ANTHEM - failed Destiny clone from BioWare

[abija]

Regarding the relevancy of UK retail sales for PC.

From Software’s latest just barely sold more The Division 2 this week, claiming the top spot by fewer than 800 copies, as GamesIndustry.biz reports. 80% of those sales were on PS4, 20% on Xbox One, and around 1% on PC. Again, these are physical retail numbers – and if the player counts reported on Steam Charts are anything to go by, the game’s having no trouble on PC.

 

[Angthoron]

1% is probably some sort of collector's editions.

I see absolutely no point in buying most games "physically" these days, all you get is a stupid bunch of packing material you throw out and a Steam code inside it. Maybe a quick installation guide for imbeciles and a bunch of ads for games I'll never want to buy anyway. What's the point?

 

[Turjan]

I see absolutely no point in buying most games "physically" these days, all you get is a stupid bunch of packing material you throw out and a Steam code inside it. Maybe a quick installation guide for imbeciles and a bunch of ads for games I'll never want to buy anyway. What's the point?

The few times I visited the games section in a local electronics chain, they actually had some major games on offer for cheaper than online stores (at least those that play by publishers' rules). It's not that common, but it happens.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Can't say they didn't warn you

 

[fantadomat]

Can't say they didn't warn you

Fix it for you mate

 

[Clockwork Knight]

anyway, shit just got real

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheG...eal_reason_for_loot_balance_and_store_issues/

Ok, hang with me on this one. We all are frustrated with the LOOT, BALANCE, and STORE issues in Anthem right? Well there was a thread last night I saw here where a guy was claiming he could "force" the game to give him better loot by reloading into freeplay over and over again until it started a loot shower to keep him playing (I can't find his post now, if you read this and post here I'll give you credit for the post). I don't know if this theory was true or sample bias, but it ticked a memory for me, about an AI powered system EA was going to add to a game, a game at that time I didn't recognize. Here is the news report from January 2018.



https://www.techpowerup.com/240655/...e-model-paper-foretells-a-dystopian-nightmare



While the story doesn't name Anthem by name the leaked paper has SCREENSHOTS clearly from Anthem and only Anthem. Meaning, EA was implementing this system with Anthem. For those of you too lazy or untrusting to click the link, I'll give you the basic run down for what this paper detailed.



A paper was leaked out last year discussing a new AI/Telemetry system which would track your actions, location, shopping habits and game playing behavior. It would then use this data to create a "profile" of you as a player, and then dynamically adjust game difficulty, rewards, and other features to encourage you to play more and spend more in the game. If you think about it, a lot of the black box weirdness with Anthem (no player sheet, numbers not meaning much, strange scaling issues) makes a lot more sense if things are being dynamically adjusted by an AI which is profiling you.



This would explain why they can't "flip a switch" to loot shower us, or apparently fix much of anything easily with how the game is functioning, especially since it looks like this system was to be deployed on Anthem for the first time (for EA). This would also explain why EA isn't upset about the problems from Anthem. They're after the telemetry data and training their AI and their team's experience with it, for later titles, which would mean that we paid EA $60 for what amounts to be playing nothing more then an AI testbed/tutorial for their game designers.



I know that sounds extreme, but how else can you explain what we're seeing with this game?



EDIT: Wow, thanks for the coins. first ever coins on Reddit :D Did not expect that!

 

[markec]

I know that sounds extreme, but how else can you explain what we're seeing with this game?

People in EA are incompetent retards.

 

[True Ukrainian]

And the recent patch introduces a whole pile of new bugs involving worthless loot, crates that contain nothing, loot that goes missing after players spend an elysian key and completely messes with loot distribution. One step forward and several steps back.

 

[Plaguecrafter]

anyway, shit just got real

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheG...eal_reason_for_loot_balance_and_store_issues/

The fact that his post was removed on Reddit pretty much confirms everything he said.

 

[HoboForEternity]

backup screenshot

HAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHA it's exhilarating how much paying customer get fucked by these shits

 

[Mikeal]

backup screenshot

HAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHA it's exhilarating how much paying customer get fucked by these shits

They deserve it for buying this shit.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

backup screenshot

HAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHA it's exhilarating how much paying customer get fucked by these shits

What makes you think you're better than them? The device you carry in your pocket daily already does more than this and nobody complains.
It's even referenced in the slides e.g.,

 

[Clockwork Knight]

damage control mode engaged

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheG...uys_are_being_bamboozled_by_the_hacker_known/

I'm sorry to break the hype but honestly this looks sketchy as fuck to me. As in, a fake. OP has stated (I assume this is in good faith) that this comes from a 4chan thread and linked this (original no longer available). The 4chan post is literally just:

"A deadman's program has activated and you have been selected as part of the reception avenue because the content is related to video games and you are marked as a media receipt."

