Picture this. You’re playing a first-person shooter with random people online via the matchmaking system. You’re putting your all into the match because you want to win! Plus, you trust your teammates to work toward that same goal. But as you play, you notice that one of the players either isn’t doing anything or is intentionally getting themselves killed by enemy players. In short, they’re cheating by intentionally throwing the match. That infuriates many gamers and has been going on for some time. Get the wrong person on your team, and your whole group suffers. However, Electronic Arts might have a way around that with their newest patent.
The patent has been labeled “detecting collusion in online games.” So its purpose is self-explanatory. It’ll be a piece of software that’ll try to determine at any point whether a person or group of people is colluding with the other team to ensure their victory. The punishment for being caught by the software is a loss of rewards within the title or being banned from online play. That last punishment would require definitive proof to enforce it.
But that’s the rub right there. How would Electronic Arts be able to detect such collusion? The answer is within the patent, but it’s not an answer that many want to hear. According to the details of the software, a process will look into any communications a player had with someone on another team. That includes whether they had chats and what they talked about during those chats.
That’s a problem, as it would have access to potentially very private messages to determine whether there is “collusion” or not.
To their credit, EA notes in the patent that this inspection will maintain the laws within the privacy policy and settings of the player. But by that token, you have to wonder how they’ll do their job without violating privacy.
Another thing it’ll attempt to do to make a verdict is examine the “social relationship” between players. It’ll look at things like the Lobby Chat and other public spaces to see how players interact with one another and then, based on that, ascertain whether anything is happening between them.
As you may guess, this is not a perfect system right out the gate. EA is likely attempting something with this patent without guaranteeing it would work. That’s not uncommon in the tech industry, and we hope they figure out a way to make it work in a fair and non-invasive manner.
Source: Exputer