Chase_Arcanum

I was going to suggest this also, but like you, my time is pretty short right now. I'll be glad to contribute what I can, but I can't manage the effort.

Currently, I'm getting the infrastructure in place to resurrect my old "guides," but this time in an episodic webcomic format. If all goes well, I'll have regular updates leading up to "Going Rogue" hilighting those features, then updates that serve as "guides" on various topics of interest. I've got a pilot script written for the first few weeks without even seeing GR content, so hope to roll out the first test objects in the next few weeks, if all goes well.

I sense a disturbance in the force....

Somewhere here, our data is really at odds. According to sources published back at 1996, worlds.com demonstrated tech in the market way back then. Granted, it may not have executed the entire system that they show here-- which would be a fatal flaw. if that was the case, though, the patent wouldnt' have been granted at all.


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Also, Although the abstract sounds generic, all patents do- you have to cover the general idea in a very limited space. The importance is in the details. I can patent a "device that delivers caffeine directly to users through the Internet" and then list how I do it. You can patent your own "device that delivers caffeine directly to users through the Internet" and as long as we achieve that same goal in entirely different ways, we're both OK.

In this case, "habitat" wasn't considered prior art (correctly or incorrectly) because this dealt more with the specific challenges of scalability and scope. Habitat has used techniques to work around these barriers, rather than overcome them. Air Warrior and Club Calibre were the same way (and were prior art that was used by the USPTO in its consideration). Again, both of these products managed to make a multiplayer game that worked around specific barriers, rather than overcome them. This patent design *claimed to* use an innovation that worked past those barriers.

As long as they made a valuable and not-obvious contribution to a public-domain invention (habitat's data), they can then patent that contribution. This has been common over a century- heck since the paperclip was patented, there have been almost a dozed patents that build upon the expired patent with new techniques (ones that don't dent/mark paper as much, ones for larger bundles, ones with clip binds, etc). Those are all legitimate patents that build off the prior art idea. People can keep using the public-domain idea, but if you want to use their innovation, they can charge you for it.

The claim that worlds.com made was that they DID come up with an architecture that eliminated those barriers (true or not). That's what's critical here. Worlds.com has not made the claim that every virtual world out there owes them money. They've instead targeted places that use techniques that parallel the ones that they claim they developed and that the USPTO gave them a limited-time ownership to.

- it did not include peer to peer
- it did not include ad hoc systems
- it did not include 2d graphic systems
- it included 3d client-server systems
- - if those systems used a technique to identify the max avatars & objects to display
- - if this determination was made on identified client and network resources
- - if that display limitation is executed on the client-side.

That's what their system governs... well, the first item's hilights.

If you made a client-server based network game that didn't limit the max avatars & items to display- if it was to render everything, even if it made the client's system hang due to the load... then you DID NOT INFRINGE ON (this part) OF THE PATENT.

This wasn't a claim to all 3D MMO's. This was a claim to a method to overcome the challenge of having TOO MANY people in the same place at the same time in a 3D MMO.


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Personally, this is why I hate software patents. Every programmer /designer working on something new is going to face a different challenge and make a different solution every day. Some of these will be rather remarkable innovations and take quite a bit of work to get done, but they're really the same innovation that someone else will independently think up somewhere else tomorrow or next week. Do we really want something like Alexander Graham Bell's "race to the patent office" for all of these? Do we really want a decent idea tied up for 20 years because people are asking too much for their share?

Curious as to why. Seriously... not being a jerk here, but once you get off the fansites full of misinformation, the patent didn't seem nearly as abusive. I'm not a fan of patent zealots, but there seemed to be considerably worse abuses out there, but this particular one gets a lot of ire.

From what I've read:

- many people cite the filing date (2000) as post EQ, but the original filing was 1996, not 2000, and it was based on tech they first demonstrated even before that.

- It didn't cover what was available at that time in MUDS, moos, or the earliest multiplayer graphical games, but covered a general architecture that could handle some of the barricades that they saw from moving away from general MUDS to larger (geographically and population-wise) 3d games.