So supposedly someone set up this deadman's system that, for some reason (you can verify this with a quick google search), ONLY targets 4chan and NO ONE else, not media agencies, not other websites, not civil rights organizations... literally just 4chan. If this was a literal dead man's switch then I'd expect personal details of the author to be published since, well, he should be dead, but there's nothing in the post.

Okay, now onto the slides. To begin with there are occasional grammatical errors, I'm pretty sure I saw an "it's" instead of "its", which is something you would definitely NOT see in a corporate type presentation. One of the first images at some point mentions:

alter the player's individual experience (psychological manipulation tactics) causes a consistent and dramatic increase recurrent revenue streams.

Besides the grammatical weirdness at the end, I strongly doubt that even the shadiest corp would use such explicit language to describe the concept. Anyone who's read any of EA's research bollocks or looked at some CIA/NSA leaks will know that more "political correct" or technical terms are used. Speaking of technical terms, for a presumably corporate presentation designed to convince executives or present a system, there are remarkably few actual pieces of data. No tables, no practical examples...

The "some real life data" section features some fairly weird things. To begin with, if this is a internal report then I'm not sure why the company's name is omitted. Then, there's this:

For example, when we track user cell phones, we can tell if they are driving past one of our partners billboards.

Again, grammar, but also that's not how phone tracking works. Unless they can somehow convince people to keep a GPS-enabled app open at all times, every other geolocation system is not nearly precise or fast enough to be able to do this. Anyone pitching an idea like this with a straight face would need to do far more than just writing:

We can monitor their reception to every single ad they pass by

which also sounds super janky and nothing like what you'd read in a meeting document or business pitch. Then there's this:

our partners (...) that have security cameras can opt in to our partner's services. They will send a stream of their store from their own security cameras to our servers where an AI...

To begin with no one with technical knowledge would write "an AI" like it's a common everyday app or something. Also, there are many technical roadblocks to streaming security camera video to a private server, such as the fact that most security cameras are CCTV (closed circuit), on different formats, not connected to the Internet, and of course privacy laws. You'd expect these to be addressed in such a revolutionary technology presentation but they aren't.

At any given moment your phone is broadcasting bluetooth, wifi beacons, and cell information to cell towers

This is not true (wifi and bluetooth can be disabled), "cell information" doesn't sound like what a technically-informed person or someone trying to sell an idea would write.

Our software takes in things like acceleration XYZ, geoposition, SMS send/receiving timings, Call send/receiving timings, GSM strength and estimated XYZ location...

Who the fuck writes "acceleration XYZ" to refer to acceleromter data? Same goes for the location. Regardless of this, the implication here is that an app like Facebook would be able to access this data. However, at the beginning they write:

Our software designed in Xamarin for all mobile devices

which implies that the software is its own app; Xamarin is an app development framework, look it up yourself; it's a front-end framework as well so it's not something you would "plug in" to an existing app like Facebook. This is contradictory, and who the fuck would install such an app anyways?

Maybe I'll continue later

Continued:

This is gold:

Use engine noises from our engine noise hashlib to detect type of car for income guessing purposes

In case you don't know, a hash is a mathematical function that converts an arbitrary piece of data into another data element (usually a string of characters or integer number) that has fixed length. There's no reason why comparing engine noises would require hashing them, let alone maintaining a library with hashes of them. Traditional hash functions also wouldn't work for sounds because the output of a traditional hash function can change dramatically even with a slight variation in the input. There is "fuzzy" hashing which can work in theory, but it's a fairly novel technique and you'd expect this to be mentioned somewhere.

The AI begins a new testing lifecycle that starts when the game session closes. It will patiently lie in wait for the high value distraction event to end

"It will patiently lie in wait", come on. It sounds like what a 10-year-old thinks AI is after watching Transcendence. Also, there's no such thing as "AI lifecycle" unless maybe in evolutionary algorithms, but those aren't mentioned anywhere.

It discovered a correlation between the voice pitch adjustment away from the normal standard deviation, and that women would buy more in those 48 hours

There is no such thing as "normal standard deviation". Normal distributions and standard deviation do exist in statistics, so maybe this (incredibly incompetent) researcher was referring to the standard deviation of a normal distribution? Even so, without more precise context all of this is meaningless; the slide has no context. Also, standard deviation is a measure, and as such it should be accompanied by some kind of value.

