The means to have an object follow another object can be fairly useful in cases like having lasers follow the trail of a flying space ship. These special objects can also be used for providing a realistic motion for other subjects too such as a bouncing ball. This is accomplished by special objects called "helpers". Helper objects are supposed to help with making the movement of objects realistic as long as it's coupled with the proper modifiers and edited correctly in the Curve Editor. The unfortunate reality of this is that these helpers are sometimes not really helpful unless you do some manual moving and jiggling with your subject. An example will be provided below of a draft for my bouncing ball
As you can see, the animation for the product drops at a realistic rate until you realize that the point that the ball drops at becomes higher and higher once the ball moves. A solution to this is to just guesstimate when the ball will drop and move your helper down near that frame as you move the helper; however, this problem could just be user error on the helper tool. The curve editor can be proven quite useful in providing a realistic bounce for the type of ball you are creating, but I suspect there could be some work on the Curve Editing side to see if there is anything conflicting with the Point Helper being of any use. Overall, the use of the Helper tool is great coupled with path animations too, but that will be a blog post for another time
References
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/getting-started/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/3DSMax-Tutorial/files/GUID-164AE554-03F5-42D4-92AA-AFFB10A82B42-htm.html
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/getting-started/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/3DSMax-Tutorial/files/GUID-D020B375-E56E-4A3A-9566-771469E8BF07-htm.html
Summary
Helpers are more a guideline to follow and animate objects with
The Curve Editor is pretty consistent if used properly.