You may not know this, but there’s some games out there that actually forego skill and rig matches to make a team lose by matchmaking individuals purposely based on effort and non-effort. There’s one particular EA game that already does this, which will supposedly be joined by other adaptive service practices in the future.
YouTuber YongYea has found an interesting finding that relates to matches being rigged and forego skill and promote service practices on new pages dl.acm.org and dl.acm.org. The second page contains an abstract in regard to engagement optimized matchmaking (EOMM), and reveals a framework that breaks down player statistics to force gamers into a fixed situation:
“Dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) is a technique for adaptively changing a game to make it easier or harder. A common paradigm to achieve DDA is through heuristic prediction and intervention, adjusting game difficulty once undesirable player states (e.g., boredom or frustration) are observed. Without quantitative objectives, it is impossible to optimize the strength of intervention and achieve the best effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a DDA framework with a global optimization objective of maximizing a player’s engagement throughout the entire game. Using level-based games as our example, we model a player’s progression as a probabilistic graph. Dynamic difficulty reduces to optimizing transition probabilities to maximize a player’s stay time in the progression graph. We have successfully developed a system that applies this technique in multiple games by Electronic Arts, Inc., and have observed up to 9% improvement in player engagement with a neutral impact on monetization.”
The games by EA used to conduct the above method have not been disclosed, but a YouTuber by the name of Crafter, who noticed a similar method in Battlefield 1, has a video below on the topic:
To summarize the above video, the less PTFOing/basses captured and the more you kill people, the higher chance the system will place you on the winning team, which results in earning Scraps. If you are on the winning team you can gain 1.2, 1.5 and 2.0 or higher multiplayer bonuses (depending on the game mode) at the end of a completed round to spend Scraps on loot-boxes or earn via a progress bar at the end of a round.
If you are the type of person that spends all your time PTFOing or being a good sport and helping your team with ammo and health, but you have fewer kills, you will more than likely be placed on the losing team. This means you will gain less Scraps and will not see multiplier in your favor to gain more EXP.
In other words, the system is set up to help the unfortunate or newcomer to gain more Scraps to spend on loot-crates. If you don’t believe me or Crafter’s video, take it from both the EOMM memo and YongYea’s video:
This research is currently under EA’s investigation and could likely find its ways silently into future games. You can do research yourself on this matter by hitting up dl.acm.org or dl.acm.org.
