How do you feel about having computer controlled players holding a place in the top 100 list?

In a competitive game I am thinking about, players can combat each other to grow their character as well as fight computer controlled characters. But when the players look at the rankings, should they NPC accounts be included.

Without the NPC in the rankings, you could see that you are ranked #19, the player in #18 place is stronger than you by 5 levels, but when you go to fight the other characters that are your level, you cannot see #18 because he is too strong, so all you fight are the NPC and players weaker than you but with in your attack range. This could be misleading to the player as they feel they are stronger than they really are.

And with NPC accounts in the rankings, player can really see how they rank up to other accounts that are as strong as them. They can see how many accounts stand between them and the next rank.

On a side note, some NPC accounts are marked as NPC while others are not.

1 hour ago, Mercury Gate said:

How do you feel about having computer controlled players holding a place in the top 100 list?

To keep that point the computer has to have a unfair advantage, as in it needs to act faster than a human and use the fact that it knows the best results. Even then the computer will have a hard time owning the top 100 spot against players.

OpenAI vs Dota is some of the best example of this.

When players started acting irrational while under the fog of war, the AI had difficulties. But if the AI is part of the game it can just cheat and pull player data from the engine.

The most interesting thing about the OpenAI was that it fell for the same tricks many times. In short it could learn but not as fast as the humans playing it. Once people found a exploit they could keep beating the AI and win.

In other words unless you give the AI an advantage the players will beat it down and if you do give it a advantage players will feel it's unfair for it to hold a top ranking.

Players in the game I was thinking about are rank based on a player stat like "strength".  As you develop your character, it gains strength.  The player who has 5000 strength will out rank the player with 4500 strength.

I was thinking that the computer could control an account and play the game itself without interfering with the humans,  If the computer player out grows the human player, their rank will be higher.  If the human player does not like that, he can attack the computer player and beat them back down to a lower rank because when you lose in combat you will lose strength.

Another example could be that my army has 5000 soldiers, so it has a strength of 5000.  The computer has less soldiers and therefore has less strength.  After combat I may have 4500 strength, but the computer could have less than 3000 strength (depending on losses).  At this point I may have lost 2 or three rank positions, but the computer could lose 10 ranks.  A smaller human player could fight that same computer opponent and beat them down even more.

I doubt the computer players would hold any top ranks unless they were left alone for a long time.  But say for ranks 20 and below, players could see their ranking among humans and computers alike.

...or should I leave the computer players out of the rankings and only show players?