Rubber Band AI - Television Tropes & Idioms

A hypothetical: You're playing John Madden Football. Your team is up by 13, there's three and a half minutes left until the end of the game, and you have the ball. Your victory is assured, right?

Wrong, because suddenly the AI is twice as fast as you, knows what play you're going to do, and shuts down your offense, forcing you to punt. On their drive, the AI marches downfield with no difficulty by completing several consecutive bombs, scoring an easy touchdown. Rinse and repeat, and before you know it you've lost what you thought was a safe lead. The video game has just experienced a Miracle Rally.

Why does this happen? It's a subset of Fake Difficulty, and it's called Rubber Band AI. The further you stretch a rubber band, the harder it pulls. It's the same idea here. Basically, the better you are doing at a game, the harder the game gets in order to continue to present a challenge. This isn't just the idea of making the game harder and harder as you progress farther and farther, this means that the level you're on right now will, for seemingly no reason, ramp up its difficulty if it thinks you're doing too well. This may, in some cases, be coupled with the computer actually cheating, rather than just getting better.

Of course to be fair this sometimes happens in reverse, the AI easing up when winning to give you a chance to come back, stealing any satisfaction the player might gain from "victory". It would be nice to see at least some attempt at including plot-relevant Enemy Chatter to justify this, such as opponent teams speaking overconfidently when the difficulty eases up, or receiving a much-needed pep talk from their NPC coach when they're doing poorly.

Also seen in a few RPGs, where enemies are adjusted according to your character's levels, which can make any non-levelable stuff (like items) useless pretty quick. This is sometimes referred to as "punishing you for your experience".

Casually, Wikipedia has a comprehensive article

about Rubberband AI.

The reverse version of this trope is an Unstable Equilibrium.

Examples:

Final Fantasy VIII was a recent example. However, since the ability to draw magic and junction it to your stats was technically separate from the Character Levels gained from actual battling, it was very easy to unbalance the game with some ingenuity.
Perhaps the most noticeable example is the John Madden Football games, which are often accused of featuring an "AI catch-up mode", in which opposing teams inexplicably become drastically more potent in the final minutes of a close game, often to the point where preventing them from completing long bombs and scoring touchdowns seems like an impossible task. Some Madden players, however, dispute the existence of Rubberband AI in the game, arguing that this is more likely the perception of players who are unable to adjust to the AI's late-game all-out offensive strategy. It may also be possible that the difficulty level may have something to do with it.
Some Super Robot Wars games use a variant of this -- completing optional goals during missions, above and beyond the victory conditions (such as completely destroying an enemy who would usually escape when low on health, or finishing the enemies within a set number of turns) will give you "Battle Mastery" points. The higher your points go, the higher the difficulty gets -- but certain special secrets you will need for that Hundred Percent Completion also requires you to have a particular number of Mastery Points by a certain mission, pretty much forcing you to play at max difficulty...
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an example of a game where enemies level up along with the player everywhere throughout the world, even in already visited areas. Sentient characters also gain fancier equipment when they level up in this fashion, leading to the absurd situation of having bandits that wear armour and carry weapons that are worth thousands of gold coins demanding you give them the by-this-point-trivial sum of 100 gold.
- This could also be exploited using powerful techniques that low-level characters obtain to get easy victories in ludicrous situations, like becoming the champion of the Monster Arena for the entire game world… at level 1!
The Mario Kart series does this to an exceptionally annoying and inconsistent degree. Wipe out at the start of a race and it's a straightforward task to still win. Wipe out near the end of the last lap (having raced a perfect game so far), and there will always be 3 guys right behind you to snatch all the points.
- And if you're good at hitting shortcuts, expect the computer to be able to suddenly hit a top speed well beyond what any human could do. The most blatant instance is Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 64, which has a shortcut that can literally skip 40% of the course (which is, to this date, the longest course in the game's history). Even if you hit said shortcut on all three laps, the computer is still able to catch you on the last lap.
- Mario Kart Wii, unfortunately, takes the rubber-banding to a new low (high?) after the fairly cheating-free DS game. The computer racers change their speed depending on your position in the race, and they also get much better items than you if you're ahead. This is all par for the series, though, until you realise that driving too far ahead of the pack results in your getting bombarded with three or four items in a row, which requires impeccable coordination that only a computer could muster and adds at least five seconds to your lap time. This cheating is so blatant that it practically seems like Nintendo wants to discourage players from being good at the game, and leaves the results of races to nearly random chance. At least there's always online play...
- It may happen because Mario Kart Wii has 12 racers, rather than 8. For example a person could get a blue spiney shell (which hones into the leader) but you get bombarded by a red shell, a thunderbolt and a cannon into the lead.
  - When This Troper started playing the game, he ended up thinking that the POW block and the blooper were two effects of the same item, after being hit with both of them at the same time, but never separately, for roughly a dozen times in a row.
- One of Mario Kart Wii's recent tournaments had players race Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong while they had an infinite supply of banana peels. If you tried to get ahead of them, they would ROCKET up to you to make sure you couldn't stay ahead. While the AI never does this in a regular race, the two in this tourney outright broke that rubber band.
Sin Episodes was released with a much-touted dynamic difficulty system -- kill the enemies too quickly and they'd send more next time, get too many headshots and the next group will wear helmets, etc. Unfortunately, encounters that were supposed to be easier or harder were counted in this, resulting in situations that a hard encounter would be made virtually impossible due to how quickly you dispatched an easy one.
Def Jam: Fight For NY was notorious for this. Get the computer into a corner, and suddenly the AI shoots up two or three difficulty levels, reversing and countering every single move you make.
The first Max Payne proudly touted this as one of its features, with arguably less-than-optimal results. Even on the "easy" difficulty setting it ramped up the durability, accuracy and reflexes of the enemies until you died at least once per level.
"Why did they even bother giving you difficulty options? As far as I could tell your options were "insane / insane / impossible / impossible with a time limit." -- curst, Quarter to Three forums
The original NBA Jam would frequently job you out of victories with miraculous, last-second, full-court shots. It got to the point where a two-point lead with just seconds to play was an almost certain loss if the computer got the last shot.
The Need For Speed series had an annoying feature known as "Catch-up": your opponents would drive faster the more ahead you were of them, and slower the more behind you were. Forget the traditional strategy of games like Gran Turismo, where you can focus on pulling a comfortable advantage over your opponents allowing you to make a couple of mistakes without screwing up your race: in Need For Speed Underground, you had to be extremely careful during the entire race, because your only chance to build up an advantage was to have the CPU crash against the incoming traffic.
- The games allow you to view the statistics of your car as well as other AI cars. As an exercise, you could compare AI lap times when you're running perfect flat-out laps and to situations where you just park your car over the start/finish line. In the latter situation, the AI may be more than 40 seconds a lap slower than if you've done a perfect lap (where they would always match or beat your lap times even in inferior cars).
In Shoot Em Ups, which don't feature a player going up against apparently identical computer opponents, the feature where the machine becomes more efficient if the player does better is known as "rank" and is often an expected part of the game.
- The Shoot Em Up Warning Forever is based off this trope, being nothing but a Boss Rush with the boss changing depending on how you beat it the last time.
- Battle Garegga is rather notorius for its rank system; many players find that playing passively and keeping firepower to a minimum until the sixth stage is the only way to clear the game on a single credit.