For example the recent case outlined in schedule "P" shows how developers or persons targeting children for emotional manipulation is illegal by the CJEU ruling P(1).

CJEU is the European Union's Court of Justice. But conveniently, "schedule P" and the supposedly related ruling are absent, so this supposedly real fact that the text refers to is entirely unsourced. So far googling around I have found no such ruling either.

Let's take a look at the paper documents. I'll just quote this:

Side-Channel Data: Data not gathered via a data point in itself but of the implementation of the data.

This sentence makes no sense. No one would ever write this on any technical paper.

The password submitted is a secret, but the MD5 hash thereof can be smart-metasearched before it is salted along with other details of the user.

You can't do something with a hash "before" it is salted, salting a hash function just means adding some extra data (that isn't the password being hashed) to the input. There's no "before" or "after", a hash function is either salted when it is calculated or it isn't.



Credit to /u/-The_Blazer-

There's already people saying it was a conspiracy theory. Just as absurd as using behavioral psychology to get kids to gamble with real money, amirite

 

[TheChickenKing]

Most of what's discussed in this theory does sound pretty absurd for a wide variety of reasons, but that's not to say that EA and BioWare aren't using usage statistics from their players to determine drop rates in an attempt to produce addicts. They absolutely are. Otherwise, a company that's listening to the community as much as they claim they are would've adjusted the drop rates to much more tolerable levels by now. Throw in the absolute technical nightmare that the game is, and Hanlon's Razor would indicate that BioWare is just extremely incompetent and unresponsive, not that they're running some advanced microtransaction-focused machine-learning script behind the screens for each and every player.

 

[Gerrard]

If they wanted to do something like that they would have things actually worth buying in the game. They don't.
E: some of those slides are completely retarded nonsense that don't even read like they were written by a human being (or at least a native English speaker)

This would explain why they can't "flip a switch" to loot shower us

But that's exactly what happened after the first patch and was quickly hotfixed.

E2: Ben Irving, the guy who's the lead on Anthem previously worked on ToR and was responsible for some shitty loot update over there as well, so I think they really are that incompetent.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheG...g_is_still/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheG...tai/ejnizbz?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

call me crazy but

HP Bug = https://patents.justia.com/patent/9919217

Dynamic difficulty adjustment
Mar 8, 2016 - Electronic Arts Inc.
Embodiments of systems presented herein may perform automatic granular difficulty adjustment. In some embodiments, the difficulty adjustment is undetectable by a user. Further, embodiments of systems disclosed herein can review historical user activity data with respect to one or more video games to generate a game retention prediction model that predicts an indication of an expected duration of game play. The game retention prediction model may be applied to a user's activity data to determine an indication of the user's expected duration of game play. Based on the determined expected duration of game play, the difficulty level of the video game may be automatically adjusted.

-

The process 200 begins at block 202 where the model generation system 146 receives historical data 152 comprising user interaction data for a number of users of the video game 112. This historical data 152 may serve as training data for the model generation system 146 and may include user demographics or characteristics, such as age, geographic location, gender, or socioeconomic class. Alternatively, or in addition, the historical data 152 may include information relating to a play style of one or more users; the amount of money spent playing the video game 112; user success or failure information with respect to the video game 112 (for example, a user win ratio); a play frequency of playing the video game 112; a frequency of using particular optional game elements (for example, available boosts, level skips, in-game hints, power ups, and the like); the amount of real money (for example, U.S. dollars or European euros) spent purchasing in-game items for the video game 112; and the like. Further, in some cases, the historical data 152 may include data related to the video game 112, such as one or more seed values used by users who played the video game 112. Additional examples of data related to the video game 112 that may be received as part of the historical data 152 may include settings for one or more knobs or state variables of the video game 112, the identity of one or more difficulty levels for the video game 112 used by the users, the type of the video game 112, and the like.

hmmmmm

edited to include the patent's name and summary

 

[J1M]

The notion that corporate people use proper grammar and care about spelling all the time is false.

The higher-up someone gets, the less willing people are to point out their mistakes.

 

[Mustawd]

The notion that corporate people use proper grammar and care about spelling all the time is false.

The higher-up someone gets, the less willing people are to point out their mistakes.

As someome who creates deliverables to executives (including the CEO) and Board of Directors, I can tell you it is very much true. It’s insane how much time we spend on getting the language right. In addition, it goes through multiple levels of review and word-smithing before it even gets to a VP’s desk. Once it gets to the SVPs and C suite the deliverable is pretty much pristine.

