After Activision, Electronic Arts does something behind the scenes!

The former has patented a matchmaking system to „encourage” players to spend money on microtransactions as they end up facing stronger, overpowered opponents. YongYea, a YouTuber found a patent filed by Electronic Arts. It’s called Engagement Optimized Matchmaking (we’ll shorten it to EOMM), which is an algorithm that tracks how we play online. Our skill, our aggression, how much time it takes to be frustrated (how do they know about that…?), and these data would be used to put us together with similarly ranked/playing players.

On paper, up to this point, it sounds good. However, the EOMM research papers have a definition that flips things around: „Within the EOMM framework […] we can change the objective function to other core game metrics of interest, such as play time, retention, or spending. EOMM allows one to easily plug in different types of predictive models to achieve the optimisation.” Spending. Bingo – we’re at the same position as Activision is: Electronic Arts would simply plonk the algorithm into multiplayer to make us spend money.

Although Activision claims they didn’t use their matchmaking system, and Electronic Arts is at an early state of going through the patent application process, you can bet how games such as Call of Duty later this year, as well as possibly Anthem by BioWare, will use these matchmaking systems. So no, the publishers will not get off the more money, money, money train.

Source: WCCFTech