- Zanac is based off of this concept as well. Firing maniacally and collecting certain powerups will drive the AI mad and send more enemies to attack the player, while calming down and firing minimally will make the AI less aggressive.
In Capcom brawler God Hand, enemies can "level up" depending on how well the player continues attacking and dodging counterattacks successfully, increasing in speed and strength. On the flip side, they de-level if the player gets smacked around too much or uses the "grovel" God Reel technique.
- There is an indicator on the side of the screen which shows you what "level" you're on. The higher the level is when you complete a stage, the higher the reward you get.
The four words most often screamed by RC Pro-Am players: "The yellow car cheats!" If you get too far ahead in some races, or use your weapons to destroy the other cars, one of them (almost always the yellow one) will drive the rest of the course at the maximum speed, making it impossible for you to win.
In the Initial D Arcade Stage game series, two-player battles have a feature called "Boost," and like Need For Speed Carbon's Catch-up feature, it gives the trailing player a speed advantage. There is, however, an option to turn this off so that players can have a real battle.
- The same feature appears in Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune, and again, can be turned off. However, whether handicap should be used in a battle is a matter of heated debate, due to the presence of non-player traffic cars in the game; a randomly-placed traffic car could cause a player to crash and suffer an unfair disadvantage.
Burnout. At least in Burnout 3 you can ram the caught-up cars, steal their boost, and regain your lead....
The Touhou games have an invisible variable that gradually increases the amount of bullets fired at you, which resets back to the lowest level upon death.
Perhaps the earliest advertised use of this is in the Bitmap Brothers action game Gods, which would at predetermined points give the player a pity health item if he was doing poorly, or spawn additional enemies if he was unhurt.
The arcade game Pigskin: 621 A.D. (released as Pigskin Footbrawl on the Sega Genesis) is a game vaguely reminiscent of rugby and American football, though set in the Middle Ages. You could punch other players out, or get into a brawl (read: two characters collide and turn into a dust cloud) on the field. If one side is losing badly, the crowd starts chanting, "Send in the troll!" At which point a big green troll enters the field for the losing side. He's immune to the game's weapons and much more difficult to knock down. If the fortunes reverse and the losing team starts winning, a troll can come in for the opposite side as well, to even things up.
This troper rented Sonic Riders for the 'Cube once and observed AI controlled racers vanishing from their positions well behind him on the track in order to suddenly zoom by him without apparently passing through the intervening space.
This can actually happen in the real world, in certain economic systems. There, it's called the "ratchet effect", and the AI is your competitors or some third-party agency. A good example: In the former USSR, the planning agency would reward the enterprises that made more than their quota. However, they'd base the next quota upon how well the enterprise did, so the harder you worked, the worse it got. The right strategy, of course, was to produce ever so slightly more than the quota.
Many chess programs have an option to match the player's strength. This is probably done with rubberband AI: If the program estimates being ahead, it eases on its calculations, and if it estimates being behind, it calculates more aggressively. When properly implemented, it can work pretty well.
Magazine ads for the Genesis Jurassic Park game claimed that as you played better, the dinosaurs would get smarter. It didn't seem to make much difference in the game, unless you count the raptors occasionally ducking your shots as getting smarter.
Although not a computer game, the 4th edition of Dungeons And Dragons does have rubber bands: the difficulty for skill checks (e.g. climbing cliffs or picking locks) goes up even as your skill goes up, which means that as you level, the same cliff suddenly becomes steeper, and everybody in town buys better locks. The designers' intent was to give players always the same (60-70%) chance of succeeding at pretty much everything, because "it wouldn't be exciting" otherwise.
- This is not entirely true. Most skill checks that have specified D Cs (such as climbing a wall or foraging for food) do not depend on level. There are also many skills that are used "against" another creature (like monster knowledge and stealth) that have D Cs based on the characteristics of the target creature, not the user. The only place where D Cs are specifically based on the user's level is during skill challenges or when the DM has to make up a DC on the spot using the "Actions not covered in the rules" section.
Cruisin' USA for the Nintendo 64, though This Troper bets that the arcade game was the same. Get too far ahead, and what we would call the "Annoying Blue Car" would catch up, even if you race perfectly.
The multiplayer game MULE will inflict whichever player currently has the highest score with with bad "random" events, while whoever is bringing up the rear will only have good things happen to them.
The original Unreal Tournament had this with the final boss, a 1v1 to 15 kills. The boss would start at an AI level matching the difficulty you were playing on, and every time you killed him, he'd pop up a skill level(the converse was true too, every time you die, he goes back down one, to a minimum of where he started). Thus, getting a killing spree was a very bad idea, as the boss would be up at Godlike skill in no time, and even when he got back down to your level after getting a killing spree on you, he'd be loaded with every weapon and full armor, while you'd have nothing because you just respawned.
Some WWE wrestling games have this. Play without a loss for too long and the player will eventually be presented with a match where victory is impossible. The Rubber Band AI has snapped so far that enemy players will be completely immune to attacks and able to win via submission or escaping the cage without any problems. In some games the computer will cheat, by making the player so weak that a single hit will make the player unable to get up for long enough that the computer escapes.
In one of the Mortal Kombat games, persistent victory results in harder and harder difficulty. The difficulty is TOLD to the player in a % stat on the lower right of the screen. The stat will lower itself back to "beatable" when the player loses. This troper once kept interrupting his friend by pressing start on player 2. This kept the Rubber Band AI from ever going away and giving player 1 a completely unwinnable match!
The original World Of Darkness games had something like this at one point. Success of an action was determined by rolling a number of dice corresponding to one's skill. Rolls higher than a target number were successes, lower were failures, and 1's cancelled out successes. Having more 1's than successes constituted a botch, in which the action not only failed, but led to disastrous consequences. A character with more dice, constituting more experience and power, would therefore be more likely to botch a roll than an inexperienced one. This was thankfully revised in later editions, to where a botch also required that no successes at all had been rolled.

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