- While the patent was (originally) filed in '96, it was only awarded in 2007. By that time, a whole industry had developed, many using techniques that they felt that they researched and developed... and that the USPTO had just told them that they had ownership right to. That's not the typical 'submarine patent' behavior where they file broad generic patents, wait for the industry to grow dependent on tech that would theoretically infringe, then sue.

I'm not sure where the "prior art" was at that time- God knows, I was still on text-based MUDS back then. Compared to what I was playing with, and put in that context, a 1996 patent covering this stuff (and showing a demonstrable model) seemed pretty advanced... but I wasn't actively looking.

Was at a game developer convention a few years ago. There was a legal study on the progression of game patents. For years, it had been common practice to "build off" your competition's mechanics: There were numerous maze-and-chase games that took slightly different spins off pac man, plenty of different fighting games since double dragon and yie ar kung fu (and they weren't the first in their genre either) and plenty of side-scrolling shooters like Defender. There wasn't much thought of patenting a game mechanic. Hardware got patented, game mechanics... notsomuch.

That's changed.

Back then, it was noted that Nintendo patented a "fear meter". There were dozens of examples-- many of them barely a modification off the public-domain mechanic they built on top of (or other identical prior art). The patent office, though, wasn't exactly very discriminatory to that little detail & awarded the patents rather quickly

In conversation with the presenter, a CoH dev that was there noted that if he'd thought to patent sidekicking-- which was widely copied in other MMO's in one form or another, Cryptic/NCSoft probably could have been making as much from the licensing of the patent than they made off CoH sales.

Would you guys have thought it was fair for Cryptic/NCSoft to sue WoW and EQ2 and AoC and everyone else that put a mentoring system out after them... had they applied and received a patent?

Some people try to claim the idea as theirs. Some believe that things are better served by letting the idea remain open to the public. Some ideas are just so common-sense they shouldn't be patentable. To me, the problem here was less about worlds.com, but the fact that the patent office is so generous at awarding those patents out.

Worlds DID think up some ideas for breaking some pretty challenging (for the time) hurdles. They developed, demonstrated, and patented the tech. They just failed to monetize off of it in their own projects. Whether that patent should have been granted or not, it was.... so worlds.com essentially has a note from the US Government saying that they owned that idea.

When you see people profiting off something the government says you own, is it really THAT unreasonable to seek compensation?

((NOTE: all that is devils' advocacy. Personally, I'm much more a fan of keeping ideas open and free for everyone. I'd also go bankrupt running my own business by giving away everything, though...))

the difference is that bizzard didn't patent that idea.

Worlds.com patented the concept of managing map data on a 3d grid and handling latency.


And... two ways to look at it: either the other MMO giants use a way to manage mapping thats so different from Worlds that it couldn't be considered to be related to the patent... or worlds was hoping for enough settlement $$ from this case to fund suits against the others.

You might've missed that the in-game ad tech where it tracked *who* could see the ad, and how often they were seen. The client was therefore charged by the access to the ad. If most people turned it off, the ad campaign just wouldn't be as expensive.

Odds are that it died (in part) because online ad revenue dipped significantly last year (something of a global recession) and it takes time for the devs to review, approve, and set up- if the $$ was so low that it wasn't even paying the devs' caffeine fund, then they probably just didn't want to waste the resources....

It IS a barrier- most people that you're paying to reach through TV marketing do not have subscription-based-MMO experience. They see this more as "I'm paying the same amount as a brand new console game for something I can play for only a month, before I have to pay more."

That's not to say there won't be people interested there. Just saying that when you're dealing with a limited budget, you spend it where you can get more bang for your buck.

Television's Limiting Value

TV ads, you're paying (A LOT) to reach all television viewers. Even if you focus on "techie friendly" channels and markets, you're still going to find that the largest base reached are users with crappy 4-year old PC's with integrated video cards (the vast majority of PC's sold) that won't get to experience the new shiny, may not be able to tell the difference between a PC limit and lemon software, and voice their complaints in ways that either make them more costly- actually hurting the bottom-line as the game has to allocate more resources to help them or ease the negative reputation they spread than they ever get via revenue.

