Sony has patented a system that could help detect players who use secondary accounts in competitive games, and the technology may eventually find its way to PlayStation 6, Wccftech reported. The patent was filed on April 20 and published on November 5, and it describes a method for identifying a user through gameplay characteristics. In simple terms, the system receives interaction data from one player account, works out a set of characteristics from that data, and then checks whether the same characteristics appear in the data of a different account. If the two sets match, the computing system can provide an indication that both accounts are linked to the same person, which is the basic idea behind tackling a problem known in the gaming community as smurfing.
According to the patent, the system collects data on the buttons a player presses on the controller across menus and gameplay. An Artificial Intelligence (AI) model then looks for patterns in those inputs, such as how much time passes between button presses and how the player moves through system and game menus. Sets of inputs are compared with other stored sets using a similarity score, and once a certain threshold is passed, the system can decide that one player is using two different accounts. An alert is then sent to the platform or to the developer of the game, who can restrict ranked play for the account or ban the secondary account altogether, depending on how the studio chooses to handle such cases.
A system like this could raise the risk of false positives, which would mean restricting legitimate main accounts, but Sony has included features in the patent that are meant to reduce that risk. The AI model can estimate the skill level of a player by comparing the inputs with known input sets from high-ranked players, and it can discard data from matches that were thrown on purpose to change the rating of an account. The rating then updates dynamically to reflect real performance. On privacy, modern competitive games already record input data for gameplay purposes, and replays in fighting games such as Street Fighter 6 rely on that data to recreate matches, so the Sony technology would draw on information that is already stored.
Smurfing happens when experienced players create alternate accounts and return to the bottom of the competitive ladder, where they win easily against less experienced opponents and spoil the experience for newcomers. Some players do it for harmless reasons, since certain older games did not allow the use of secondary characters without lowering the rank of the whole account, while many others do it for less admirable ones. A tool that identifies such accounts could help match beginners with players of similar skill, which is where the enjoyment of competitive gaming usually comes from. It is worth noting that a patent does not guarantee a product, and Sony has not confirmed that the technology will appear on PlayStation 6, but the filing shows the direction in which the company is exploring fairer ranked play on consoles.
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