All the way back in 2015 Activision filed a patent in an effort to increase microtransactions revenue. I found this article by using a Boolean search typing in mircrotranscations and patents. To everyone's horror the patent was approved in October 2017. This patent as stated by the Kotatku article written by Alexandra Heather says," A patent granted to Activision outlines a new matchmaking system that would pair players together in order to encourage microtransactions." Yet another underhanded attempt to try and swindle money from players wallets. The below picture is a simple way of understanding the system. It starts out by finding an interesting item that player 1 would value (is relevant to them), then it would find another player with this item paring them together in a game session. From this session the system would see if the first player would go and purchase this item. If they do it puts them in another game session where the item is "effective", another word for this is overpowered or broken. The system could put a player in lower skilled lobby enabling him to destroy the competition, this player might get the feeling that buying more stuff will continue this trend. If he doesn't buy this item it states his profile gets updated, probably thinking the item wasn't as enticing to the player keeping this data somewhere for future use. Its horrifying that this system occurs in the background with no knowledge given to the player. Every game can be artificially setup to encourage microtransactions, players with broken weapons and out of frustration that player might go and buy this weapon. Throwing them into another game where they have the broken weapon and again piss someone off enough to buy that weapon again. An endless cycle of misery and disgust. But I feel as if the best quote to summarize this was made by a commenter on the Kotaku article named Taliesin Merlin," Just the latest reminder that microtransactions aren’t separate from the game. They can be central to the game itself, in mechanics designed to trigger further purchases."
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