This patch significantly improves the CPUs. They should now challenge the majority of players and should legitimately help dedicated players improve at the game. Given how difficult it can be to find real people to play against I think this is pretty important! The new AI will also allow me to add some new features I'm pretty excited about... more on that soon. Please leave feedback on the new CPUs via any of the usual channels. Thanks!

CPU AI

• There are now 7 CPU difficulty levels, up from 4. The new difficulty levels are Dummy, Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard, and Extreme.
• Significantly improved all aspects of CPU AI. Note that some of these improvements are only relevant at higher difficulty levels.
  • Offense: Improved attack selection, timing, combo routes, and edgeguarding.
  • Defense: Improved ability to defend against opponent attacks and projectiles. Added the ability to escape aerial juggles, use directional influence, and floor tech.
  • Neutral: Higher level bots can bait out attacks, whiff punish, and mix up their approaches.
  • Improved awareness of gear piece-specific strategies and abilities.
  • Advanced techniques: Higher level bots now incorporate dash dancing, wavedashing, wavelanding, shield dropping, fastfalling, and more.
  • Improved awareness of common scenarios such as shield pressure and jab mixups.
  • Improved stage positioning and awareness.
  • Higher level CPUs are generally more resistant to "cheese" strategies, encouraging honest gameplay that will help players improve.

Tutorial / Story Missions

• Life Lessons mission: Tweaked the star requirements and the number of opponent lives (due to the improved CPU AI). Also tweaked the stage's platform placement.
• In platformer missions, players now have 3/1 lives on veteran/expert difficulties (up from 5/3 lives). This is a reversion of the increase from patch 0.20.5.
• Expert difficulty story missions are now locked until the mission is completed on any other difficulty.
• Added shortcuts from the pause menu to restart the current mission at a different difficulty level.
• Targets that require a specific attack type are now red + yellow, to differentiate them from "regular" targets.
• Added other minor QoL changes to the Intro Tutorial and Jim's Message mission.

Bugs

• Fixed rare bug where matchmaker could continue searching for a match while already in a quickplay match.
• Fixed issue where equipping Television would cause the Life Lessons cutscene to play out incorrectly.