Electronic Artshas patented a punitive feature that could outright ban players that deliberately collaborate with the opposing team to get an unfair advantage. While it’s not an exceedingly common occurrence, it’s possible for players in competitive games to collaborate or collude by having some of them join the enemy team to undermine their efforts, and EA may be looking to stamp out that behavior.
Electronic Artsholds a great number of feature patents that have been purpose-built to eliminate or, at the very least, substantially reduce the amount of cheating that goes on in the studio’s games. Competitive titles such asBattlefieldandApex Legendsare usually major targets for cheat-makers, and it’s not particularly surprising that the publisher would be looking into ways of alleviating these problems.
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WhereasElectronic Arts' previous major security patentfocused mainly on the prevention of illicit item sharing, its latest anti-cheat foray focuses on cross-team collusion instead. Specifically, EA has now proposed a system that would automatically detect if players across opposing teams are collaborating to gain an overwhelming advantage over other players. This conspiratorial behavior would rely mainly on the automatic analysis of the players' social connections and in-game relationships using an algorithm that would pore over the potential colluders' in-game history to decide if they’re engaging in illicit game progression.
Notably, this patent references EA’s multiplayer and battle royale games, therefore it’s likely being built withBattlefieldandApex Legendsin mind, specifically, though it could obviously be applied to a far wider array of titles in the future.Apex Legends' controversial anti-cheat systemmay be getting an upgrade in due time, with that in mind, as the most popular competitive PvP games do often have issues with so-called smurfing and account boosting, and the proposed collusion detecting feature could help in this regard, too.
Earlier this year,EA submitted an input delay alleviation patentas well, meaning that the publishing giant may be looking at a comprehensive solution to making competitive games fairer across the board. With advanced anti-cheat systems, input delay improvements, and collusion detection algorithms, the latter of which may be able to dish out suspensions and bans in some cases, it does seem like Electronic Arts' more aggressive approach to player security and gameplay fairness may be controversial in some respects, but only time will tell how aggressive these systems may end up being.
The publisher isn’t just patenting various hypothetical security options, it’s worth pointing out. Recently,EA submitted a spatial partitioning featurethat could streamline graphics rendering by a substantial measure. Theoretically, this should improve the games' performance without a loss in visual quality, but it goes without saying that the feature may be pretty far off from its inclusion into actual EA video games at this time.
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