also be cool, this could be single player or multiplayer ranked thing, since its fun in either way. Also the stats subsection on the leaderboard page looks a bit poo, if it was centralised or there was some more info that would be good. Maybe some graphics of your best maps / win rate on each map or a match history with scores.

Hey man solid feedback, appreciated

About the leaderboard:
-> Games should show up automatically immediately, but I just checked and mine is also not showing up. Fixing it now
-> Verification might be overstating it, it's basically an automatic pipeline at this point that runs 1x per day to re-run and verify it isn't corrupted etc. Not like I am manually reviewing each demo myself..

I just played a game vs the reaper on spire and also realized there are a bunch of improvements to make ...
-> Dodging vs pipes; he just stands at the same spot and gets chipped by pipes easily
-> He doesn't finish you off, quite often you were <50hp and he doesn't finish it
-> Not using rocket launcher to spam downwards
-> Awkward jump behavior from around the jump pad

Sawyard:
- Just played a round vs the reaper and he indeed play very awkward. Was just staying on the grass often and generally just felt very off. Will investigate to see what is going wrong here.
- Logs: will make the top surface flat because rockets can indeed clip inbetween them and ruin splash damage
- Tryhard mode does seems to get triggered a bit too random, especially pre-fire rockets

In terms of achievements/goals: my first goal is to make the reaper bot really strong and improve its movement + game sense on spire and other arenas, basically make him super hard to beat. The first tournament will have a prize money about (1) who can beat him first and (2) who can beat him fastest (thats why I started with the leaderboard)

Steam login: will make it public for all users in the next update

https://imgur.com/a/aBGnBT5

i beat the reaper aimbot on nosplash twice (out of 20 losses but we ignore those) but it didn't keep me logged into my account or save it :(

Steam login now open for everybody, and Reaper leaderboard also updated with top 5 fastest wins. Watch replay button also works

https://i.imgur.com/H1U3t1k.png

After pretty easily 20-1'ing the reaper on Sawyard I have a little bit of feedback.
1. Reaper does not try to close distance enough
2. It goes for directs that you can dodge or jump over when splash could easily guarantee a kill
3. Is too comfortable getting in spam battles from lowground instead of trying to take height back
4. Tries to push you in a straight line and gets juggled instead of surfing rockets towards you or jumping you
I think it would be interesting that if it misses a few shots on you but you are hitting it, it immediately tries to close the gap or reposition instead of just slowly losing a mid-range spam battle. I am not particularly good compared to a lot of other people here so if I can 20-1 it on my first try, something is definitely wrong lol because it kicks my ass in the other arenas.
Also am I bugging or does ctapping not work on scoville at all?

I saw your demo, you played the Reaper with only the rocket launcher enabled. He is not fully functional yet when it comes to limiting his weapons as he will still try to switch to other weapons (e.g. snipe from a distance) but his brain gets distorted... One of the updates I'm working on.
Give him another try without any weapon restrictions and let me know how he plays? For sure there are many improvements still - and closing the distance is one of them

Spire bot improvements now live: https://scoville.gg/blog/#post-5

& Sneak peak... cooking something: https://youtu.be/JM9kksLAdM0