Forums » Off-Topic and Casual Chatter

The brand new world (of mmorpgs)

    • 271 posts
    January 16, 2018 3:05 AM PST

    Read them and weep folks..

    "An artificial intelligence (AI) will deliberately tamper with your online gameplay as you scramble for more in-game items to win. The same AI will manipulate your state of mind at every step of your game to guide you towards more micro-transactions. Nothing in-game is truly fixed-rate. The game maps out your home, and cross-references it with your online footprint, to have a socio-economic picture of you, so the best possible revenue model, and anti buyer's remorse strategy can be implemented on you. These, and more, are part of the dystopian nightmare that takes flight if a new AI-powered online game revenue model is implemented in MMO games of the near future.

    The paper's slide-deck and signed papers (with corrections) were leaked to the web by an unknown source, with bits of information (names, brands) redacted. It has too much information to be dismissed off hand for being a prank. It proposes leveraging AI to gather and build a socio-economic profile of a player to implement the best revenue-generation strategy. It also proposes using an AI to consistently "alter" the player's gameplay, such that the player's actions don't have the desired result leading toward beating the game, but towards an "unfair" consequence that motivates more in-game spending. The presentation spans a little over 50 slides, and is rich in text that requires little further explanation."

     

     

     

    Among many, many others.. worth taking a look; been (sadly) long overdue.

    Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/240655/leaked-ai-powered-game-revenue-model-paper-foretells-a-dystopian-nightmare


    This post was edited by Aenra at January 16, 2018 3:07 AM PST
    • 105 posts
    January 16, 2018 3:12 AM PST

    I'll go get my tin foil hat...

     

    • 557 posts
    January 16, 2018 4:07 AM PST

    Kipling said:

    I'll go get my tin foil hat...

     

    The NSA is tracking tinfoil sales. I saw detectors mounted overhead in the supermarket.

    • 271 posts
    January 16, 2018 4:36 AM PST

    Celandor said:

    Kipling said:

    I'll go get my tin foil hat...

     

    The NSA is tracking tinfoil sales. I saw detectors mounted overhead in the supermarket.

     

    I always appreciate thoughtful and indepth replies.. especially when they're the first after an OP. Their contribution to the discussion aside, they make certain folks stay on topic and provide equally meaningful replies. Well done to you both.

    That aside, not sure what prompted such a response, but am willing to count out what first comes to my mind. So i'd only say that if you think this is far off, does not occur in other fields, or is too far fetched for an mmo industry of billions and billions of dollars, well then..

    As the man said, slap the grin off my face; but not just yet Lord.


    This post was edited by Aenra at January 16, 2018 4:37 AM PST
    • 1315 posts
    January 16, 2018 5:19 AM PST

    Almost all of the phone based pay to win games already track what you purchase and increase the price slowly every time you make a purchase.  Additionally I have noticed a few times where something I look at on Amazon but decide to wait to buy goes up in price the next day.  If I then go back and clear my cookies the price from the previous day shows back up again.  Technically Amazon does enough business that they really might have constantly fluctuating prices based on inventory so it could just be chance.

     

    The big lesson is be smart with your play time and money. Don't feed the trolls and don't give your money to underhanded companies like Daybreak and MZ. Vote with your wallet and boycott any company that is un ethical and tries to monetize your personal habits, both in the digital space and the physical space.

    • 3852 posts
    January 16, 2018 6:49 AM PST

    >I always appreciate thoughtful and indepth replies..<

    So do I - but I also appreciate humorous replies and the second and third posts fell into that category and were related to the topic raised by the OP. 

    • 557 posts
    January 16, 2018 8:14 AM PST

    Also be smart about your activities both online and off.   Carry your ID in an RFID blocking foil-lined wallet.  Don't use Facebook or any other online service to post photos of yourself or your friends.  Use a non-tracking search engine such as DuckDuckGo.  Use a VPN service such as ToR to mask your location.  Turn off location services on all devices.   And the list goes on.   

    How much privacy are you willing to give up for the sake of convenience? 

    How deep have you been sucked into the social networking rat hole?   

    The vast majority of people have embraced their new online masters and don't see a problem.

    Rise up and strike them down!   Take back the Internet!

     

    (Is that better?)

    ((Now you know why I turned to humour, rather than take the issue head-on.))

    • 1315 posts
    January 16, 2018 9:56 AM PST

    Whats kinda sad Cel is I do half of the things on your list and the other half I kinda do.  Ill let you guess which is which.  A lot of your joke advice, at least the concept behind them, were communicated to me back in the windows 95 days and I have sort of followed them.  To this day my only online presence under my actual name is my business presence.

    • 2752 posts
    January 16, 2018 10:13 AM PST

    Companies have been trying to manipulate people into spending using behavioral science and psychology since the mid 20th century. At the end of the day you still have the power to make your own purchase decisions. 

     

    If you aren't doing every single step (and staying up to date constantly) to safeguard your privacy it's ending up all over the place. It's too hard to keep up with personally, in addition to the inconvenience it would be of basically not having any apps on my phone since apparently everything needs access to every aspect of my phone.