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Hey guys, haven't posted on here since the Brood War days...but I mostly just needed a place to vent my thoughts.
A little background:
My name is Derek Jones aka DJONES. I used to play high level CS 1.6 when I was younger, then turned to Brood War where I was around a C+/B- level Terran on Iccup. Never put in the time to get any better, mostly just played for fun...but I've seen just about every professional Korean game on YouTube.
My favorite player was Jaedong, and my favorite games are probably his game against Iris in the WL finals where he was microing 2 groups of mutas and 1 shotting turrets; or the MSL finals power outage game where he somehow managed to hold off that 1st huge push from Flash.
Anyway, a couple years ago I decided to pursue a career as a professional Madden player (NFL video game made by EA Sports). I placed 3rd in my first major tournament, and came in 2nd place in a major last year that was broadcast on national TV.
Fast forward to this year, where I had a very tough year, and only qualified for 1 of the 4 major live tournaments. I am not trying to make excuses for my play, because I played awful this year and didn't deserve to win anything.
In any case, I believe there has been some shady business on the level of match fixing going on with EA, who runs the major tournaments. I will explain:
In the 2nd major tournament this year, the 'Madden Challenge', the final 8 competitors qualified for the 'Live Final'. 7 of those 8 players were under the age of 20 years old.
In and of itself, this might not seem odd...but those 7 players are actually the top 7 players in that age bracket. I am not trying to take anything away from them, they are all really great players...but the very best Madden players win between 70-90% of their games on the online ladders; and there are plenty of players in the 20+ age bracket who are of similar skill level to those who made the Live Final.
Now, to make this event, we had to go through 3-4 rounds of single elimination online, then a group stage where 4 players are placed in group, and the top 2 advance (round robin format). If we assume the average win rate of these players is 80%, it is just not mathematically plausible for those exact 7 players to make it, especially since they will be playing tougher competition in the online portion of the tournament (top players from the ladders qualified).
This tournament also had a "Made for TV special", that was aired on Disney XD, and the actual event was rebroadcast on The CW. I believe EA wanted to promote some young players as the stars of our E-Sport, and manipulated things behind the scenes to influence this to happen.
I know this is all highly circumstancial, but what really tells me something shady happened, is there was an official EA document leaked onto Reddit which describes a "Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment", or 'DDA' that is programmed into the game.
Basically what this 'DDA' entails, is a method of adjusting game difficulty or sliders to stealthly influence players to spend more time on the game (they call it maximizing engagement). There is also an official patent document from EA that describes the DDA in detail, and compares it to Mario Kart where your kart/items are nerfed when leading, and buffed when further behind. EA wanted to achieve this effect, but have it be impossible/ very difficult to detect by the users.
In essence, I can be playing a h2h game where my settings/sliders (speed, strength, agility etc.) are on a different level than my opponent. I don't think this belongs in any competitive PvP game, especially one with over $1,000,000 in prize money at stake. I believe EA used this code to give certain "more marketable" players an advantage in tournaments.
I brought this up to some of my fellow competitors, and most of them agree with me...but I would like to hear some impartial opinions on the subject. Below are links to my twitter if you want to check me out, as well as the 2 official EA documents on DDA.
Thanks for reading 
http://www.twitter.com/djayones
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/16c4/5d99437bd43e0e60fe160f058e3d824ef79d.pdf
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2017/0259177.html
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I don't believe this at all. I would need more information to even begin to make an assessment of whether or not I could even hypothesize that matchfixing took place. Who are these "marketable players"? How many people did you bring this up to? If "most" of them agree with you, then how many didn't? If they didn't, why? For those who agreed with you, how well did they do in the tournament?
Lotta questions.
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With the involvement of Disney, you have a motive for the organizers to prefer younger players.
But while unlikely, mathematically this can simply be chalked up to Gambler's fallacy.
Like 1913 in Monte Carlo, when the ball fell on black 26 times in a row, 1 in 136million chance. This has nothing to do with plausibility, in fact, maths tells us, this is in fact very plausible, it only tells us how unlikely it is, but even the unlikely stuff has to happen some times. That it happened when Disney was involved, oh what a serendipity.
Now that DDA stuff is shady and very much like EA. Why bother playing their games in the first place? Though there was a WC3 tourney where they tried to make moon lose and modified the tournament maps to change the hitpoint and mana regeneration of nightelf units...
I know nothing about Madden, I assume certain parts of the game rely on chance, and these parts EA screws with? Thanks to maths, unless we get a big sample size (Law of large numbers), this will in fact be impossible to prove.
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What you have here seems like a gut feeling at best, as it was presented. You need some type of statistical significance testing just to say it was weird for those specific 7 players to make it to the live shows. The way you spun the story, the situation seems shady. But, you are missing a lot of information that could begin to make an actual case out of it. Don't get me wrong, that information could totally be out there. You just need to add something more than just a gut feeling and somewhat relateable circumstantial evidence.
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I appreciate all your opinions. I would literally never want any of this to be true. I think with all the circumstancial evidence, it is definitely worth looking into.
