EPTBot on ladder - Page 6
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Scarlett`
Korea (South)2420 Posts
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p4fn2w
398 Posts
On September 20 2026 05:01 FaZ- wrote: I took a look at the bot's early losses: - vs. 빠른비상 (RapiDFlyUp): blocks its own main-natural choke (Octagon) with a Sieged Tank, is never able to push out - vs. OnlyWinWar: gets contained on 2 base (PvZ) against Ling/Lurker, goes Zealot+HT but never pushes - vs. llllllllll: can't figure out where its natural is (Odyssey), takes 3rd and never pushes. The bot (or its owner) CHATS!? - vs. ANSOO[iris]: same issue with Odyssey natural, gets run over by 1-base Zealot+DT into Arbiter+BCs, lol - vs. Shot1234: blocks own ramp with a Sieged Tank again (Knockout), never pushes. - vs. Ssak: badly misplaces natural CC, somehow gets out to a midgame supply lead (macro CC?!?), but fully contained VODs: - vs. Larva: https://vod.sooplive.com/player/207504015?change_second=3774 - vs Ssak: https://vod.sooplive.com/player/207470727?change_second=218 - vs Paralyze: https://vod.sooplive.com/player/207485853?change_second=9034 Kind of funny, it reads like the losses are due to: 1. AI bug 2. played PvZ 3. AI bug 4. AI bug 5. AI bug 6. AI bug | ||
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quaristice
149 Posts
edit: nvm just got to the paralyze game where he does | ||
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iCCup.Trent
Argentina465 Posts
Think of the opportunities this unlocks eventually: - We never run out of opponents. Off hours, dead regions, weird maps. - Most importantly, it gives new players the ladder experience BW needs: a sequence of bots at progressively higher difficulty, so a beginner can actually climb and measure improvement, without a bunch of unfortunate toxic geeks destroying you and calling you a noob. Personally, I've been waiting for this to happen since forever. Best thing that has happened in a long time. Thank you! | ||
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Jealous
10379 Posts
On September 20 2026 22:17 iCCup.Trent wrote: Something major in here is getting buried under the maphack discussion: the actual headline is that bots now run on Remastered! BWAPI has been stuck on 1.16.1 for fifteen years! Think of the opportunities this unlocks eventually: - We never run out of opponents. Off hours, dead regions, weird maps. - Most importantly, it gives new players the ladder experience BW needs: a sequence of bots at progressively higher difficulty, so a beginner can actually climb and measure improvement, without a bunch of unfortunate toxic geeks destroying you and calling you a noob. Personally, I've been waiting for this to happen since forever. Best thing that has happened in a long time. Thank you! Yea, that's theoretically possible, if Blizzard allows it and gives enough of a fuck to communicate with and work with bot developers, with the goal of having enough machines running bots for all of the people who can't find a match to have an opponent, and then they could also- who are we kidding, Blizzard ain't gonna do none of that shit. Fun fact though, you can already do most of what you described via SCHNAIL: https://schnail.com/#/home | ||
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earob84
Germany184 Posts
On September 20 2026 16:39 Scarlett` wrote: is there any way to play against this locally rn? Yes it is. Dont ask me how. But i saw koreans play against Pluto in localmode with old graphics tho and also Pluto without maphack. The Pluto on ladder uses also maphack | ||
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iCCup.Trent
Argentina465 Posts
On September 20 2026 22:46 Jealous wrote: Yea, that's theoretically possible, if Blizzard allows it and gives enough of a fuck to communicate with and work with bot developers, with the goal of having enough machines running bots for all of the people who can't find a match to have an opponent, and then they could also- who are we kidding, Blizzard ain't gonna do none of that shit. Fun fact though, you can already do most of what you described via SCHNAIL: https://schnail.com/#/home Sorry to contradict you, Jealous, but the whole point of my post is that you couldn't do this in SC:R up until now, this is clearly stated in the first answer of their FAQ: https://schnail.com/#/faq | ||
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Jealous
10379 Posts
On September 20 2026 23:39 iCCup.Trent wrote: Sorry to contradict you, Jealous, but the whole point of my post is that you couldn't do this in SC:R up until now, this is clearly stated in the first answer of their FAQ: https://schnail.com/#/faq And the whole point of my post is that 1. There is next to no chance that some Blizzard x BWAI Community sudden romance will develop and lead to the golden age of skill-based AI match-making on Battle.net as a result of a banned Korean IP thief running a maphacking bot on their ladder for a few days and 2. SCHNAIL offers you almost everything you're asking for and have been asking for except for random weird maps and SC:R as the gateway. People already have access to that. I don't think there is any misunderstanding here. | ||
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Lorch
Germany3711 Posts
Just let your bot play custom games, idk why you would ruin ladder with this. If I were Blizzard I would hardware ban the living shit out of anything that can be linked to this bot, not just from SC but all of battle.net. | ||
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PurpleWave
9 Posts
