The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard / WWE Video Games

• Goes hand in hand with the Rubber-Band A.I. which has a tendency to completely snap.
• General Manager Mode, or 24/7 Mode starting with 2008, is not afraid of having your opposing General Manager(s) get 4/5 star Pay-Per-View shows in spite of their match cards being less than true to that reality. For example, it's possible for the Smack-down AI to get a 5-star No Mercy show out of matches with 2 stars, 2 1/2 stars, 3 1/2 stars, and 1 4 stars.
• For whatever reason in 2010's RtWM mode your opponent will always be cheap and difficult to beat even if you haven't touched the difficulty settings.
• The game is unashamedly a Perfect Play A.I., to the point where it will glitch to win. For example, immediately getting to its feet from the ground. Not climbing up from the ground, but teleporting from flat on their back to on their feet.
• In WWE '12, John Cena, Randy Orton, and Big Show were especially bad at this. On Normal difficulty, the three will all reverse a lot of your moves and have incredibly high durability. What this means? Due to the new feature where early in the match, your opponent will get right back up after grapples. Well, prepare to have that happen after you hit your Finisher. And with the comeback specials, which mean your opponent can basically No-Sell your offense just to set up for a finisher. Due to how bastardish this game can get, the AI will activate its comeback after you hit a signature move, just to prevent you from using your finisher on them.
  • And that's not the worst thing possible here. The computer will sometimes CANCEL OUT YOUR COUNTER TO THEIR FINISHERS.
• The game seems to determine who wins and loses before a match. If fighting the CPU and you want them to win (say you want to boost their popularity) you will be hard pressed to get a decent match out of them, much less pick up the victory. If the game wants the player to lose then it will ignore counters and damage, the computer will gain finishers willy nilly and the kickout meter will be delayed giving little if any chance of escaping a pin. Either way if a wrestler is slated to lose you would be hard pressed to do anything to say otherwise. This can be clearly seen in CPU vs CPU matches, pick any two and play ten, twenty, a hundred matches in a row. Odds are one will be specifically coded to win every match no matter what.
• It might accurately represent wrestling, but you can be soundly beating your opponent, they get two moves in, sudden finisher, no kickout meter, you lose.
• Just how far will the game cheat? Play a championship scramble match and it might not only prevent you from being able to pin or submit, the referee himself will attack you.
• For once justified in WWE '13. In a match with The Rock and Ken Shamrock, once you fulfill the objectives the match doesn't end. Instead Shamrock becomes totally invincible, cheating on a scale the previous game could only dream of. That's actually in line with the real match, as Rocky did lose, and the game carries on afterwards. You can win, however- if you manage to hold off Shamrock enough, he will hit you with a chair and get himself disqualifed.
  • Justified in SmackDown Vs. Raw 2011 where you have to lose a match to progress in the story- for instance, take Christian’s Royal Rumble match where Dolph Ziggler decides to try and send a message by interfering. No matter how many times you hit your opponent or try to move away the chairs so your opponent can’t hit you with them and win, they’ll always kick out at two or make a beeline for the chairs.
• Certain actions in the game will gain a signature or finisher move. At times when you do so the game will conveniently forget to give you one. If any other evidence is needed this is it: THE. GAME. CHEATS.
• An occasional glitch in WWE13 is during a contest you are suddenly warped into a pin.
• The game has a tendency to crash if you win or are winning. The game crashes. If you win or are winning. It's like you are not allowed to beat the game at times.
• Observant players might realize that when using a strike the CPU will immediately use an appropriate counter, so it reads your inputs. Sometimes during a grapple it will pause for the briefest of moments to work out what move you are trying to use and react accordingly.
• Semi-justified in WWE 2K14. Part of WrestleMania was trying to defeat The Undertaker on the grandest stage of them all. Now, at the time of release, as far as fans know no one, but no one, has been able to do this, and if anyone did they would become an immortal, guaranteed Hall of Famer and considered to be among the Greatest of All Time, the whole nine yards^note And then Brock Lesnar went and did it at WrestleMania 30. The game recognized this and on the one hand Taker is Nigh-Invulnerable, plays on a level above Legend and fights very intelligently without cheating. However what may be cheating is in a competitive match after hitting your Finishing Move, the lights go out, Taker teleports behind you and hits the Tombstone. Even worse at certain points when you try to attack him while he's on the ground, he'll either counter with a chokeslam or the Hell's Gate.
• In a bid to recreate specific moments (such as John Cena escaping the Sharpshooter) the game will cheat until it's done. The final match of 30 Years of WrestleMania has Cena and The Rock where you have to hit the AA and win. However by then Rock has infinite finishers (though you do too) and he becomes reversal happy, escaping Attitude Adjustment after Attitude Adjust and cheating on a scale that makes even the Rock/Shamrock example above scream how blatantly unfair it is.
• In 2K14, any adjustment of the AI reversal rate past "None" means they'll reverse roughly 80% of your attacks. This includes finisher moves, which grants the opponent a free finisher of their own, even when the finisher reversal rate is left at 0. In short, reversal adjustment is strictly an "ON/OFF" setting, and the slider bars are just there for show. To add insult to injury, your own window to successfully reverse an opponent has been cut down to about 1/8 of a second.
• Just as 2K14's "Beat the Streak" mode somewhat justified this trope, 2K15 does the same thing with the "Proving Ground" mode. However, instead of a near-unbeatable Undertaker, the player is instead faced with a near-unbeatable John Cena. Making things even worse, you have to beat him in under 30 minutes.
