Games that decide when you win and when you lose.

A few words about the Youtuber whom you are going to watch. Yongyea is a well respected games pundit and hes good at covering the usual BS that big publishers are known for. My thoughts on this matter follow after the vid.(use the link. It got removed when I embeded it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC19cGJa-xw

To summarise this. EA wants an undetectable system that rigs a match with the ultimate purpose to keep you playing and spend money on microtransactions.

So basically the quote that struck me the most is that the publisher will decide wether you win or lose based solely on buying mtx. At this point I'm writing any "entertainment" software off from being concidered a game. This is like those stupid mobile "games".

I think this a little different from activision's patent, but not that far off.

To be honest I find this to be even worse than pay to win, because essentially you will be set up to fail even if you have dropped money for top tier gear. I wouldn't be surprised if Battlefront 2 implemented this system. It already shoves in your face who killed you and what star cards he has.

Of course much like Actiblizzion's patent there are going to be people that will claim that this is not the case and that EA wont use just because they said it yada yada yada. We were saying the same about loot boxes, and look where this got us.

EDIT: Something else I wanted to add is that basically these systems are using you as an ad banner. You are doing advertisement for them, and you are supposed to have no idea about it.

Shit like this has the opposite effect on me; I don't want to buy anything, I just don't want to play.

Not saying I have the right way, but it would be nice if everyone just stopped buying this garbage. Yeah, it'd be nice if publishers restrained themselves and were not so greedy, but it'd be easier for us to show them there is no market for it.

Unfortunately, with EA having access to the Star Wars license, that is easier said than done.

*I also want to add, and pose a question: do you all feel like these publishers need these huge budgets? Do you think games really benefit from having Hollywood actors voice five minutes of dialogue? Do they really need to make a 400 million dollar Superbowl ad for a game everyone knows about?

Maybe if they had more modest budgets, focused on the fundamentals instead of extras, they wouldn't have to spend so much making the game, and then wouldn't have to make these abominations.

Esports would not allow for such hidden mechanics.

@henrythefifth: Well, in e-sports you are not playing random matches.

In singleplayer it's no different from certain kinds of difficulty/loot scaling that have existed in the past and is reasonable so long as the player is notified and in the case of difficulty gives the player a choice. Just like with the Destiny xp nonsense, transparency is the issue more than the actual mechanics. Plenty of games have diminishing returns on their reward systems, particularly in MMOs, and this is often done to decrease the effectiveness of botting. But games like Guild Wars would literally tell you with a tool tip that it was happening.

Didn't really say how this would work in multiplayer, if it would be done purely with matchmaking or hidden modifiers adjusting player accuracy, damage, move speed and the like just enough to make a difference but not enough to attribute to anything more than having a good/bad match. We all have those matches where we're a little off, so noticing these kinds of tweaks through our own variable gameplay would be very difficult. It's a shame that EA and Activision are doing this because MTs offer a genuine way for players to speak with their wallet and support the games they really like while getting something fun in return. I worry that the games that do this kind of thing right, like a Path of Exile, will suffer from the paranoia created by the bigger companies who want to cheat their way to profits.

EA's come to the conclusion that a lot of businesses do when they reach a certain size - that it's more profitable to run a con than it is to run a business, and they're right.