Activision Blizzard makes the fans angry yet again

Last week I wrote an article called “Even EA is starting to look good when compared to Activision Blizzard,” and the sentiment has only become stronger ever since. 

With Operation Grand Heist recently launched for COD: Black Ops 4, Activision silently introduced a loot box system and a battle pass with purchasable tiers. From the players’ point of view, it all is just a sneaky way to squeeze out of the fans as much money as possible, while keeping the development costs at a minimum.

If you are playing Black Ops 4, Activision might be using dirty tricks on you

In 2017, Activision won a patent that uses matchmaking to force people into buying skins. Here are extracts from that patent:

The microtransaction engine may identify items to be promoted, identify marquee players that use those items, and match the marquee players with other players who do not use those items.

The system may match a more expert/marquee player with a junior player to encourage the junior player to make game-related purchases of items possessed/used by the marquee player. A junior player may wish to emulate the marquee player by obtaining weapons or other items used by the marquee player.

This is really bad in two separate ways:

1. Matching people with skins against those who don’t use skins is a dirty scheme and shouldn’t be used on customers by a respected company.
2. A matchmaking system is meant to bring balance to the game. Factoring in skins screws up the core experience, because one team could end up stronger for no particular reason (other than making the Activision board more rich).

We can’t tell for sure if Activision is using their patented matchmaking system in the current games, but there have been enough of development cycles to do it by now.

At the moment of writing this, Activision Blizzard stock is close to the two-year low (the lowest point was reached on February 11), and it’s a rightly assessment of the company actions.