Yes, there are technically-savvy folk out there, but we're talking averages here, and this game community is much more savvy than the market segments we'd see in the best targeted TV ads.

But overall, you're spending an INCREDIBLY expensive marketing campaign to reach a market that's largely unlikely to become valuable, contributing customers. Odds are very good that you'll end up spending considerably more than you'll ever get back out of it. That's fine if you're doing this to buff your ego, but it's stupid if you're running a business. (There are other market reasons that make STO and WoW exceptions I can go into later, if anyone cares).

Target the Low-Hanging Fruit

Existing PC Gamers
Studies suggest that PC gamers have tuned down their TV watching habits- that market has more or less substituted the 20+ tv watching hours of their peers with 20+ online hours. They generally watch less or are more likely to split their attention between PC and TV (ignoring commercials). The TV's not going to reach them effectively.

PC gamers are going to come to the table more familiar with how "system requirements" affect their experience. They're also going to have, on average, better machines that can render the game in all its glory. They thus get the most out of the eye-candy while offering lower technical support costs.

PC gamers are also more comfortable with online activity, as a whole. They're more likely to search online about a game before they buy it. Marketing can help this decision making by identifying gaming communities & news sites, assisting these places in reporting about the game, encouraging their player base to go to those news sites, and making sure that those sites have current and positive information.

More Specific
Online subscription gamers are specific subgroup of gamers- there's a large contingent of gamers that just won't consider a subscription fee, even if the game lacked the initial up-front costs of buying your typical A-list console game. I've read business studies that suggest that there's a greater general skepticism to subscription-based service over pay-once-and-forget services, even when the economics show the subscription as the better deal. That's a trust barrier that has to be overcome, but once it is, users that find success with that model are more likely to try that service in the future.

So, if you can get the message to people that have already played a subscription-based mmo in the past, you have better chances of getting them to try it again.

And Yet More Specific
Average "churn" in an mmo used to be reported as around 3 months (based on 2006 data). Jack E. once alluded that CoH churn was more like 6-9 months during a keynote. City of Heroes numbers have been on a stable, but gradual decline-- much more gradual than even a 9-month churn would explain unless we're getting a reasonable number of new people replacing some of the old. Many just try things and move on as a form of habit.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of people by now that have tried this game. We got them through the system requirements barriers, through the subscription-play barriers, and in the game and playing. Some left in a fit of anger, but most just searched for the next shiny-- and we can bring those people back.


Now Imagine
Imagine you had the cash from a three-month national cable tv campaign that reached a number of people- many of which are never gonna be viable potential customers... and instead you used those resources to enrich the places existing subscription MMO gamers frequent-- giving them news material, encouraging and community promotion & participation in those commons-- refreshing media resources. Make viral material... seed it, encourage others to do the same... put some of the marketing push behind it to energize the base to share and spread it.

Then you take some of that money and encourage player meet-n-greets in all sorts of places where gamers or gamer-high populations congregate-- from comic & game conventions to your friendly local game/comic shop to... heck... organizing a campus lan party. Get them to organize them online, give the bigger ones some swag, and encourage them to be visible, open, friendly, and inviting, so other people ask & discover.

The $$ from that tv campaign would go a LONG way in these kinds of campaigns and reach far more viable customers.

Viral web ads have some potential- they're more economical and more likely to hit the target market.

The challenge is that none of those celebrities would likely be a cost-effective spokesperson. Heck, a simple, targeted TV promotion is extremely unlikely to attract enough paying subscribers to pay itself off, let alone one that has the additional cost of a celebrity spokesman.





Celebrity spokesmen are good for engaging a new market and getting them interested, but I'm wondering if that's what will really drive subscriptions with Going Rogue. From what I've heard, Going Rogue will require a license to the original game to work, which means that people who haven't played the game before will need to fork out $10 more for the complete collection. Doesn't sound like much, but that's still a barrier to someone that's not sold on the game (yet).

