Last week it came to light that EA had filed a patent for a matchmaking algorithm to "dramatically increase the odds for players to purchase microtransaction items". Fans of BioWare's upcoming Anthem expressed concern that this algorithm would be included when the game is released, supposedly later in 2018. However, Technical Design Director Brenon Holmes took to Reddit in a brief post to disabuse fans of that notion.
The patent reads:
The patent, Engagement Optimized Matchmaking, is specifically designed to keep players actively engaged in multiplayer games by adjusting matchmaking behind the scenes. Various player statistics are analyzed by the algorithm including player skill, sportsmanship and play style (offensive or defensive preferences and favored attacks).
Within the EOMM framework, the core building components, skill model, churn model and graph pairing model are uncoupled so that they can be tuned and replaced independently. Moreover, we can even 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 optimization.
This is good news for worried fans.
Read more at the provided links.
Do you think that BioWare can keep its word?
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