He´s “just” a principal designer.
Don´t you think the people who programmed the thing would understand it too?
Also
Let me get this straight:
Some (misinterpreted) quote of Scott Mercer can be “proof” of rigging/handicapping, but a quote clearly stating the opposite is instantly disregarded?
It would actually result in less competitive integrity because the more random matchmaking would result in matches that were less responsive to individual player performance.
That’s the most important bit in all of this to understand (at least from the standpoint of wanting to accurately rank the competitor’s on the ladder in terms of their skill)- that lopsided matchmaking results in less information about the relative skills of the players in the match.
So asking for matches that are more randomly made is asking for less accurate ladder rankings.
(That’s before you get into things like lopsided matches resulting in poorer play across the board and less development of skill at the peak of the skill curve.)
You are not wrong. If we wanted, we could make some truly, truly lopsided matches. We could put Lebron against a bunch of weekend warriors, too. Or we could put a chess grandmaster against someone just learning to play. Or we could pit a trained soldier against someone who just picked up a paintball gun.
In each of these matches, we would get what some percentage of the player base say they want. What would be the result of this?
Well, for one thing, Lebron would be a much worse player in a world where he routinely played against players who were not on his level. I mean, surely we’ve all been in these circumstances before? Everyone who has seriously competed has been in competition against someone much less skilled than them at some point.
Those are not real matches.
You cannot even go all out in those matches. The level of competition is such that you simply cannot play to your ability. What you have instead is a sort of limiter on your performance. This is what handicapping actually looks like.
There is no way that Lebron can do anything but handicap himself when he plays against people who are much less skilled than he is. If you have ever truly competed in a skilled endeavor, you know that your best play only occurs when you face opponents who are roughly on your level.
Otherwise, it’s something other than competition. And it is terribly, terribly boring. It’s like sleepwalking through a match and your opponents just fall before you. It’s like teaching your nephew or niece to play poker as opposed to playing in the final rounds of a tournament.
So we could decide to that we want more non-matches in the game. That we do not value competition. But we should not be surprised when others do want a more competitive experience, and we should not be surprised when the devs prioritize real competition over allowing people to stomp their nephews who are still learning to play the game.
I think you have touched on a major philosophical underpinning of the debate around algorithmic handicapping/balance.
To quote BioShock’s Andrew Ryan: “Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? ‘No!’ says the man in Washington, ‘It belongs to the poor.’ ‘No!’ says the man in the Vatican, ‘It belongs to God.’ ‘No!’ says the man in Moscow, ‘It belongs to everyone.’”
By designing online games with algorithmic handicapping/balance, Overwatch’s designers have added a fourth answer: ‘it belongs to the corporation.’ They are saying that individual players and groups are not entitled to the fruits of their own labor; the “sweat of their own brows.” In fact they are saying this quite literally: perspiration is one of the biometrics explicitly mentioned in the details of invention for Activision’s 2015 Matchmaker patent.
There is no possible way you can believe that Blizzard measures your perspiration when you play Overwatch. Actually, let me revise that- based upon your posts throughout this years long discussion, I do believe that you could think this. But it would be immeasurably beneficial if you would simply come out and say it.
Then everyone would at least know where you stand.
I’ve said this to you before, and I"ll say it again: READ THE PATENT FOR YOURSELF IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME. Activision explicitly mentioned sweat as one of the biometrics that is planned for in their 2015 Matchmaker’s details of invention. It’s right there in print. The technology already exists, it’s just not distributed yet and one day it may be.
I’m sick to death of arguing with you about things that are DIRECTLY IN THE PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL. Just read the damn thing for yourself!!! If you won’t, then shut up and stop trying to challenge me on it, you ignoramus.
Are you saying that you do believe that Blizzard measures your perspiration when you play Overwatch?
(And, yes I understand what the patent says. I also know that the vast majority of patents are not implemented and that Blizzard has no way to measure my perspiration.)
I’m not saying that they do, I’m saying that they would like to. And one day they very well might.
That is:
So why do you keep bringing it up when (some people at least) are trying to understand how the game currently operates? It is obfuscatory and irrelevant.