But I’ve worked in organizations where the review process is not as robust and the Executives, as well as the Board members, will chew you out if they see grammatical errors. And rightly so. It makes your work look sloppy as well as make you look incompetent.

Now, your experience might be different, but everywhere I’ve worked at I’ve seen grammar and spelling on internal, as well as external, deliverables matter.

 

[Angthoron]

The notion that corporate people use proper grammar and care about spelling all the time is false.

The higher-up someone gets, the less willing people are to point out their mistakes.

As someome who creates deliverables to executives (including the CEO) and Board of Directors, I can tell you it is very much true. It’s insane how much time we spend on getting the language right. In addition, it goes through multiple levels of review and word-smithing before it even gets to a VP’s desk. Once it gets to the SVPs and C suite the deliverable is pretty much pristine.

But I’ve worked in organizations where the review process is not as robust and the Executives, as well as the Board members, will chew you out if they see grammatical errors. And rightly so. It makes your work look sloppy as well as make you look incompetent.

Now, your experience might be different, but everywhere I’ve worked at I’ve seen grammar and spelling on internal, as well as external, deliverables matter.

Yep, this. And besides, even if this were the case, that report wouldn't have been written by anyone high up in the chain.

Of course, something written by someone in R&D and then given directly for review is going to look like a hot pile of trash in terms of everything linguistic, but that's another story.

 

[Reinhardt]

The device you carry in your pocket daily already does more than this and nobody complains.

My nokia don't. We love each other.

 

[commie]

The notion that corporate people use proper grammar and care about spelling all the time is false.

The higher-up someone gets, the less willing people are to point out their mistakes.

The notion that corporate people use proper grammar and care about spelling all the time is false.

The higher-up someone gets, the less willing people are to point out their mistakes.

As someome who creates deliverables to executives (including the CEO) and Board of Directors, I can tell you it is very much true. It’s insane how much time we spend on getting the language right. In addition, it goes through multiple levels of review and word-smithing before it even gets to a VP’s desk. Once it gets to the SVPs and C suite the deliverable is pretty much pristine.

But I’ve worked in organizations where the review process is not as robust and the Executives, as well as the Board members, will chew you out if they see grammatical errors. And rightly so. It makes your work look sloppy as well as make you look incompetent.

Now, your experience might be different, but everywhere I’ve worked at I’ve seen grammar and spelling on internal, as well as external, deliverables matter.

He he J1M knows...I got an email from some big shit VIP complaining that some mail was flagged as spam. It was so badly written, with such shitty spelling and grammar that I thought it was one of those Nigerian scam mails which somehow got past the filter. I told people not to process it until I found and contacted the guy that sent it! The fucking thing was legit. Fuck me.....

Musty must work for that one company that gives a shit....

 

[Gerrard]

If you actually believe any of that retarded shit about EA having an AI capable of mapping your room based on wi-fi signals while being unable to fix a bug where the game's sound system crashes and requires a restart of the game, you're just as dumb as the average r/anthemthegame user. My condolences.

I have never seen a better case of Hanlon's Razor.
Also, to further illustrate how dumb the people on this game's reddit are, reading through the comments of that thread I found many shocked by the revelation that a dev running an online game collects gameplay information about the users' behavior like play time and what they spend most time doing.

 

[Angthoron]

If you actually believe any of that retarded shit about EA having an AI capable of mapping your room based on wi-fi signals while being unable to fix a bug where the game's sound system crashes and requires a restart of the game, you're just as dumb as the average r/anthemthegame user. My condolences.

I have never seen a better case of Hanlon's Razor.
Also, to further illustrate how dumb the people on this game's reddit are, reading through the comments of that thread I found many shocked by the revelation that a dev running an online game collects gameplay information about the users' behavior like play time and what they spend most time doing.

I don't believe that, but I do find the other part, "AI" adjusting droprates and stats according to usage metrics to be plausible. A bit confused if they're both part of the same claims or separate ones.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

If you actually believe any of that retarded shit about EA having an AI capable of mapping your room based on wi-fi signals while being unable to fix a bug where the game's sound system crashes and requires a restart of the game, you're just as dumb as the average r/anthemthegame user. My condolences.

Even if the presentation is fake those were presented as ideas for the future, not things possible right now

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Yes it's the April's Fools joke, but the division 2 comparisons in every thread since release makes this hit a little too close