No, it's cheating. It provides an unfair advantage by replacing a skill with a technology. There may be good intentions, but if so they are founded on a total misunderstanding of competition.
The relevant excerpt: "Exposing information that’s intentionally obfuscated (cooldowns or timers)"
As for all of the other match data mining, that's par for the course in competitive games these days.
Doesn't this just benefit people who are good at counting ?
There is a decent sized list of all the timings you should keep track of with in a game, and they change from game to game. If you don't do it you're basically lost.
Doesnt having a good memory give advantage to chess players?
Or having good reflexes benefit shooter player?
However, "Coaching is available in private lobbies, casual matchmaking, and Co-op bot matchmaking, but not Ranked matchmaking, Team matchmaking, or Tournament lobbies."
If I were an investor in this company, I'd be asking the founders what their plan is when they get banned by the major anti-cheat engines.
Its not a service I would ever want to use because I actually enjoy games and I find coaching it to be too much to care about, but I think "audio clues to practice" doesn't meet the bar of cheating lol.
The proper inject time (for instance) is just X*N seconds since game start, the second best time is right after that.
Even if there isn't decisive legal consequences they can carpet ban whoever they want whenever they want. Which is likely the reputation which causes the landing page of this service to be plastered with "don't worry you won't get banned" all over the place.
It seems very fraught and risky to use for gamers who desire that their accounts don't get banned.
> For example, we have an "Early Ganker" tag for the gamers who tend to gang in the early game. [...] We provide these tags based on only publicly accessible data on the official game publisher API. For example, any gamer can search for the opponents’ game data and conduct a similar analysis.
also seems questionable to me. Is it common/practical to do this kind of thing in these games? It seems to me that, while it might be technically possible to get the info, it should be impractical for a human to actually do the analysis, in the timespan allowed by a pregame lobby, right?
I guess it could also depend on how much preprocessing they do... hypothetically we could imagine a game where every match is recorded and saved to a public user account, and a "coaching" AI system that extracts users tags by watching these offline, and then just queries them at match time. This analysis would pretty clearly be information that players wouldn't normally be privy to, despite being available through legitimate means.
In my opinion for non-professional play (casual and ranked), these kinds of tools should be outright banned. The game goes from “how can I improve myself and play better” to “let’s expend the minimum effort possible solely to win”. You’re not playing to your strengths but just to the opponent’s weaknesses from the get-go. That’s just incredibly boring. Just because one can have a shortcut to a win doesn’t make for better or more interesting gameplay.
Regarding professional play, the teams have the resources to do this given the limited player pool and they’re also at the pro level anyways.
I feel like gaming stats should have way better privacy options in general.
Data from games is such a good way for people to get into programming and data analysis (Speaking from personal experience).
It's easily accessible, real and has a decent level of complexity. Would be a shame for it to go away because people want to hide their data.
Realistically speaking this kind of stuff doesn’t really matter at a lower level anyways- everyone’s bad and makes dumb mistakes. And it doesn’t help to know about data if you don’t know how to capitalize on it.
I can’t recommend getting into MOBAs/ARTSs solo, but if you have 2-3 friends they’re quite a blast.
There is a lot of summary stats available, but the most useful one from personal experience is the win ratio. If the data tells you that one player on the other team wins 70 % of the games, then that's usually a clear indicator that the ranking of that player is most likely lower than it should be.
It might just be a better or worse player overall, so adapting to it might not be possible, except for knowing who to put pressure on.
If that's not obviously cheating, make it time dependent, make it player dependent, etc.
If that is obviously cheating, what about producing those maps and not providing an in-game overlay?
If a professional team uses data analysis and then teaches their players something like "at 30s, on this map, this player rotates from here to here in 70% of games", that's just good training. If they have this data being live-streamed to their second monitor, it's cheating.
Maybe its just because I play on Sydney servers, but I really find this a bit overblown personally -- and I've ranked up from bronze 2 to plat 1 over six months of playing. I think its honestly just that some people have "on" and "off" games, at least from the hundreds and hundreds of ranked matches I've played.
I'd be really interested in a product that does more of what a human coach would do.
Even with DBM - there used to be an addon that told you exactly where to stand to avoid different bosses attacks. That got banned pretty quickly because it over trivialized the mechanics.
I would also say that what it's doing with Valorant is cheating. It's providing additional cues and advantages automatically, that other players have to keep tabs on manually. The other players have to risk glancing at the timer(s) and temporarily divert attention from the other parts of the screen, while the "AI" user can rely on auditory feedback that is not present in the game for everyone (and maybe was a conscious decision from the game developers).
The whole point of competition is to evaluate player vs player performance, not player+personal assistant vs player performance. If you allow uneven things like that, then it becomes an arms race and also becomes boring from both a viewer and participant standpoint. Part of the challenge of games like Valorant, League of Legends, DotA2, etc, is to learn how to manage the sheer amount of information while also engaging in fights/gameplay.
An actual coach "AI" concept could be to provide intelligent information -inbetween rounds-, not during gameplay itself.