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...

[BumFlannel]

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.

I've been calling Valve out for this for years, way back in CSGO. In CSGO it wasn't as rife for everyone, but you would get a load of people, always experienced players based on their hours played, where suddenly the muscle memory they had had ingrained for years would stop working. Shot nots registering or seemingly going around enemies, recoil seeming more intense along with screen shake, not being able to react to enemies who are killing you with 4 shots even though they were only on your screen for 100ms, or instantly head shotting you while moving while anyone spectating you says you just looked at him for ages, etc. Then getting mechanically normal games for a brief period before going back to playing like you've never played the game before.

Personally when I started playing CSGO I could perform better and way more consistently than I can now, and shooting was incredibly consistent compared to what it is now. Now it seems completely bias to hitting or missing no matter how well you perform. Even against the completely obvious new player who you somehow come across at 20k+ mmr. Watch the demo and they are running around shooting, taking ages to respond to you, no crosshair placement, don't counter strafe, and can't aim, yet their bullets all seem to find that instant first shot headshot given to them by lucky spread, even at long range with multiple spam pistol dinks in a row, smg dinks in a row, deagle spam, and run and gun rifle headshots. I have to tap central to the head at about 20 meters up to 10 times to get a bullet that doesn't go around the enemies head from spread. Then for brief periods here and there my first shot will always land on the head.

Something I've discovered recently is that the spread appears completely bias. In one match the game can feel beautiful and you can tap heads at all ranges with great statistical chance of hitting. It's like now you get a small chance to miss rather than a small chance to hit. Valve recently made your view align to how CSGO was while shooting, and in general, shooting now feels great, at least from a visual stand point. But they said in the patch notes the bullet trajectories remain the same as they always have been in CS2.
It's the trajectories of bullets (spread) that I find extremely fishy. When you get a good game you can visually see you are getting a lot more central distribution from your bullets, then in a bad game you can see the distribution seems to be favouring more the extremities of your inaccuracy circle making your bullets go more around the enemy and few to the centre.

Before they did the visual update to shooting to look like CSGOs, people complained a lot about too much camera shake even though there wasn't any more camera shake. Your view has always kicked towards the direction of your bullet spread. I believe the reason people complained about more camera shake (and it wasn't consistent by any means because in matches you felt you were getting good "organic" shooting mechanics and were able to consistently spray that perception of extra camera shake didn't really exist or was extremely muted) is because when the spread appears to be being bias toward the extremities of inaccuracy you're getting larger jumps between greater distances for shots which creates a greater distance that your view and view model need to travel for each shots on average. When the game appears to be giving you proper organic spread, e.g. in a good game, and you get more shots with central distribution, that's on average less distance to travel for each shot because you have the central distribution shots at least halfling the distance between each shot. This gives the impression of less screen shake.

I suspect the game server is sending a spread modifier to the client to adjust the spread as it likes which would most likely be applied under the lag compensation layer, not in client game mechanics code because that would expose it completely. This way you can't prove anything and have to trust that the server is sending a truthful value, and if it's not, assume its just lag comp doing it's thing. The server could stream a small ambiguous value every tick along with a bit to say whether or not it should be used on the next shot, and that value could be applied on the next shot. So this could be done pretty much invisibly on every single tick. A pre-emptive modifier with a switch to say whether or not it is to be used for the next shot.

I also highly suspect real time latency adjustments creating higher opponent peekers advantage and predicting movement ahead to give you less peekers advantage. Players cannot physically gain extra peekers advantage from having higher latency or see you faster than their latency allows them to. You should still see the actions he made in order and over the same timeline up to where he starts shooting, you just unknowingly see them around half his and your ping later. Someone with 200ms ping might come out late on your screen, but that gets balanced out because their shots are also delayed to the server. How often I peek a high ping player but magically get instantly headshot the moment my crosshair centrally meets the edge of cover makes no physical sense. He should not be able to see me yet on his screen, I have to be accelerated on the server for him to see me at this point. With his ping of say 200, and ticktiming around 45ms, he should be 145ms behind, so how can he possibly shoot me in the head when he would only just be seeing half of my head if he was playing in the same instance as on my computer, not even lan that is 0ms but still has ticktiming.

Then I have noticed, when you are holding the correct angle and all you need to do is click, with distance from cover and right eye advantage, if someone peeks there they come out so quickly its impossible to respond to. But if they peek from another angle far enough away from the one you're holding, they peek like a human being, not a benny hill character. They take a lot longer to respond. All this takes is a large bubble around players on the server side and when a view angle intersects that bubble, delay their movement info by whatever milliseconds your algorithm wants to push.

There is so much evidence for manipulation in this game.

Valve also have patents for this kind of stuff just like Activision and EA. When there are so many symptoms that don't make mechanical sense and actually align to what these kind of mechanics suggest, mechanics are bipolar and seem to statistically change in waves and not from encounter to encounter, haven't been called out as bugs by the company or fixed for years, the company basically becomes so introvert that they have zero communication with their players, wont even acknowledge such accusations or even clarify by saying something like" no we don't do anything like that", and have a history of utilizing unethical methods to make money, then their game NEEDS to be questioned on its integrity.

Look at COD. Activision passes most of these criteria. While they do communicate some, they mostly stay quiet when it comes to accusations of the game being rigged. They did acknowledge it once with a huge response, but they didn't even have to lie about anything. The community always talks about this in the wrong context, in the context of SBMM and EOMM. SBMM and EOMM is just the matchmaking that occurs before the game is actually played, so of course these accusations cant exist in the context of those two systems. Activision didn't correct the contextual error of the community, they leveraged it and responded in that incorrect community created context and never in a game wide context or in any context of gameplay. So technically they couldn't lie.