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Gamers allege EA uses dynamic difficulty adjustment so players spend more money
- saiya-jin 6y agoMaybe its just me but I never liked the games who adjusted difficulty ie as I leveled. That's lazy design. Completely demotivated me to try to do sidequests / other ways to improve myself before moving to more difficult quests/areas. I mean what would be the point? Just facing more difficult enemies. Compare it to the game who gets the difficulty balance just right with static setup, and every gain makes a bit of difference and game is never frustratingly hard nor too easy. Areas of initial struggle become walk in the park. To me that's rewarding. Maybe some middle road where enemies can get a bit harder, but still they become more defeatable as player progresses would be ideal. Or even better - make it tweakable in the menu (but that's a mammoth effort to do and test)
- brodie 6y agoPuzzle games seem like the perfect example of an entire genre that strives to get the difficulty level “just right.” I think Stephen’s Sausage Roll might be my absolute favorite recent example of this. The Talos Principle and the Witness are also other great recent examples. Also, to your last comment about adjusting difficulty in the UI: many, many single player action/adventure games have this. It’s been a commonplace thing for quite a while now. It also enables cool things like maximal-difficulty speed runs. I recently had a great time watching someone speed run Metal Gear Solid 2 at its absolute highest difficulty level (that I don’t think the game even offers to players until the first play through is completed). I believe it was a recorded speed running-for-cancer event or something like that. I’ll have to try to find the YouTube video. Actually, here it is: https://youtu.be/3DDMhcxUoAc https://youtu.be/3DDMhcxUoAc. Obviously not something to watch if you ever want to play the game and haven’t yet. Another excellent one for MGS3: https://youtu.be/jUMDBOasRbA https://youtu.be/jUMDBOasRbA
- petepete 6y agoI found The Witness perfectly balanced. None of the puzzles were insurmountable but some took plenty of headscratching. The way that if you get stuck you can go and try a different area of the island made it - I might have lost interest if I'd been stuck with no room for manoeuvre.
- simion314 6y agoI think depends on the implementation. Skyrim does dynamic leveling and this has the advantage you are not stuck in the beginners zone where you have to do most of the quests so you can get enough levels and money to be able to exit this zone. I also like Gothic series did the static enemy levels and enemy would respawn only on Chapter changes, this gave you a god feeling when you could finally access a hard area and defeat the guys that were impossible to scratch at start. So IMO both Skyrim and gothic work because they feet the game and the player base that is targeting and give a different feel of the world, there is no better system IMO. Also in Skyrim the stronger enemies differ visually too, is not just a hidden number that is increased, stronger enemy types with stronger gear is spawn.
- jon-wood 6y agoI think this is the optimal model, set the level of enemies to wherever you’re at on arriving and then leave them at that level going forward. That way as you progress through the game you’re always being challenged by new areas, but you can always go back to earlier areas if you just want to unwind and stomp low-level enemies.
- simion314 6y agoIt depends on the implementation, I do not like how in witcher 3 the quests,weapons,NPCs,creatures have a level so a cool sword is garbage after 1 hours and a some random NPC will drop a rusty ugly sword with a better number. I prefer the games where you don't have a level printed over the enemy head, all low level bandits are the same level but you can find in other areas a different NPC camp with different gear that can defeat you in one heat.
- moomin 6y agoThere’s grey area. For example: Half Life 2. Every so often there’s a downtime area full of boxes. The amount of loot in those boxes is enough to get your ammo up to the levels the game thinks you need for the next challenge. Is this dynamic difficulty? Depends on how you view it. The worse you were at the previous section, the better your rewards, but maybe the challenge is just “get to the next area by any means necessary”. Either way it’s pretty invisible to the player.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoHalf-Life 2 also bumps up the health points of the civil protection soldiers in later chapters, counterbalancing the player's improved firepower. https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Civil_Protection https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Civil_Protection
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoAwful fail :Ð
- rhn_mk1 6y agoThe article never adequately explains how the increase in difficulty affects multiplayer gaming. Football is played beween 2 players, so the difficulty is defined by the skill of the competitor. Does EA favor one of the players? How would that result in increased spending?
- Bootvis 6y agoIt's supposed to work as follows, from the article: > A popular video titled “TOP 10 SCRIPTING PROOF! EA 100% EXPOSED! FIFA 19” purports to show 10 different clips demonstrating dynamic difficulty adjustment during gameplay, mostly near-misses, goals that should have gone in but don’t, that sort of thing. A game is just a simulation and the skill of the player doesn't influence every aspect. Any event that is not in complete control can be nudged to benefit the weaker player. For example, a ball that's just in or out.
