You rate AI way higher than you should. Bits designed to play games have been a thing forever, but they just suck. No matter how fancy they still follow patterns and eventually become predictable.

That's not to say it wouldn't be good to have the option, but it's just not the same.

I generally prefer single player games anyway coz I can't keep up with people who spend all their time online though.

"with AI" fuck off I want the unpredictability of human opponents

Younger people grew up playing games online with their friends and having fun social interactions with people online. You can't do that with ai. It's like sports. An important part of sports is playing with others.

I hate playing online multiplayer, and I only play solo games. But it doesn't bother me that online multiplayer games exist. Let people have their fun, it's not bothering us.

At least for me, who was a disabled kid who literally couldn't go out and play under the sun, online multi-players were my salvation. For collaborative games, such as MMOs, few things are as fun as a full squad with comms, whole party of friends investigating a brand new dungeon. Or the gorgeous chaos of a full chain of command, creating strategies and forming friendships in the heat of a 60 v 60 battle, gathering resources beforehand to make yourself useful, the commaradery of giving your old, engraved armor and weapons to your guild's treasury, or to a growing player you took under your wing.

A lot of its allure is for isolated people, a place to build a community and sure, chatting is a significant aspect, but once you know your squadmates, everything flows just better.

I have so much fun delivering gradeschool appropriate trash talk.

Red team is a bunch of poo butts!

Its about the social aspect of playing with other people. Thats the draw. I go through the pain of setting up private servers just to play online games with my friends.

I used to play all kinds of FPS games online and loved it because people in each match would play differently. I always kept my mic/voice chat off because I didn't want to listed to 13 year olds screetching or 30 year olds yelling at their kids. You can't replicate this with AI because developers only do so much work with this stuff and you start to notice patterns and repetitive behavior from them after so long. With real people you might sometimes get your ass whooped while other times your team winds up camping the enemy spawns and cleaning the floor with them.

If I didn't have online games I would cut my wrists and overdose. The games are that good at supporting my mental health.

Having a hard time understanding the downvotes on this one. Definitely not a popular opinion by a longshot.

Finally, an opinion with more downvotes than upvotes.

But on a serious note, I think there is something to it when you know you play with/against real people - a sense of connection, a spirit of honest competition (not with a machine that is either poorly programmed or straight up let you win so you would feel better, like, good luck playing any board game against actually fully equipped AI), and then, chatting and social behavior.

This is why people get so pissed off when they see bots introduced into multiplayer games - all of a sudden, you can now never know if that juicy frag you made was against a real person you outcompeted or it was just AI that intentionally played dumb, being nothing but a dummy. There is also less connection and communication in that scenario.

There are also other cases like companies of friends playing together (co-op games exist, but are limited in scope and amount of players), or MMOs where entire economy and systems are built around players making the game and forming lively communities, roleplay, working together and waging wars, etc.

Why is this being downvoted? Its an unpopular opinion.