I would like to ask JWD[9] how they figured out Blizzard (or whoever was running that tournament) was messing with hitpoints and mana regen. I don't know anything about WC3, but that sounds messed up to me.
I think a similar thing is happening in Madden, but the game is more stats driven than some other games.
The stats(ratings) of players in the game determine how well your units play on the field. Changing individual ratings (speed, strength, agility, throw power/accuracy etc.) can have a huge effect on the outcome of the game. Especially if the settings are not the same for both teams.
I think the only way to conclusively tell if this was in fact going on, is to have a high level coder review the game tapes (replays), or go through the game code itself. EA will not allow this though, because they have a patent on their 'DDA' code, and will not disclose proprietary information to the public. I think it will take some sort of intervention from a 3rd party for this to happen.
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With EA's history of shady tactics, motive (promoting young stars to 'advance' the E-Sport), and all the circumstancial evidence..In my opinion these mfs definitely match fixed.
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On June 18 2018 15:36 ninazerg wrote:
I don't believe this at all. I would need more information to even begin to make an assessment of whether or not I could even hypothesize that matchfixing took place. Who are these "marketable players"? How many people did you bring this up to? If "most" of them agree with you, then how many didn't? If they didn't, why? For those who agreed with you, how well did they do in the tournament?
Lotta questions.
Did you read my post? Madden is a growing E-Sport (NFL football is really popular in the USA). The "marketable" players are the young (<20 age bracket) ie. Kiv, Drini Joelcp, Mattster, Spoto, Prodigy, and Hollywood. They are "marketable" because they are good looking young kids who are also really tough Madden players...but there are lots of other players with similar skill levels (Problem, Skimbo, Spotme, Dubby etc.) Like I said, those are all terrific players, and I'm sure they knew nothing about what was going on behind the scenes at the time.
I stream from time to time on twitch, and one of the most common subjects I am asked about is the DDA/slider manipulation/match fixing garbage. When I break it down on stream, most viewers who are logical agree with me.
In specific, I have brought it up to 'DubDotDubby' who was actually the 8th player who qualified for that live event, and he agrees with me and posted on his Twitter about it.
The people that disagree with me usually say I am just being a hater, and jealous of those players, or trying to justify my results this year. No, I fucking sucked this year and didn't deserve to win anything, and I would never want to be anyone besides myself so how am I jealous? I don't know every single player in the competitive Madden community, but I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who participated in these tournaments and feel like they got cheated.
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On June 18 2018 22:45 esReveR wrote:
What you have here seems like a gut feeling at best, as it was presented. You need some type of statistical significance testing just to say it was weird for those specific 7 players to make it to the live shows. The way you spun the story, the situation seems shady. But, you are missing a lot of information that could begin to make an actual case out of it. Don't get me wrong, that information could totally be out there. You just need to add something more than just a gut feeling and somewhat relateable circumstantial evidence.
I think I broke it down fairly logically, and using your brain about something is hardly "just a gut feeling". They do not post our win % on the ladders, so there is literally no way for me personally to present you with statistical evidence to back this up. I am also not a coder, so I am not capable of investigating the game code.
What I can tell you is that I am a top level player, and I have played most of these players on the ladders. They are all really good players, but some of them are not even close to being the elite of the elite. Kiv, Drini, and Joel are, but the rest are mid tier players in my opinion...and I'm sure the stats back this up.
I have been to many of these tournaments, and there is always one guy from EA's competitive gaming division sitting in a back room on his laptop. His name is Donny Moore, and he was one of the inventors of 'FanDuel', which is a daily fantasy sports website (gambling). What place does the inventor of a gambling website have in the competitive gaming division? I bet if you confiscated his laptop there would be plenty of evidence on there.
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On June 18 2018 22:07 JWD[9] wrote:
With the involvement of Disney, you have a motive for the organizers to prefer younger players.
But while unlikely, mathematically this can simply be chalked up to Gambler's fallacy.
Like 1913 in Monte Carlo, when the ball fell on black 26 times in a row, 1 in 136million chance. This has nothing to do with plausibility, in fact, maths tells us, this is in fact very plausible, it only tells us how unlikely it is, but even the unlikely stuff has to happen some times. That it happened when Disney was involved, oh what a serendipity.
Now that DDA stuff is shady and very much like EA. Why bother playing their games in the first place? Though there was a WC3 tourney where they tried to make moon lose and modified the tournament maps to change the hitpoint and mana regeneration of nightelf units...
I know nothing about Madden, I assume certain parts of the game rely on chance, and these parts EA screws with? Thanks to maths, unless we get a big sample size (Law of large numbers), this will in fact be impossible to prove.
That's crazy, I had never heard of that incident in Monte Carlo.
Perhaps I misspoke, what happened is very very very, very mathematically unlikely to ever happen. Add that to all the circumstancial evidence, and there is no doubt in my mind what went down.
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By the way, I think the players had no knowledge of what EA was doing behind the scenes...so I have no ill will towards them.
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EPT
