IT之家 news on November 9: According to foreign media Patentlyze, the United States Patent and Trademark Office recently published a new Sony patent, US 2026/0346147 A1. The technology uses AI to analyze players' habits and preferences in pressing various buttons during gameplay, such as commonly used combos and the time intervals between consecutive button presses, and based on this builds a unique gameplay characteristic profile for each player, to prevent veteran players from creating new accounts pretending to be new players and bullying newcomers.
According to the patent, when a player creates a new account and tries to use their beginner status to match against low-skilled opponents, the system can compare the new account's gameplay characteristics with existing profiles, thereby identifying multiple accounts suspected of belonging to the same player, then retrieve the historical match records and skill data of that player's main account and apply them to the new account's matchmaking mechanism, so the player is matched again with opponents of similar skill.
However, if a player is involved in malicious rank boosting, that is, "having a skilled player disguise themselves as a beginner and lead low-skilled players to gain illegitimate match records through games", this system could play an even greater role; for example, officials could quickly confirm such cases, send the corresponding accounts into a special matchmaking pool commonly known as the "little black room", or directly ban them.
Of course, this technology also has quite a few controversies in practical application. First, in order to identify players, the system needs to continuously collect and analyze users' input behavior on keyboards, controllers and other devices, which may involve personal privacy issues. Second, if family members share a gaming device or account, differences in each member's skill level could also lead to the system making wrong judgments. In particular, without combining other information such as network IP, how high a recognition accuracy rate can be achieved by relying solely on AI analysis of gameplay habits remains an unknown; otherwise there might even be cases where a relative's child comes over during the holidays to play games, only to be misjudged as using a smurf account to "smurf".