Fighting Game · Guides & deep dives

V2 AI Director And Smart Matchmaking

The V2 AI Director is a single-player pacing layer above per-bot Adaptive AI.

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Runtime Scope#

The V2 AI Director is a single-player pacing layer above per-bot Adaptive AI. It observes session-level signals only in Story, Side Stories, Arcade, Towers of Time, Tekken Force, Devil Within, Konquest, Def Jam Story, and MyCAREER style CPU modes. Ranked and tournament modes never run the Director; they use the static rule-of-the-day and fixed CPU/queue policy.

The Director state machine is:

  1. Calm
  2. Build
  3. Climax
  4. Recovery

Signals are recent win rate, session length, repeated rage-quit, repeated same-mistake, declining session time, and declining session frequency.

Difficulty And Tutorial Rules#

The Director maps the player's rolling-average skill into a CPU skill bucket and feeds an approximate skill hint to pre-fight banter. In Story, Side Stories, and Arcade, three consecutive losses trigger a difficulty step-down suggestion. Five perfect wins trigger a step-up suggestion.

The accessibility adaptive difficulty profile AI.AdaptiveDifficulty.PerPlayer.V2 is a separate per-player opt-in layer at Settings.Accessibility.AdaptiveDifficulty. It uses deaths, retries, consecutive failures, completion time versus authored target time, and perfect clears to resolve bounded single-player difficulty steps before feeding CPU skill, incoming damage, and pacing scalars.

Rubber-banding is available only as a single-player toggle, defaults off, and is blocked in ranked and tournament modes. Frustration signals bridge into tutorial-on-demand and Smart Help so the weakest observed area opens the matching trainer.

Tendency Profile#

The per-player tendency profile is observed across sessions, stored alongside Save Game, and never shared cross-account. CPU response covers preferred wake-up choice, throw-tech rate, anti-air consistency, and mix-up reliance. Smart Help uses the weakest-area signal to surface the relevant trainer.

Climax Moments#

Boss encounters in Director modes can enter Climax. Climax enables the cinematic camera, environmental hazards, crowd hype audio, Niagara atmospheric ramp, and a per-fighter Climax line bank reserved for those moments.

Smart Matchmaking#

Online matchmaking remains separate from single-player difficulty. Queue scoring prefers lower RTT inside the current MMR tolerance window, then expands skill, ping, and eligible regions over wait time. Anti-stomp routing keeps smurf-flagged accounts in a separate pool. Party queues can bias toward preferred friends. Per-region MMR tiers stay aligned, with off-peak cross-region widening.

Transparency And Compliance#

Settings expose Settings.Gameplay.AIDirector, which discloses single-player Director use and lists observed signals. Opt-out locks single-player difficulty to manual and falls back to static CPU profiles. The EU AI Act limited-risk surface documents the conformity assessment, and per-player Director profile data is covered by data subject rights routing.