Engagement, Algorithms, and the Myth of Competition

I’m done pretending this is a game. It is an algorithm designed to manufacture outcomes and sustain a predictable retention curve.

I’m not even going to dive into the baked-in gadget bugs, server and client authority chaos, legacy code debt, the obsession with cinematic warfare at the expense of mechanical depth, incoherent pacing, or maps that feel like they were made by AI. Each of these deserves its own autopsy. This is about how you tell us “we’re listening” while funneling millions of player actions into models that predict our frustration and compliance.

You matchmake premade squads against solo players because short queues and retention metrics are more valuable than meaningful competition. Premade players retention is more important than the solo queues, right? Statistically they spend more money and more time online, correct? EA/DICE have moved from game design to addiction engineering. Most players sense this and have long known the illusion of competition is just the marketing veneer.

The algorithm does not focus on fairness. It focuses on engagement, retention, and micro-rewards that keep players hooked. Then EA turns around and bans cheaters for creating “unfair advantages.” That is the structural hypocrisy. Both the cheater and the algorithm manipulate systems that predetermine outcomes. Both accept asymmetry as the baseline. Both treat effort and reward as arbitrary. Both extract “fun” from imbalance. Cheaters are not punished for creating unfair environments — the game environment itself is intentionally unfair by design. Cheaters are punished for violating EA’s monopoly on unfairness. Under this system, unfairness is acceptable if it serves shareholder interests. Cheating is not heresy against fairness; it is heresy against corporate sovereignty.

Competitive games operate under an assumption of equality of opportunity. Weight classes in MMA exist for a reason. Professional teams do not face high school teams. Skill differences are fine; rigged fields are not. Engagement-driven design abandons that principle, yet many players still instinctively believe in the old meritocracy. This is the illusion the system relies on. Every Ribbon, every slot-machine kill sound players were conditioned to love, every micro-reward conditions players to stay online, play, and spend.

The community reinforces the myth. Many players internalize the fiction to protect their own investment, psychological, financial, and social. Admitting that matchmaking is exploitative would collapse the reality they’ve constructed. Cheaters become convenient scapegoats, a ritual purification that sustains the belief that fairness still exists. Punishing visible transgressors maintains the illusion while the underlying system of engineered imbalance goes untouched.

At its core, this is not just a technical problem; it is a problem of priorities and ethics. The system rewards imbalance, manipulates engagement, and redefines the very fairness EA claims to uphold. Players are left to navigate a world where competition is curated for metrics, not merit. The illusion of fairness serves the system, not the player. Those who see it clearly are left watching a game engineered to extract compliance and engagement, all at the player’s expense.