Could the game industry be going beyond EBMM and rigging code related to gameplay?

[Jonnyc55]

I'd thought I make a thread to see thoughts/feelings on this, since a lot of people do all these tweaks, using great hardware, they feel it works and then they come across contradictions to this feeling, yes some are technical reasons why, luck, physiological, personal and some are placebo but I thought I'd take a stab in the dark, which is game companies rigging the gameplay code.

After watching the fraudlent Ashley Madison dating website on a Netflix program, which highlights fake dating profiles, and myself seeing this on many other dating websites, and many others accusing Tinder of the same, when I couple this with the many people feeling there is EBMM in CoD and Apex and the public patent (rigging matchmaking) by Activision then it goes to show how willing business men are to cheat in secret. This has always been obvious to me and others, but amazingly not so obvious to many people. Activision already has for a long time had a patent on the internet for all to see, which basically uses jealousy, desirability etc. of shop items by an in-game mechanism of putting good performing players who have shop items with those who don't have shop items and are bad performers, as to make the shop items look more cool, and all that jazz.

If their psychologists (which is a norm for a lot of big companies) and their analysts say the rigging isn't hurting profit but actually helping it, then these CEO's and shareholders will most likely go for it, if of course there is legal leverage to protect them. Engagement based matchmaking I can totally believe, but the dubious one is rigging code; registration of hits, making aim assist less powerful at certaint times (I saw a few on reddit believe/feel this) etc.

So for me, knowing how much CEO's and shareholders who rake in millions to hundreds of millions annually don't give a crap about your time (Activision patent, fake dating profiles), as long as profits are up, then rigging gameplay code doesn't feel that far-fetched, it's possible they could implement it softly under the excuse of gently increasing aim assist more for those who need it etc. (and this could be dynamic background adjustments). It is technically their software which you agree to use. So there may be legal workarounds for rigging gameplay... I don't know, or not.

So I think, there is possibly another factor in the hunt for constant good input lag, and that's possibly rigged gameplay that's following a psychological model that raises profits on average from across the playerbase, and this could sometimes mean, your gameplay being chewed up in their gears when it doesn't favour their models. This could explain some of the hit and miss nature in tweaking the system for input lag.

However, there might be more vigilant people than me, and don't see that's the case and can see there is consistency, with only genuine network variance and hardware issues to blame.

[dervu]

You have to differrentiate between people talking about "input lag" just in specific game vs those who have symptoms also outside game and on any operating sytem. It's hard to know statistics who have what, because symptoms overlap in so many cases.

[Espionage724]

So I think, there is possibly another factor in the hunt for constant good input lag, and that's possibly rigged gameplay that's following a psychological model that raises profits on average from across the playerbase, and this could sometimes mean, your gameplay being chewed up in their gears when it doesn't favour their models. This could explain some of the hit and miss nature in tweaking the system for input lag.

However, there might be more vigilant people than me, and don't see that's the case and can see there is consistency, with only genuine network variance and hardware issues to blame.

Unless you're on LAN with cables, there's always variance in the network code. You have it, the person shooting at you has it, the people on the other side of the map has it, L3 has it, whatever ancient copper wires to different servers your ISP runs over has it, and it's all "compensated" in a black box of algorithms and mandatory latency so that high-level clients know what to properly report quickly.

As for rigging player performance, sure why not? For-profit companies have to reasonably seek profits, including through manipulation. Heads aren't concerned with gaming integrity beyond trying to prevent mainstream cheats from working, hence applying system-wide invasive anti-cheats. Having an algorithm to have preferred latency and "experience improvers" to bigger names and streamers sounds like a good idea; their experience better be good, to present to other people, to buy your game, that'll keep getting refreshed with a new cloak each year to hide any controversy. At the end of the day, as long as regular players have fun, what's the harm? Even with the potential of all that, I'd still hop on CoD on Xbox and have some fun :p

Only way to not question client/server manipulation is open-source games with public server codes, and trust of the server you play on. You aren't getting that with CoD, CS2, Apex, Valorent, or any mainstream shooter today, but they give a convincing illusion they're fair :p You can get that with Xonotic and OpenArena today, since they're open-source all around!