It would be very helpful if it was possible to give sparky differnt types of decks.
Say I want to test out my new deck against a specific type of deck. So I make Sparky the deck I want to test my deck against, and I get my testing done. Would be very helpful.
Or is sparky too dumb to play any decks we would make for him/her/it?
External link →Cool idea! I have worked on her A.I. a bit and I can give you some insight.
The current version of Sparky needs to be taught how to use each card individually. We've done some work this year to make this easier, and more robust, so we could better make the Color Challenge games - but adding new cards to her decks usually involves a bit of work. This mostly revolves around telling her what are the legal targets. The bigger problem for your suggested feature: there are a lot of cards we don't use because she has no idea how to use them.
I would like to have the ability to "test" a limited deck against her. Especially, if I'm working with a wonky mana base. I've seen a few threads asking for that so I put it on our backlog. It will have to be costed and prioritized with everything else, but I hope it's simple to add. If it does get implemented, more than likely, Sparky will just be using her normal 60 card decks.
Hopefully, that answers your question!
A "sample draw" feature would allow some testing of manabases while being easier to implement.
Adding features that require new UI is actually a lot more difficult than tweaking Sparky's match parameters. That said, manabase testing is something I have personally used when building decks online before Arena, and I can see some utility in adding it. No promises of when (or if) we would work on something like that, but I will put it on the design backlog.
In the chess engine world, neural networks (which from my understanding is a self learning AI) have begun to outperform traditional chess engines. Have you considered developing some sort of self learning AI to improve sparky?
Most of our dev budget is going towards player-v-player interactions at the moment. It's definitely a fascinating subject, though. I wish I had the time and domain knowledge to mess around with it.
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