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Activision Patents Pay-To-Win Matchmaker (rollingstone.com)
New submitter EndlessNameless writes: If you like fair play, you might not like future Activision games. They will cross the line to encourage microtransactions, specifically matching players to both encourage and reward purchase. Rewarding the purchase, in particular, is an explicit and egregious elimination of any claim to fair play. "For example, if the player purchased a particular weapon, the microtransaction engine may match the player in a gameplay session in which the particular weapon is highly effective, giving the player an impression that the particular weapon was a good purchase," according to the patent. "This may encourage the player to make future purchases to achieve similar gameplay results." Even though the patent's examples are all for a first-person-shooter game, the system could be used across a wide variety of titles. "This was an exploratory patent filed in 2015 by an R&D team working independently from our game studios," an Activision spokesperson tells Rolling Stone. "It has not been implemented in-game." Bungie also confirmed that the technology isn't being used in games currently on the market, mentioning specifically Destiny 2.
Before Apple had IAP, you paid a few dollars for a game, and got a decent amount of levels. Often, there was a sequel, so you spend $3.99 or so, bought that.
Then came IAP. Games which were challenging but fun became a lot harder, in order to force people to buy powerups to beat the game, or the game would have a delay if you lost... of course, you could pay something to have the delay removed. Additional levels? More dosh. Even a basic tower defense game became so loaded with costly powerups that the whole genre wound up collapsing.
If I want Farmville, I'll play Farmville. The whole gaming genre has been so polluted by this P2W crap that it just isn't worth the time, and since older games that have not been recompiled for 64 bit which haven't been updated are wiped off Apple's App Store, what is worth playing is pretty hard to find.
It is said that when there are cheaters in a game, nobody wins. When the PROVIDER is cheating, that goes double. But as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, if you can't check the source code, how do you know for certain?
I.e. the Dunning-Kruger sufferers of players, that are pretty bad by do not know that. Well, I predict they will make great business with that model, but quite a few players will find themselves disgusted and repulsed by these games. I certainly will very carefully check before I ever buy anything from the again.
Incidentally, why can you patent such stuff? this is both trivial and highly immoral. Both should make this completely non-patentable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I once got in to Hearthstone briefly. This was the first time I have ever tried a card game or anything like that. Let me also say that I have been in to game theory since the 70's, probably before the Hearthstone's developer's parents were even born.
I first learned how the game worked. I was able to climb to the top rankings even then. I then developed a set of Lua scripts that calculated the best plays based on the game at hand. Well, in short, I got banned. Not because they thought I was using a bot or cheating (and I wasn't, I was just playing as a regular human-controlled, me), but because I won too often even against people that payed lots of money for superior stacks that should have wiped me off the floor.
Oh... OK. Fuck you too, morons.
Hear me out on this. The practice described in the patent is total garbage and a very bad thing. However, the patent itself is excellent. If Activision owns the patent on this, then other game makers would have to pay to do the same thing, thus making them less likely to do it, thus making it less likely for us to see the practice used in actual games.