- rhn_mk1 6y agoThe article doesn't state it, but you indicate the game is favoring the weaker player. There's still a missing link: the article makes an assumption that the incentive to boost the weaker player is greater earnings. Otherwise it's hard to get upset about the practice. But how does it translate to increased spending? I would guess that having more matched games would lead to both players having more fun and being more satified with their current skill levels.
- My8thAccount 6y agoYes, its about keeping people playing and not rage quitting. I love halo, but after a few months of playing, I start matching against semi-pros (or koreans at night =P) that are far too good and even though I've been getting better, it reaches a point where it's more stressful than fun.
- Bootvis 6y ago> unfairly increase the difficulty of multiplayer mode online matches in order to encourage players to spend real-world money to boost their chances of winning I admit it's a big leap and this technology seems like a good idea to an extend but it doesn't reward getting good at the game as much. As mentioned elsewhere, Elo-type matching is an alternative but does have the disadvantage you never get to beat down on noobs. Some gamers indeed hypothesize that the earning of more money is indeed through better engagement based on artificially balancing games: > "EA Wants to Get Rid of Fair Matchmaking to Focus on Player Spending & Engagement"
- tomc1985 6y agoThere is talk of something similar in EA's Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes gacha game, but in this case it pertains specifically to the drop rates for things (shards or gear fragments) that players are farming. Specifically, the drop rates for stuff decreases the closer the player is to important goals/thresholds. The intent is to force the player is to burn through available energy and, being so close to finishing something, that they spend premium currency to buy energy to get more chances for the shard/fragment to drop to complete the thing faster. There was even talk of a software patent that EA might hold governing this very behavior. I would be very interested in reading a statistical analysis of droprates in gacha games, as I feel like I've noticed this stuff in my own play. But short of hard evidence (plus the ease of explaining away this stuff to the nature of randomness) it's difficult for anyone to make accusations that aren't baseless.
- vbezhenar 6y agoIt's a "well-known" fact that in WoW new characters receive something awesome very quickly. It was not acknowledged by developers, but plenty of people including me observed that behaviour.
- Bombthecat 6y agoHuh? Awesome for new chars? Like a super awesome weapon for lvl 10? You loose that weapon like 10 mins later?
- wongarsu 6y agoI assume he meant newly max-level chars. WoW tries to make anything but max-level very fast to push through.
- vbezhenar 6y agoAfter I dinged 120 level in BfA on new account, I got alpaca mount from the first world boss which is rare drop. My friend resubscribed after 3 years break and got Lich King mount from the first kill (also very rare drop).
- jimbob45 6y agoThe lesson to take away from this is to make sure your sons and daughters never play games designed specifically to addict (like this one). Bejeweled is addictive but when you shut it down, you don’t think about it. Games like these, it’s easy to spend time formulating in your mind how to best spend your next time playing the game. It’s unhealthy.
- AussieWog93 6y agoI honestly can't think of a single competitive game with RNG and/or matchmaking where people _didn't_ accuse the system of being unfair. Pokemon (Battle Tower/Frontier/Subway etc.), League of Legends (Elo Hell), the list goes on... This goes back to before I was born, even. One of my past colleagues used to work on poker machines back in the 80s and the company would regularly receive complaints from people "proving" their machines were non-random. I would take this accusation with a massive grain of salt.
- bluesign 6y agoYeah the problem is people assuming those games are simulations with little or none random. But basically RNG is big part of this simulations.
- GlennS 6y agoThere's an interview with Sid Meier floating around somewhere where he discusses how, in Civilization, people will assume the computer is cheating at combat, unless you actually bias it quite strongly in the human's behaviour. Civilization shows you the odds for each fight based on the relative strength of the units. People expect to win a 90% odds fight every time. (I'm also currently partway through reading Thinking In Bets, which has some interesting things to say about this sort of thing.)
- AussieWog93 6y agoFire Emblem is one of the games that shows fake probabilities to get around this problem - if the actual probability of an attack connecting is 95%, it will display a value of 80-85% to the user. The odd part is that I've played hundreds of hours of those games and never noticed anything wrong.
