Every online or multiplayer game plays better with friends and publisher Electronic Arts (EA) wants to make that process easier for lonesome players.
According to a new patent published earlier today, EA understands that players may not always have online friends to play online games with or particularly “potential and optimal friends with whom they can have an established and continuous relationship to play online games.”
EA also notes that a player may have the right online friends for one game but after switching to another new game, they might have to establish new friends altogether for that particular game based on real-life schedules and genre interests.
Hence, EA has figured out a game management system which can identify “gaming data associated with online players” based on their gameplay history such as the games they play or like to play, their level of skill, among many other elements.
The system can afterwards create subsets of players with similar interests and when a player comes searching for new friends in a new game, the same system can make accurate recommendations by matching players of a single subset.
Console players may not like to match with PC players for the same game for example. Mobile players similarly would prefer their own group. The patented system takes all of that and more into account before making friend recommendations.
The game management system may use similarity scores between pairs of players in any suitable manner to provide friend recommendations.
Other suitable mechanisms may include making friend recommendations to a player with a predetermined number of other players with whom that player may have the greatest level of similarity, as determined by the similarity score.
The patented system attempts to address a social aspect which has already been the subject of internet humor. Finding new friends to play online games with can become problematic as real-life chores and jobs roll in. However, as EA sees it, modern-day data reading algorithms can be used to artificially match players together. The idea certainly has merit.
