Okay. This thread has been quite the rollercoaster.
I have read through the patent. Shocking, honestly. I was not aware Activision had this up blatantly in public, even though it should have been common knowledge that this tactic has been employed for virtually every single game involving game winning (and sometimes even cosmetic) microtransactions.
Now, a few points I would like to make.
Blizzard is a company that is profit driven. The company overall has plateau’d, but let’s focus on the game in question for now. Hearthstone’s market share has plateau’d as well and is at the cash cow stage in its growth share matrix. That cow will transform into a dog over time unless some major external changes happen in the future.
Paradoxically, Hearthstone has become more free to play friendly over the years. The game rewards you with more free legendaries, more packs, higher gold rewards, free grindeable cosmetics, more free gamemodes, singleplayer, the core set, etc. I say paradoxically because although the rewards have vastly increased, so has the costs of being competitive in the constructed environment. However, in order for the appeal to the game to completely die for new players or free to play players, the constructed environment has been reduced to a niche, instead of the main gamemode of the game. Further improvements towards sedentarization of the game modes, separate from each other will undoubtedly come in the future.
Hearthstone irefutably works off of the positive reinforcement strategy. That’s why Bob urges you to buy battlegrounds perks after a successful run and that’s why returning players or new players have a very high (statistically proven!) luck percentage of getting legendaries. You cannot have consumer remorse if you were remorseful before consuming. Blizzard has a strong marketing sector and therefore understands and employs this well.
With these in mind, let’s discuss the patent itself, its implications and Hearthstone’s position in all of this. Like I said, patenting manipulation is shocking and I feel like Activision should have received overwhelmingly more bad press from it than it did. Imagine what the reaction would be if EA did it. They state that they have never used it, but this is quite honestly a load of crap and a company “investigating themselves” should not never be believed by anybody with any functional braincells.
HOWEVER, —and this is a big one —my father holding a knife near a crime scene and me holding his hand neither makes me the primary suspect of the crime, nor does it incriminate my father. My father does become the primary suspect, yes, and he will (should?) be investigated for it, but he is not already pronounced guilty. The existence of a patent for manipulation is extremely shady and is damning by itself, but does not prove the usage of it. Now, to skip on the company PR bs, let’s be more conspiratory for a second and assume they do use it. We are aware of hearthstone’s use of positive reinforcement. Now why would they manipulate matchmaking for free to play players to lose more on average than paying players, if they want them to incentivize them to spend? I don’t know about you, but when a game screws me over time and time again, my first sentiment is not to throw my money at it. The usage of that tactic is not believable for Hearthstone considering they use many other manipulative tactics to incentivize players to spend. Those alone would have to individually take up other threads and I would rather focus on the patent in question rather than the other possibilities.
As far as the other arguments in this thread are concerned, such as Zephrys and the others, I would prefer not to waste my time on them because they can all be reduced to “Oh, weren’t you aware of the fact that —insert conspiracy here—?