I'd instead be looking at targeting the hundreds of thousands of players that have tried the game, enjoyed it, but eventually left for the next new shiny. You want them to come back, buy the box, and re-discover all that's changed and grown since they left. They've got less of an investment cost to come back and they're familiar with the product. They're the low-hanging fruit that marketing can bring in-- They can also be more directly targeted- focusing on sites mmo gamers frequent and online mail get-the-word out campaigns... much cheaper than TV spots and thus more bang for their buck.

I was surprised more people didn't respond to market forces here:

The prices for pool C items has risen, but shouldn't there be a point where it would start encouraging players to JUST roll C's to sell on the market for all those hundreds of millions of inf?

Is the problem that Merits are seen as too valuable... or is it that influence is too worthless?

Ditto.

Ok, that's what I've seen for the kind of 3d printer they're using... very grainy.

When you say "blocky" do you mean that there's a texture to the surfaces that you'd expect to be smooth- like the skin? I know that 3D printers are generally very "grainy" (their equivalent of "dots per inch" is still rather low) but from watching FigureCraft's videos & seeing all the tools, I was left with the impression that they'd grind the critical surfaces down smooth.

I figured you'd toyed with OGLE by your post on the topic (and your general technical uber-ness). Looking at this pic, though, brings up one of my areas of concern: the skirt's razor thin- essentially no thickness. Do you think a 3D printer would ignore a property this thin, or make it with the thinnest grain it was capable of.

Also, what happens with when you OGLE capes?

Well, a few things to consider:

1) "3d printing" only gets us halfway there... perhaps not even that. OGLE (the open GL extractor) open source project can already capture a model. The last report shows limited success with CoH models- the NPC models are no problem, but the PC characters are kinda a little borked. That'll get you something like theNemesis jagers.

That's an exact representation of the model- it'll need sanded, smoothed, and sculpted. Things that have no thickness (like the razor thin edges of jackets, pant cuffs, some of the fancier flared items, capes, trenchcoats, and many of the head decorations) will either not 3d print at all or print in grainy blocks that will need buffed down. Some "flat" items that get the finer levels of depth from illusion, rather than model (fingers on the hands, some facial characteristics) will need etched on (or in some cases, have modeling material added and sculpted). Heck, some "effects" based appearance items might not be renderable at all...

Now, WoW uses more polygonal blocks than CoH does, so if FigurePrints did pure 3D printing, they'd be EXTREMELY blocky. Looking at their models, that isnt the case, so I'm suspecting they're doing something different. It just wouldn't be very cost-effective to be manually scuplting each and every custom order individually.

Well, WoW offers far less character customization than CoH, so they have fewer variations between the different "critical parts." They can likely do a model-matching type of system (if game asset X is used, use detailed 3d model Z instead of using blocky model Y.) As they build up a library, that will reduce the level of detail they need to manually add to each model.

Something like that really isn't feasible for CoH, though-- too many assets. We'd likely have to go with considerably more custom work after the 3d model was printed-- something we'd pay for due to the extra man-hours. Add to that the cost of setting something like this up and the lower potential market that CoH has to spread the costs around.... I'm willing to bet that a CoH implementation of a similar system would cost close to double of its figureprint counterpart...

I don't think it ever really went anywhere.

All I've ever seen reported is that the "movie rights" were purchased. Movie rights are purchased all the time without a movie ever being made. They can be "sat on" until they expire... or brokered to someone who gets more excited about a prospective movie than the rights' owner... or until someone has the time to sit back, look through his asset pile, and suddenly get the inspiration to go ahead...

Very well done. Much better than my idea of going after the dyslexic female demographic:

Awesome.

Not a bad drive for me... if nothing else, maybe an unofficial player meet-n-greet?

Granted, I tried to plan that exact thing a few years back, then had to bail when RL blew the plans up, so I'm probably not the best one to organize / plan that.