Eagle-eyed YouTuber discovers ongoing EA online-matchmaking shenanigans
15 replies, posted
[url]https://arstechnica.com/?p=1241989[/url]
So what this boils down to is that EA wants more player retention in their games, and that "fairness" and "fun" do not help? And in order to combat this, they make the games dinamically subtly easier, but even then it doesn't help their sales? The whole thing just seems dumb.
Games that have been perceived to be fun has always had player retention and people will keep playing them. "Fairness" and "fun" in EA games do not matter because a good chunk of the time, the players get shafted because of microtransactions, and this becomes so overwhelming that any fun that the player had gets overridden by it. Do you want some of the old school plants to use in the new mobile Plants vs. Zombies game? You gotta pay real money for them. And of course, I don't even need to point out Battlefront 2...
How do you make players keep playing your games? By not treating them like beaten bags of money.
Glad to see Yong getting more exposure. He puts out great content.
Alright, I've read the papers since my previous post. Let me shed some opinion on this.
Both documents focus on reducing [I]churn risk (when a player stopped playing for an extended amount of time, but not necessarily permanent)[/I]
The first is Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment [DDA] for games. We kind of already know about this as Left4Dead and Resident Evil 4 are famously known for it. However, they are experimenting it for mobile games, which makes sense for the paper to include monetization findings because most of them are free-to-play games in an over-saturated market. Mobile market is a completely different (and much, much uglier) beast compared to core games so I wouldn't blame them for wanting to find better ways to grab players.
The second is interesting: Engagement Optimized Matchmaking. This is this first paragraph from the Abstract:
[quote]Matchmaking connects multiple players to participate in online player-versus-player games. [B]Current matchmaking systems depend on a single core strategy: create fair games at all times.[/B] These systems pair similarly skilled players on the assumption that a fair game is best player experience. [B]We will demonstrate, however, that this intuitive assumption sometimes fails and that matchmaking based on fairness is not optimal for engagement.[/B][/quote]
Basically they are designing a matchmaking system (1v1 PvP) that focuses on player engagement (which is pretty much matchfixing). They compared their findings with other types of matchmaking: random, skill and one that is literally the exact opposite of their engagement-based system. Unsurprisingly their experiment is a success, but something of note is random and skill based matchmaking tied in terms of "engagement". Nowhere in this document mentions anything about monetization.
Boy EA, y'all are just making it easier and easier for me to hate you. What I wouldn't give for them to pull a konami and leave the fucking games industry. Might as well since they have such a fucking boner for what is effectively slot machines.
How are they supposed to measure "fun"? That's not a number. How about we maybe look at how often users quit playing after a match? That'd probably indicate they're not having a ton of fun, right? And maybe we can make changes to matchmaking that will result in fewer games where the player quits the game right after.
That's all they're doing. This isn't a bad thing.
[QUOTE=geel9;53041987]How are they supposed to measure "fun"? That's not a number. How about we maybe look at how often users quit playing after a match? That'd probably indicate they're not having a ton of fun, right? And maybe we can make changes to matchmaking that will result in fewer games where the player quits the game right after.
That's all they're doing. This isn't a bad thing.[/QUOTE]
They are laying the groundwork for skewing matches to encourage monetization again as soon as they feel the Battlefront 2 backlash has blown over.
[QUOTE=TestECull;53043157]They are laying the groundwork for skewing matches to encourage monetization again as soon as they feel the Battlefront 2 backlash has blown over.[/QUOTE]
Encouraging monetization by nature of players enjoying the game more?
Isn't that kind of obvious?
[QUOTE=geel9;53043905]Encouraging monetization by nature of players enjoying the game more?
Isn't that kind of obvious?[/QUOTE]
No. They're trying to force players to buy microtransactions by skewing matchmaking. To do that they need to get people to, ya know, not quit the game. The games being fun isn't gonna work(It's EA) and so they're using that to make it all work.
They don't care if you're having fun. They just want to manipulate you into playing longer in the hopes they can sell you a 1.99 micro DLC.
What's funny is they could easily accomplish this [I]by making the games fun to play in the first place[/I] :v: All this effort, psychology, manipulation is pointless, all they have to do is make the games fun and people will happily play on and on and on and on and on. That's why games like TF2 and CSS stay along, why I still play Fallout 4 and Fallout: NV, why Gmod still thrives. They're fun to play, so their players continue to play them. No manipulation needed.
[QUOTE=TestECull;53044638]No. They're trying to force players to buy microtransactions by skewing matchmaking. To do that they need to get people to, ya know, not quit the game. The games being fun isn't gonna work(It's EA) and so they're using that to make it all work.
They don't care if you're having fun. They just want to manipulate you into playing longer in the hopes they can sell you a 1.99 micro DLC.
