News - Is Warzone 2 Screwing Us Over. The Dynamic Difficulty Conspiracy

We've all felt it. One minute, you're a kill-to-death ratio God, next you're seeing a string of hit markers, but your targets just shake it off. Sinister, are they messing with bullet damage, enemy aim, and even respawn locations to keep us on that roller coaster of emotions?.

Hear me out

Okay. Instead of creating evenly matched lobbies, the whole point of EOMM is to stack the lobbies so the matches aren't even, and it does this strategically to make sure you stay in that sweet spot between frustration and victory.

It's a balancing act on a tight RPP of dopamine. For the purpose of this article. I'm making the assumption that eomm is in the game, and based on what I've read and what I can see with my own gameplay, it seems incredibly obvious that Call of Duty lobbies have been drenched in it for the last few years, and eomm opens the door for all kinds of manipulation.

We already know they want you to feel great and then be super frustrated. For a while, if they're willing to do this in the matchmaking before a match starts, what would stop them from messing with you during a match? We also know Activision owns patents for changing aim assist and weapon damage on the fly to help sway the outcome of an encounter.

EA also owns similar patents and faced a class action lawsuit against them for using Dynamic's difficulty to help sway players into spending money. Microtransactions, EA I can't talk about anything bad in gaming without you trying to steal the show, but before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's make sure we're looking at this.

Ok, but.

Levelheaded, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity; that's called Handland Razor, and there are words to live by for a franchise that struggles with basic bugs.

It seems kind of far-fetched that they'd be doing sophisticated calculations in each and every interaction, especially when the weird stuff happening can probably be explained by bad net code server ticks or even player lag, and while that might open the door for dynamic difficulty, it can still work as intended without in-game Shenanigans: the existence of one does not prove the existence of the other, and those dynamic difficulties are patents that Activision owns.

I saw several links to patents in Reddit posts and older articles, but the links are all broken now because the US patent and trademark office has changed their website in the last few years. Another sentiment I've seen a bit is: What's the big deal about manipulating our emotions? If a person chooses to spend money on a game that's hurting them, is it any different than movies or books manipulating our ?.

Psychological impact

Emotions, and to that, I'd say yeah, there's a significant difference in the way books and movies and dynamic DC difficulty and competitive online games manipulate emotions.

In storytelling, we choose to take that emotional journey, and we know going in what we've signed up for, but in competitive games, things like dynamic difficulty and eomm work behind the scenes without our informed consent. This lack of transparency breeds suspicion and frustration as players feel their performance is being artificially controlled, while the primary purpose of storytelling is to entertain.

Dynamic difficulties primary purpose is to keep players engaged longer, even if it undermines the competitive integrity of the game. This manipulation, real or imagined, has real consequences; it breeds paranoia, distrust, and even a sense of powerlessness. We become lab rats in Activision's Grand Experiment; our emotions are carefully monitored and tweaked to keep us playing.

It's a slippery slope, one that raises serious questions about the ethics involved. You know what isn't ethically questionable? Speaking of.

Spender's boost

Currency, while I wasn't able to locate the dynamic difficulty patents. I was able to find the activ Visions patent for matching skilled players who spend money in the shop with unskilled players that don't spend money. In May, match a more expert player with a junior player to encourage the junior player to make game-related purchases of items used by the expert player.

A junior player may wish to emulate the expert player by obtaining weapons or other items used by the expert player. Activision responded to that article by clearly stating that this was an exploratory A patent was filed in 2015 by an R&D team working independently from our game studios. It has not been implemented in the game company's file patents all the time, and that doesn't necessarily mean it's in use. It's worth noting here, though, that I've seen no such official statement denying the use of EOMM or dynamic difficulty for that.

Final thoughts

There, look you'll have to draw your own conclusions cuz I can't say for certain one way or the other but based on all the possibilities the company's track record and the fact that Activision isn't even comfortable talking about it I think Dynamic difficulty is actually plausible and given how focused Activision is on pushing players to the shop why wouldn't they use the tools and techniques at their disposal to do just that what line would it cross that they haven't already danced over, maybe I'm wrong maybe we like any explanation that doesn't involve us sucking but it really does seem to run deeper than that the evidence is mostly circumstantial, but the suspicions linger like smoke after a grenade the next time you go on a run or get that clutch kill just think who's the real winner here is it you the manipulated gamer or the invisible Puppeteer pulling the.