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!

[Jonnyc55]

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!

The patents exist showing rigged gameplay.

It is gas lighting. When you play well, and your aim assist goes bad because of that, you blame yourself, unaware of rigged aim assist.

Let the good players stay good.

A good post on this:

As a matter of fact it’s the first case of gas lighting I have seen in a FPS game. In which the game would make you think it’s you that’s the problem. People have bought modems, mouse, headphones, routers, controllers, better internet, rebuilt PCs, all in the vain attempt to compensate for a problem which never existed on their end. Text book gas lighting.

This forum stinks of this issue, my thread is very important. Patents exist. Many big games aee talked of having EOMM.

more:

All because their:
Aim is off
Can’t hear footsteps at the start of a match of enemies.
Bullets don’t register. Score streaks that don’t register. But still register with you even though you are inside a building,
They can’t move fast enough or are sluggish. While timmynothumbs run around the map as “the flash”
They don’t see opponents they should have seen
Higher then normal pings and spikes in ping that should not exist
Blocked players still showing up in your lobbies
A pattern of getting owned buy a weapon that has some sort of bullet tracer effect. Or buy the same type of weapon from different players.
Being shadow banned inwhich you are placed in cheat lobbies. <——People forgot that activision is still actively doing this. Duration can be a few hours or a week.
Etc....

When you explore the details of what they are doing it does not come off as innocent as you imply. The offense this game brings is so egregious it comes off as demonic in nature.

If Activision care for noobs, then reveal the system... show how much you care... no they won't because they are guilty of mega greed and they know good players will play other games...

[timekeeper]

This has been my exact suspicion with CS2. I have 6k hours on the game and I've been on the top 1000 premier leaderboard multiple times, global in CSGO etc. I started out not knowing or caring what EOMM was until after the launch of CS2 when I started to notice how bizarre the game is. One of the things that threw me for a loop was how I kept seeing objectively bad players on my team frag out like crazy. Sometimes I see players in 25k+ premier lobbies who look like they would've been between GN2 and DMG back in CSGO, but in CS2 they're able to hit these super high, high ranks, I'm talking top 1%-2% worldwide ranks while looking very rudimentary in terms of actual gameplay. My first assumption was that they're cheating, but after 2 years of the game being out and having logged over 1200 matches in premier alone, I genuinely think something else is afoot. Sometimes there's no evidence whatsoever that they're cheating, yet the gameplay doesn't match the results. Also, sometimes I'm the one destroying players much better than me. I would regularly get matched against popular CS streamers who are worlds above me in terms of skill, yet sometimes I would destroy them, and sometimes they would destroy me, there's no consistency at all. Maybe this all boils down to bad netcode, though. In halo 3 there was always one player who got immediate hitreg while others had normal ping-based hitreg, maybe something similar occurs in CS2 with the new subtick system. However, if look at valve as a company and see how much they care about 'data' and the fact that they hire experimental psychologists, it starts to make sense to consider why they would add engagement mechanisms to the game.

Imagine that you have a competitive 5v5 shooter like CSGO and you want to make a successor game. But other 5v5 shooters exist which already have massive popularity and are more 'new player' friendly. CS is notorious for having a playerbase of old heads and tryhards with 10+ years and thousands of hours on the game. Are you really going to release CS2 and allow that existing playerbase to decimate new players and make them quit for valorant or other games? Of course not, you're going to give them some kind of advantage, at least sometimes. It's part of the dopamine rollercoaster they've implemented. On the one hand, bad players get to think they're good for a certain number of matches so that they keep playing, and on the other hand good players get destroyed by people worse than them which hurts their pride and makes them keep playing.

Furthermore I've noticed this isn't limited to matchmaking per se, I've seen people getting weird damage values for wallbangs, seeing someone on their screen but not on the match demo (this happened for me yesterday and I got accused of cheating), teammates saying they shot 4 bullets but from my spectator view they didn't even shoot one. The severity of which seem to fluctuate from round to round, maybe even during rounds, and vary from the plausible to the outright comical. Yesterday I was watching JoJo and he awped someone in the torso, blood splattered out of him but the guy didn't die (and damage prediction was disabled) and other weird stuff like this. Which makes me think the game is actually tweaking the values (like interp ratio) dynamically throughout the duration of the match. I learned this type of rigging is often called DDA or dynamic difficult adjustment. This would also explain why valve removed many of the networking related console commands, specifically cl_interp and interp_ratio. A decision which almost everyone hated. Well I think it's because they don't want us to see these values anymore.

Now the real kicker is how cheaters and bots play into this whole scheme. Cheaters, particularly closet cheaters, simultaneously provide a convenient way to enforce certain player experiences while also providing a convenient smokescreen or scapegoat for the whole thing. If everybody thinks the game is full of cheaters, then nobody will suspect the engagement mechanisms themselves. All the blame goes on cheaters.

Anyway, these ideas shouldn't be taken in isolation but rather within the context of valve's other shady activities such as inflating or straight up lying about the player counts, backhandedly promoting underaged gambling using their ingame economy or at least being willfully ignorant of it, constantly dancing around the law etc. Hell, the CS2 devs don't even talk to the community, it's completely silent and we're just left out to dry. The way valve runs their games is less like a game company and more like some kind of secretive government agency, and I don't think it's just to deprive cheat devs of information. The valorant devs regularly talk to the community about their efforts in countering cheaters. Why doesn't valve? If you sit on that question for a while it seems increasingly likely that it's because cheaters serve the company's primary interests, cheaters enhance the effectiveness of these engagement mechanisms and ultimately make the game more sticky and addictive.

[themagic]

No...this sounds like bs Conspiracy...

Developers would never and never use rigged Algorithms/Ai that alters your hitreg/speed/movements in realtime or give the feel of inputlag/desync in Matchmaking and manipulating/degrade your Performance and at same time suddenly give all the Advantage and the good Boost to Enemy for the more EZ experience and just a WIN ? and just good feelings ? and create illusion of Fair balance and Esports in all Elo and Ranks in which you are right now hardstuck ?...where some cant really get better for years or dont feel any improvement but only are feeling and experience rigged Script Matches like on a Repeat Button and everything feels exact same bullshit disadvantage Inconsistent for you like 10 and 20 Matches before and this same similar cycle repeats each Day and at a degree on your ELO ? And where only a Smurf Account can Fix this and make you feel better advantage again ? But not for me and in my case and many other Players that i know...


Why someone should do that and manipulate like this ? That would be really Unhuman and Crime and against Fair Skill Esports Rules (if any exist ) in that so many young Kids believe and where at same time Developers advertising and promoting there Online Games always as best of the best "real pure skill based" just after Release and out of Beta...

But if Truth...then this is really Big Deal and even worse than the existence of Cheaters or gambling at Casino...


Just keep practice and just training your AIM AIM AIM AIM guys...you will get better and improve one day and the input lag desync and all issues you feel and see will disappear like a bad nightmare that you once experienced and the good real fair dreams start after...for sure

SOON...