What's funny is they could easily accomplish this [I]by making the games fun to play in the first place[/I] :v: All this effort, psychology, manipulation is pointless, all they have to do is make the games fun and people will happily play on and on and on and on and on. That's why games like TF2 and CSS stay along, why I still play Fallout 4 and Fallout: NV, why Gmod still thrives. They're fun to play, so their players continue to play them. No manipulation needed.[/QUOTE]
I'm having a hard time comprehending how a player choosing to play a game for longer [i]doesn't[/i] mean they're having fun.
The entire point of this paper is to give players more enjoyable matches so they don't quit.
[QUOTE=geel9;53045361]I'm having a hard time comprehending how a player choosing to play a game for longer [i]doesn't[/i] mean they're having fun.
The entire point of this paper is to give players more enjoyable matches so they don't quit.[/QUOTE]
What I dislike about this pretty strongly is the removal of importance of what you contribute to a match. If you look at the examples used in the original patent that Yong displayed, they're essentially removing players own impact on the win, loss, or draw of the match which in my eyes strongly defeats the purpose of any multiplayer experience.
It's like a fixed sport. You stop having enjoyment of the match, of the very point of the activity when the end result is no longer influenced by you, or by the players.
Whether it creates enjoyment or not, implementations of these kinds of practices that essentially automate your wins and losses into algorithm devalues the point of the experience. I honestly wouldn't play a game that had that feature implemented, because at the end of the match it doesn't matter what I did. Whether I failed or succeeded in any of my gameplay experiences has been rendered inert. That's just consciously something I could never let go of.
[QUOTE=geel9;53045361]I'm having a hard time comprehending how a player choosing to play a game for longer [i]doesn't[/i] mean they're having fun.[/quote]
They're not playing because they enjoy the game anymore. They're playing because they want the next unlock, or the next level, or a win, or whatever. Someone playing for fun won't give much of a shit about any of that, they're playing simply because they enjoy playing and will shrug off a 20+ loss streak simply because they're having fun. But someone who's not having fun is going to quit after loss 2 or 3, and it's those players EA is trying to manipulate into staying in game.
[quote]The entire point of this paper is to give players more enjoyable matches so they don't quit.[/QUOTE]
No. The entire point of this paper is to goad players into buying micro DLC. If they wanted to give players enjoyable matches they'd use either skill based or random matchmaking...or, hell, here's a novel idea. [I]They'd give us dedicated servers and modtools and let us do whatever the fuck we want to do bound only by the law of the land.[/I]
Ahh, but we don't see that.
[QUOTE=Solo Wing;53041398]Boy EA, y'all are just making it easier and easier for me to hate you. What I wouldn't give for them to pull a konami and leave the fucking games industry. Might as well since they have such a fucking boner for what is effectively slot machines.[/QUOTE]
I don't want them to do a Konami, I want them to do a THQ.
They're clearly incapable of doing anything good with any of their franchises sans Battlefield, and I'd appreciate it if other companies got their hands on them instead.
[QUOTE=gk99;53046060]I don't want them to do a Konami, I want them to do a THQ.
They're clearly incapable of doing anything good with any of their franchises sans Battlefield, and I'd appreciate it if other companies got their hands on them instead.[/QUOTE]
Well yes, ideally that would be the case. But lets face it, EA is too fucking evil and rich for that to be the case. Most we can hope for they resign themselves to obscurity in another market, but fat fucking chance on that.
Just flatout: the industry would be SOOO much better off without the likes of EA and Activision.
[QUOTE=TestECull;53044638]No. They're trying to force players to buy microtransactions by skewing matchmaking. To do that they need to get people to, ya know, not quit the game. The games being fun isn't gonna work(It's EA) and so they're using that to make it all work.
They don't care if you're having fun. They just want to manipulate you into playing longer in the hopes they can sell you a 1.99 micro DLC.
What's funny is they could easily accomplish this [I]by making the games fun to play in the first place[/I] :v: All this effort, psychology, manipulation is pointless, all they have to do is make the games fun and people will happily play on and on and on and on and on. That's why games like TF2 and CSS stay along, why I still play Fallout 4 and Fallout: NV, why Gmod still thrives. They're fun to play, so their players continue to play them. No manipulation needed.[/QUOTE]
The dumb thing is, especially in Battlefront's case. It is actually a fun game but its buried under all the micro transaction and gameplay balance fuckery caused by it.
So they have a fun game, but they've screwed it with forced microtransactions that effect gameplay.
And now they're doing this stuff, its crazy.
When EA is mentioned in yet another gaming controversy, it doesn't surprise me it involves them treating players like walking wallets.
This is what happens when greed takes over from actually trying to make something players will enjoy (which, ironically, is how you make games sell but EA has yet to get that memo).
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