On September 21 2026 01:28 Lorch wrote: Hope it gets banned from ladder, not interested in playing against machines, especially one that cheats with maphack. Just let your bot play custom games, idk why you would ruin ladder with this. If I were Blizzard I would hardware ban the living shit out of anything that can be linked to this bot, not just from SC but all of battle.net. People have been making bots for 17 years and nobody involved, not one of us, has ever condoned using them on the ladder. They play in bot-vs-bot competitions, or against humans who opt in to playing them. We have never even made a way to run bots on Remastered and you're seeing exactly why. We are well aware that the entire Brood War AI competition and hobby scene exists only at the mercy of Blizzard. I don't know who ran Pluto on the ladder, but it's not its creator. Whoever did it needed to create their own software to do so. My own immediate response to seeing this was to make a very accurate bot detector that Blizzard can use to detect and ban anyone botting on the ladder, should they have any willingness to use it. Detecting bots is very easy and nobody with the resources to train the kind of bot that could even start to defeat a detector (many months of work and a ton of compute) would deliberately try to evade detection. | ||
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TT1
Canada10073 Posts
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PurpleWave
9 Posts
On September 21 2026 03:09 TT1 wrote: would it be hard to implement some type of custom game mode on SB with high level bots you can pick to play vs? could eventually add a ranking system or something, like a 1v1 challenger game mode vs AI bots or something, dunno the difficulty in creating something like that tho That's what SCHNAIL is. It would be reasonable to offer it (consensually) on either Battle.net or Shield Battery if: - There existed a Remastered client with bot support but *without* enabling ladder abuse (this is tricky) - Someone is willing to foot the bill for servers which host and run the bots Bots generally require a dedicated CPU core per game for adequate performance. Pluto requires 8 CPU cores or a GPU (does not have to be modern). That's on top of needing to host the remote instance of StarCraft. These constraints explain the design of SCHNAIL: It's in 1.16.1 and the bots run locally on your machine. That has its own downsides (antiviruses/Windows Defender frequently quarantine BWAPI or its bots. And some players don't have adequate hardware to run the bots) | ||
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FaZ-
United States191 Posts
On September 20 2026 16:39 Scarlett` wrote: is there any way to play against this locally rn? https://github.com/tscmoo/pluto/releases There's a bit of setup and you'll have to play on the pre-remastered version, but hope you get it working! | ||
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iCCup.Trent
Argentina465 Posts
If the bots are good, they'll be at the top, if not, then we have more players to play against. If the pros are annoyed at them at the top, they'll play each other on non-ladder like they do on their streams. Having bot capability on SC:R is a net-positive I think? | ||
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Sonko
155 Posts
TL:DR; Purplewave is completely correct in everything. 1. I'd like to reiterate that I never condoned, and actively worked against any and all attempts to put BWAPI bots on the ladder - and all the bot authors I talked to and know are on the same page. I think if someone is sufficiently skilled to make a halfway decent bot, then they are not overly concerned with cheating on the ladder. From my experience, a lot of bot authors don't even play SC competitively, they just like the programming aspect. To PW's points: - Remastered support is a huge hurdle, but we always knew it was possible - for various reasons, we had to wait until now for someone to actually put in the resources/effort to make it a reality. Despite it working on ladder, it might not be a 100% solution the same way the old API is - maybe we just didn't see the bugs yet. But I don't know the technical details. There are some ideas about how to make Remastered support happen: 1. Mod the 1.16 client until it is functionally identical. There is some merit in this, but this is essentially redoing the work that went into SC:R 2. Have a modified SC:R instance, with bnet connectivity ripped out, with a custom bot ladder, and add safeguards to make it hard to use it on ladder. Let's be clear: We cannot 100% prevent cheating. It's been happening since forever, with or without bots. What we can do is make it hard for someone unskilled to do it, and raise the barrier. - Infrastructure costs money and time to set up. I'd like to provide to play against AI locally, but that will always be inconsistent, given that people have different PC specs. The "fair" way to set this up would be over the network, in a sandboxed environment for the bots to run in, with access to their training data, and all the resources they need. But this is not free, neither building it out, or operating it. I see a lot of interest from people wanting to play Pluto - I'm also sure it would be a fraction of it if a match cost even a cent to play. As for bot detection: It seems to be (as things currently stand) a solvable problem. My naive approach is just to look at the average APM throughout the match - high APM seems to be a prerequisite of expert bot play, but not a guarantee. Capping it at ~600 would be probably enough for now, but as with every game ever, cheating and catching cheaters is an ever-evolving arms race. On September 21 2026 03:29 PurpleWave wrote: That's what SCHNAIL is. It would be reasonable to offer it (consensually) on either Battle.net or Shield Battery if: - There existed a Remastered client with bot support but *without* enabling ladder abuse (this is tricky) - Someone is willing to foot the bill for servers which host and run the bots Bots generally require a dedicated CPU core per game for adequate performance. Pluto requires 8 CPU cores or a GPU (does not have to be modern). That's on top of needing to host the remote instance of StarCraft. These constraints explain the design of SCHNAIL: It's in 1.16.1 and the bots run locally on your machine. That has its own downsides (antiviruses/Windows Defender frequently quarantine BWAPI or its bots. And some players don't have adequate hardware to run the bots) | ||
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Sybris
35 Posts
This is no bot | ||
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