• An annoying side effect of this in the Eighth Generation / PC version of 2k15 is that the efforts made to give the AI cheat codes actually hinders the experience of Showcase Mode. For instance, in the Money in the Bank 2011 classic match that made CM Punk's career, Cena breaks the STF to run outside, clocks John Lauranitis, yells at Vince... and then.... most likely counters the Go To Sleep when he comes back into the ring. Another one is when the Shield interferes and takes out Ryback at Survivor Series 12, Cena is likely to immediately activate his Comeback state and get up, meaning you can't get the storyline mandated easy victory, and because the game just leaves Ryback on the floor rather than actually coding him to be taken down for the rest of the match, he'll probably be back up by the time you can hit a finisher on Cena to keep him down again.
• Invoked in 2K16's Universe & MyCareer modes - if you try & leap frog the title rankings, the champion will have unlimited reversals. This does not apply, however, to the Royal Rumble winner's WrestleMania title shot & Money in the Bank cash-ins.
• In a bid for matches to be Always Close 2K16 doesn't even care how much the Cena/Rock example above cries foul, especially on Legend difficulty. Sure Computers Are Fast but the game goes to the point the dirtiest player in the game would be envious, with either ignoring counters and inputs or saying it is both too slow and too fast at the same time, glitch to a more advantageous position, gain more momentum, doesn't matter what to ensure one wrestler does not get too far ahead over another.
• As an experiment, open 2k16 on PC, alongside some form of cheating program. Set difficulty to Easy and AI reversal rates to minimum, then give yourself infinite finishers in a match so you can easily damage your opponent. The moment the AI hits red health while you're still in green, a horrific case of Rubber-Band A.I. will kick in where the opponent seems to think he's a better technical wrestler than Lance Storm and will counter EVERYTHING to try and make a match closer. (You can also do this in fair gameplay, but it's both easier and more apparent to see with this when you're on 100% of your health up to that point.) Or try cashing in the Money in the Bank: even with your opponent completely in the red it won't be a squash match, every cheat will be dialed up.
• 2K17 seems purposely made to be the most cheating entry in the series. Most every example on this page has been dialed up. It starts with the basics of doing far more damage, gaining far more momentum, reversing far more and recovering quicker than you possibly can. Perfect Play A.I.. Cancel out of every move on the off chance it will even indicate that you can counter, but forget about landing a hit. If you do manage to compete the Rubber-Band A.I. will snap completely. Your opponent will become totally invincible. It will pause to work out which move is being used and counter. And if you do actually win the game will just crash.
  • Even worse, the new reversal system allows you to do a "major" reversal that will stop your opponent being able to counter you back for 30 seconds, which the AI likes doing whenever it has a finisher, leading to bullshit losses. The AI literally cheats by being able to do this via a taunt instead. This also makes the final Showcase match impossible on anything above Easy mode, as Shango will just keep knocking you over and taunting until he can finish you. Unlike the reversal limit crap, this can not be disabled in any way.
  • The AI is capable of reversing pin attempts. You could reach the climax of a hard fought match hit your finisher and go for a pin and the AI will reverse as if you performed a ground grapple!
  • In My Career sometimes Failure Is the Only Option the AI will use their finisher on you and pin meter will freeze and prevent you from kicking out!
  • Even when you do have reversals left the game likes to pretend you don't, or that the CPU can do major reversals off non major reversal moves.
  • The computer is capable of dodging, countering, turning their attention on a double or triple team attack and dodging and countering their attacks as well, leaving all three taken out like they were Cena at his most invincible, no one else is allowed to look competant against him. Wish you could something similar? Ha ha ha ha ha...HAHAHAHAHA of course the game won't allow you to, the best you can hope is to be able to back and fourth counter against one opponant.
• 2K18 actively does cheat in several ways. If you are outside the ring the ref will occasionally stop counting so you cannot win that way. If you do a move occasionally you will stop gaining momentum, thus no signatures or finishers. If you activate comeback occasionally the game will not let you use it, not the CPU fight tooth and nail to keep you from using it, comeback will be switched off for you. Plus when you taunt you cannot stop and do a move or counter. Guess what the computer can do?
• 2K19 basically has two difficulty levels: "CPU is the jobbiest job guy that ever had a job jobbing" or "CPU will reverse/counter every single thing you do". Trying to get anything resembling a competitive match out of the AI is virtually impossible.
• Rollout may be a popular addition to the game but this can be used against you especially in a triple threat match: as soon as you are forced out of the ring the second CPU hits their finisher on the third and with no way to recover you lose. The computer can do this at will.
  • If there was any doubt the game cheats before, cause an opponent to roll out then hit the finisher. S/he will instantly recover and break up the pin.
• Smackdown Vs Raw, particularly when the Rubber-Band A.I. breaks. The CPU will become a Perfect Play A.I. who ignores the rules.
• In some respects, WWE WrestleMania XIX for the Nintendo GameCube, namely in Revenge Mode. It seems as if the game simply ignores your frantic spinning of the control stick or mashing of L and R when trying to get up or counter if it feels like it. And sometimes, when you have to make an opponent bleed, it can be done easily to you, but the opponent can take seemingly hundreds of hits to finally go down. What's worse is the opponent has seemingly impeccable timing with it's counters and dodges, even doing these on your finishing moves.
• In WWE 13, you try and attack your opponent and it reads your inputs and counters perfectly. You try and counter their attacks and the game ignores them. You are not given the chance to use finishers, special abilities or even escape attacks. The CPU recovers and attacks faster than you can. It cancels out you gaining a finisher for hot tags and comeback. The game can warp you into attacks and pins. It can even make use of changing the camera angle to use Interface Screw. You name a way the game can cheat and this one will do it.