From the Matchmaker’s summary of invention, patented in 2015 by Activision Publishing Incorporated:
[ 0128 ] Examples of quality factors include , without limitation , a player quitting a match or gameplay session whileother players are still playing (indicating dissatisfaction), a
duration of a game session ( e.g. , a longer duration may indicate greater satisfaction ) , a gameplay performance factor ( e.g. , a kill - to - death ratio in a shooter game , a lap time in a racing game , etc. , where greater performance may indicate greater satisfaction ) , a player engagement factor ( e.g. , a speed of player input , a level of focus as determined from camera peripherals , etc. , where greater engagement may indicate greater satisfaction ) , a competition level of a game ( e.g. , whether lopsided or not , where evenly matched games may indicate greater satisfaction ) , a biometric factor ( e.g. , facial expressions , pulse , body language , sweat , etc. ) , explicit feedback from a player ( e.g. , responses to a survey ) , and / or other observable metrics related to gameplay.
You can find the patent for yourself on Google Patents with this code: US20200114268A1
(I’m not allowed to link on this forum.)
So, it’s right there in print, registered with the United States Patent Office. You can’t tell me that it’s not what Activision intends. Argument over, you lose. Not another word from you please.
There we go, it’s right there in the patent.
I don’t see it as unreasonable at all to believe that at some point they could utilise such a system. We already have Apple watches that measure all sorts of things, webcams and biometrics in our devices and fingerprint readers and so on.
Exactly! This is not at all far-fetched, especially when the technologies like these are already becoming widely distributed and implemented in consumer products. Corporations will do everything in their power to monitor and manipulate consumers (and we are more than consumers by the way, we are citizens with rights).
Yep. I think the question is if Activision could, would they? And from what we know about them… They have hardly the most morally upstanding track record… So yes, yes they would.
Yes. I can tell you that’s not what Activision intends. That patent attempts to comprehensively describe possible metrics of engagement in order to maximize it’s (the patent’s) utility in a corporate patent environment.
The fact that one could imagine perspiration being a potential metric for measuring engagement does not mean that it is something that either has been implemented or will be implemented.
That’s not the way that patents work. They were merely trying to make their patent as universally applicable as possible- that is the way that patents always work. Patents exist to carve out an intellectual property space and patent holders benefit from making them as comprehensive as possible.
All that patent indicates is that the fine folks who wrote it were able to imagine perspiration as a metric for engagement. (The same way anyone who has ever noticed that someone sweats more when they are excited/afraid/etc might).
That’s it.
Yes, their filings with the United States Patent Office confirm this. If they could monitor your “facial expressions, pulse, body language, and sweat” for the purpose of discriminatory matchmaking, they would do it. The same Matchmaker patent also mentions plans to use gender, location, and income level as segregators for matchmaking.
Do you have any idea how many registered patents never get used?
Companies make patents for the most obscure things, only to be forgotten some time after.
The existence of a patent proves nothing about it’s use.
And how many people actually use these?
And what if you take your watch off while playing?
Such a system would be a huge waste of time considering how much it would actually find usage.
Quite frankly it’s a travesty…
This is an absurd statement that assumes a great many of your personal biases are true in order to draw a conclusion that is not warranted from the evidence. It is a marvelous example of incredibly poor critical reasoning.
You are dismissing clearly established facts AND ignoring primary source information from Overwatch’s principal designer AND game director. This is the worst and most galling kind of intellectual dishonesty. You are an IGNORANT, PATHOLOGICAL liar. I’m betting you watch FOX NEWS because YOUR OPINIONS ARE TRASH.
This is marvelous.
You suggest that I am ignoring statements from Scott Mercer and Jeff Kaplan, when the statements you have already copied and pasted in this thread clearly state that:
and
and
Yet you ignore these statements in favor of attempting to re-brand fair matchmaking as “algorithmic handicapping.” And any attempts to have an actual conversation about how competitive ranking algorithms function are ignored by you, while you attempt to distract from them by bringing in bizarre tangents like aspects of patents that you admit are not implemented in game.
What is so scary about actually trying to understand what is happening and about actually reading what is being said without using absurd filters that interpret the most mundane statements as indicating the opposite of what they actually say?