need help with amiibo

[xDizxy]

My level 50 pikachu amiibo is having some problems. First off it spams thunder alot ( I don't even spam thunder to begin with). It does not do uptilt/upair combos even though I constantly do them. When it tries to recover using side b, it doesn't go for the ledge, just goes onto the stage. Sometimes when my amiibo is high in the air, it randomly uses QA for no apparent reason. It's not as defensive. Barely sidestep dodges, doesn't even airdodge out of combos. I heard that an amiibo is supposed to play like you but it keeps on making mistakes that I don't even do?

 

[Emuchu]

It's a common misconception that Amiibo are supposed to learn to fight like their owners. Virtua Fighter 5 had a system where you could train an AI to react in certain ways and learn your combos, which is what players seem to want from their Amiibo, but from my experience with a Toon Link and Pikamiibo, this doesn't appear to be how they learn and function. Amiibo appear, to me, to function as an AI which learn simple cause-effect relationships based around Level 9 CPU behavior. In other words, simple ratio things such as "doing this gets me hit." This simplicity, though, can also lead to bad behaviors, because of logic like "thunder hits people often."

Long story short, I think Amiibo are fun, but aren't designed to mimic player behavior. What you are likely doing is tweaking CPU behavior to favor rewards a little more than normal CPU, with the bonus of a massive stat bonus.

PS: Real talk, though: if Smash had VF5's AI training, that is, Amiibos that a) learn your combos, b) can be trained to react to situations, and c) you can coach during matches to encourage or discourage specific behaviors, e.g. "YES!" when Pika side-dodges or "NO!" when Pika spams Thunder as a non-edgeguard... no natural force on Earth could stop Nintendo from taking my money.

 

[xDizxy]

Ok can you explain this. When I fight my amiibo, it goes all tryhard but when my brother fights it, it acts like a level 3 cpu?

 

[Emuchu]

Ok can you explain this. When I fight my amiibo, it goes all tryhard but when my brother fights it, it acts like a level 3 cpu?

Uh... Is your brother inexperienced? Smash AI, like a lot of fighting game AI, is reactive. That means it prefers to dodge things and counter, rather than to go on the offensive. If your brother stands around and whatever, that could possibly explain it.

This is especially true for Amiibo. My Toon Link and Pikamiibo like to stand around for seconds at a time when they're doing a one-on-one.

 

[Wonder Gato]

Yeah, I don't know if there's a way to prevent that. These things definitely don't have any sort of advanced coding that allows them to learn that much. I just re-trained my Pikachu amiibo yesterday because it had previously just spammed Thunder over and over. I made it a point to not even use Thunder, use very specific combos repeatedly and vary up the way I killed it.

What does it do at level 50 now? Spams Thunder, uses U.Smash repeatedly on shield and recovers using Skull Bash without even aiming for the ledge, all things I never did when training it. So really, not much changed; it spammed Thunder slightly less and starting short-hopping like crazy, but still did the same general behaviors as before.

I promptly put my Pikamiibo on the shelf where it can generally be more useful by looking cool and not spamming Thunder.