As a tangent, there has recently been drama with AI and Pokemon Showdown because someone trained a bot (using standard reinforcement learning + a rewrite of the Pokemon battle engine to Rust for max self-play parallelism) that is apparently good enough to get to the top of the leaderboard.
We may are approaching the point that online games become just playing against bots. I would love to see arcades and gaming cafes back. Real human connection instead of playing against bots. Ironically. For many years. The internet was the place to play against humans. AI, decompilation, and other tech may turn that around.
Yeah I saw that too which was partly the inspo for this experiment. I feel like its kind of getting to a place like in chess where AI is getting better and while theres alot of drama right now, I feel like it'll be something like stockfish in the future
The difference is that many believe that the kind of bot detection algorithms used by chess.com probably can't be made for PS, which means there's no real way to give average players a bot-free ladder experience. It also basically invalidates Smogon's suspect test system for rule updates, which assumes that players who can reach an ELO cutoff have reasonable views on how to improve a format.
There's online tournament cheating potential as well, but from my time in that community it was pretty common knowledge that ghosting by top level human players was just accepted if you were in the right circles.
