Hey guys i woke up today and read something a friend shared, then i re-read it cause i thought there was no way this could possible be true, Activision has filed a patent that will force lower geared/skilled players into high ranking matches against over geared people for the sole reason of almost forcing players to buy things in-game with real life money to get even a fighting chance, there's gonna be a huge backlash to this and a lot of spin that comes from the company so instead here as some screenshots iv'e taken of the actual patent(update, here's the link instead.)
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=9789406.PN.&OS=PN%2F9789406&RS=PN%2F9789406

Why this matters

Now some people may just say well, this doesn't matter in the long wrong as it won't affect me because I don't "x" but take a closer look at how the gaming industry works, once something sells, it is pushed in to every single game on the market, remember when loot boxes were just a fun way to catch up? now they're being sold to you in Triple A titles, remember when CoD's FPS mode was fresh and exciting? now it's everywhere, remember when they were called Expansions and were basically a new game in a box, instead it was converted to DLC and sold to you at $20 a pop for 2 hours of content?

This is why this patent is horrifying because it WILL work and it will show up in more games and that not only affects gamers wallets but also the types of games that will get released, take CS:GO for example, there's no way you could introduce a pay2win system to that game, unless maybe you restricted weapons to loot boxes or something, so game developers will no longer tailor their games around this but instead on how they can exploit their playerbase even more.

For example, take Civilization, you all start at a certain age, the countries have strengths and weaknesses and it's up to strategy and good management to succeed, now take what activision wants to do and you end up with a Civilization where some players who experts at the game get matched with people who don't even know the controls, but they also allow the expert to start with a massive advantage in tech tree's, that is what is being proposed here, making the game so one sided that you're forced to buy things in a game you've paid for to even have a fighting chance.

It's a slippery slope

Most people don't follow game development as much as I do, but the gaming industry is the same as any other industry, it notices market trends, and if they're positive they will take them, it takes time for these to bleed into the mainstream games that get released but suddenly you're blindsided and they're everywhere, remember when quick time events were an actual special event? now you press F to pay your respects, remember when checkpoints were achieved after going through a brutal level and finally getting to a safe point? now you get a check point every time you open the menu.

They're very small and incremental and might even seem stupid to complain about but this is how the marketing is done, it's slow and creeps up your games and then suddenly it's fucking everywhere and you can't get rid of it until games blend into generic genres where even the slightest bit of creative is lauded as a "revolution" or something stupid by people paid to be excited about it, perfect example at the moment is bethesda and skyrim, they released the paid mods scam and the community lost their minds at it and fully rejected it, now they're trying it again and there's very little resistance because people have moved on from Skyrim.

The problem is though like i said is that it creeps up on you, once this goes through with Skyrim and starts padding their bottom line, it'll be in the next mod friendly game, then the next, and then finally you won't be able to modify games without cracking them and pirating them much the same way they did with games when they tried to switch to "online only" single player games in a vain attempt to stop pirates but instead just inconvenienced a shit load of players and in EA's case threatened to delete their accounts if they tried to get a refund, and ultimately had to scrap the entire thing because it didn't work, or you have multiple games where even basic mods can get you banned.

It can even ruin single player games.

Game companies are about one thing nowdays, $$$, it's a business and i accept that there's a market for it, however the problem lies within the companies themselves, instead of hiring gamers or long time devs to these things, they hire business managers who sometimes don't even play video games at all and see this as nothing more than a cash cow to milk until it's dead and then sell the bones and you can see this trend in the market over the past decade where the average content of a single player game dropped from roughly 30 hours, to 8, this wasn't a mistake or because of "better graphics" as many companies claim, it's simple math, why spend even more time making a game and devoting more resources to it, when you can literally cut the game by 3/4's and ship it as is.

Why it pisses me off so much.

I might be going off on a tangent here about the industry as a whole, but it seriously pisses me off when i see this sort of nonsense from one of the monopolies of the industry in Activision who don't need to be doing this, as someone who has helped run and ran a business, any day you can turn 50% profit is a fucking amazing day, however in Activisions case turning 200% profit is a bad day, now I know that Activision is currently failing on that front as their latest releases haven't been doing too well, but this also explains where this is coming from, like i said, padding the bottom line.

If you can ship a low content game, that will already turn a profit on release day and then continue to charge people daily for the games lifespan it doesn't pay to make amazing games, it pays to push out broken, unfair and unfinished products and attach a cash shop to it or endless "DLC" that was cut from the original game, perfect example is Borderlands 2, before I said fuck it and just pirated the rest i'd technically bought the same game over 3 times in DLC items, and that's a single player game, imagine if it was a multiplayer game that was built specifically to attack your wallet and made the game no fun to play unless you bought endless waves of items and DLC, because that's exactly what is happening here, and exactly why it pisses me off so much.

Thanks for reading guys, feel free to up-vote or resteem, or leave a comment or question below and i'll be sure to get back to you as soon as possible, thanks guys!