"An artificial intelligence (AI) will deliberately tamper with your online gameplay as you scramble for more in-game items to win. The same AI will manipulate your state of mind at every step of your game to guide you towards more micro-transactions. Nothing in-game is truly fixed-rate. The game maps out your home, and cross-references it with your online footprint, to have a socio-economic picture of you, so the best possible revenue model, and anti buyer's remorse strategy can be implemented on you. It also proposes using an AI to consistently "alter" the player's gameplay, such that the player's actions don't have the desired result leading toward beating the game, but towards an "unfair" consequence that motivates more in-game spending."
As one of the comments below the article observed, this is simply the natural result of
"telemetry + pay2win". Sounds like a perfect match for this:-
"Game publisher Activision has already patented a way to drive in-game purchases by manipulating "matchmaking,". This week, eagle-eyed YouTuber YongYea deserves credit for discovering a similar, though not identical, matchmaking-manipulation scheme being researched and promoted by researchers at game publisher EA. Current matchmaking systems pair similarly skilled players on the assumption that a fair game is best player experience [sic]," the paper begins. "We will demonstrate, however, that this intuitive assumption sometimes fails and that matchmaking based on fairness is not optimal for [monetization] engagement."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...-algorithms-to-favor-engagement-not-fairness/
^ I used to get angry over this stuff before eventually realising you can either choose to fuel it with
"well I don't like it but I'll make an exception THIS TIME because it's my favorite franchise" excuses, or you can choose to step outside of its "matrix" completely and refocus on what you like not what you don't like. Last year was the first year in +35 years of gaming (going back to MS-DOS 2.0 & Commodore 64), that I didn't buy a single "premium" hyped-to-the-hills AAA title and have completely lost all interest in modern online multi-player games.
What's Battlefield 2018 or Anthem going to be like? Don't know, don't care. EA, etc, are already completely dead to me (and it's pretty obvious they're researching this 2017-early 2018 in order to put it into late +2018, 2019, 2020, etc, future titles). My money now goes to the smaller Indie & middleweight (Larian, CDPR, etc) studios still capable of making proper whole completed (and actually new & different) games without insulting your intelligence. Looking forward to decent future single-player titles like Pillars of Eternity 2, Metro: Exodus, The Talos Principle 2, etc.
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