- cma 6y agoMaybe people expect it to be one some kind of logarithmic scale.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
- nottorp 6y agoAnyone who thinks a game with microtransactions isn't designed to push you towards buying them is a fool. And I don't mean only what EA is doing. They affect any game's design when they are present. Just. Avoid. Them.
- Throwaway1771 6y agoRIP ad-hoc GTA multiplayer.
- hutzlibu 6y agoThere are free to play Multiplayer games, where microtransactions are for skins and other cosmetic stuff. Thats fine by me. In other games, you can make progress faster if you pay. That is more annoying, but still no pay to win, or dishonest. But all those lootbox games and arcade ones, designed to lure you into more buying, well, everybod gets what they deserve.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> In other games, you can make progress faster if you pay. That is more annoying, but still no pay to win, or dishonest. But who is to say you aren’t being manipulated to buy those microtransactions? Their presence gives designers the wrong incentives.
- d3nj4l 6y agoI personally think direct micro payments for skins, even without randomness and lootboxes, are still problematic. They aren't as bad as lootboxes, which are clearly designed to extract money, but their problem is that the potentially limitless money you can spend. If you go into a game knowing that it costs $60, you know that's how much you're spending on it. If you go into a game that hands out skins for $2.50 a piece, there's no limit, and unless you're good at making and sticking to a budget (which is a large portion of the world, especially kids who have no experience!) you can just as likely spend way more than $60. This is worse when such things as skins end up getting tied to status within the game world. Fortnite doesn't have randomized loot boxes anymore, but that hasn't stopped kids from spending tons on V-bucks, especially since they get bullied if they don't [1]. Seriously, just look at videos of people bullying "defaults" on Fortnite. I think it's especially bad because there is a way to finance long-running multiplayer games: battle passes. It's an upfront cost so you always know what you're getting into. 1: https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/7/18534431/fortnite-rare-default-skins-bullying-harassment https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/7/18534431/fortnite-rare-defa...
- loraa 6y agoKnew author was a complete whiny asshole and stopped reading at 'convicted dog-fighting organizer Michael Vick.' What a smug piece of shit. Maybe pick another player to highlight instead.
- WhoCaresLies 6y agopeople spend ton of energy fighting EA but the real problem is the asian p2w games, that's something that needs to get fixed ASAP
- hnick 6y agoIt's a shame, Genshin Impact was actually really good but crippled as a game by the monetary choices. It could be amazing as a single player game with a set price but for myself, like many, what I enjoyed at the start was replaced by disappointment as I progressed.
- 1penny42cents 6y agoThis is kinda hilarious. EA could very well be responsible, but I can equally imagine poor sports taking "this game is rigged" so far as to sue the gaming company just to sooth their egos.
- hfkldjsjfkdj 6y agoThere is already an ELO system that ensures players will play against people of their skill level to keep your win rate around 50%. And EA has shown that all it takes is a shiny new card to manipulate people into buying packs.
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- bdz 6y agoI can see this being true. Recently watched a presentation from the CEO of Nexon and it was pretty interesting. The most eye opening part is the live game operations. They have multiple people who are monitoring the players and if someone is close to leaving or feels like they are going to leave the game (he is mostly talking about Maplestory) they give them a "buff" or some kind of incentive to stay. You get a better loot, or a better equipment. Basically they rig the rng in your favor. And he was talking how the AI and machine learning will change that in the upcoming years because it's actually hard to do that manually (don't give too strong buffs because the player with the buff get bored quickly etc.) The part start here but worth watching the whole video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEqzZCmlzTk&feature=youtu.be&t=1475 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEqzZCmlzTk&feature=youtu.be...
- bserge 6y agoKorean game companies are truly ruthless, everything is designed to keep you locked in, just comfortable enough to play without spending money, while always reminding you that it's better if you do spend money. It's actually really impressive from a business PoV. The games are sad, soulless time wasters, though. Seems that western developers/publishers learned a lot from them.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoAFAIK, F2P got started in Korea and Japan, so it's not really surprising that they are better at it.
- m463 6y agoA friend who worked at a "free" game company said the same thing - it's not your imagination. They exploited lots of human behaviors like hoarding/collecting, competitive behavior and fame. And the game mechanics were carefully orchestrated.
- outoftheabyss 6y agoThe last EA game I bought was FIFA12, I spent hundreds on ultimate team microtransactions and vowed never again, there was no doubt something dodgy was going on. They undoubtedly decrease the capability of in game players after a while so you feel the need to spend more and often
- Buttons840 6y agoAnd fun metagame would be proving this statistically.