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Patents Sony

Sony Patent Lets Viewers Vote and Pay To Boot Players From Games (wired.com) 104

Posted by BeauHD from the weakest-link dept.
Sony has been granted a patent that would allow livestream spectators and participants to remove players from a game. "Besides removing unskilled players, the system would allow spectators to pay for the privilege of removing players," reports Kotaku. From the report: In the patent document, Sony outlined a system in which spectators to a livestream can vote to remove a player from an ongoing game. The player would have no veto power over this decision, and they may be reassigned to a different match. The system would display the skill level of the current players and their statistics for the game, such as time played, ratings, and achievements. All of this would take place through "the cloud gaming system," whatever that means.

To avoid audience abuse of this system, a 60% voting threshold needs to be met in order to bench a player from a game. Spectators with a higher skill level will also have their votes counted more heavily in the election. Despite Sony claiming that this system would be beneficial for removing disrespectful "griefers" from matches, the patent also includes the ability for spectators to pay a fixed price or bid for the ability to remove players from a game. The text also mentions a system in which spectators can warn active players to improve their gameplay. Damn.
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Sony Patent Lets Viewers Vote and Pay To Boot Players From Games More

Sony Patent Lets Viewers Vote and Pay To Boot Players From Games

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  • What a horrible idea... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @03:11AM (#61912689) Homepage
    This isn't toxic at all, and will never be abused. /s

    But it might make money, so...

    • Re:What a horrible idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by The123king ( 2395060 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @03:55AM (#61912765)
      Sometimes i wonder if these big tech engineers live in some sort of ideal utopia. I thought the exact same thing when Chrome introduced "notifications"

      • Re:What a horrible idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @06:43AM (#61913011)

        Sometimes i wonder if these big tech engineers live in some sort of ideal utopia. I thought the exact same thing when Chrome introduced "notifications"

        People working on reputation systems and the like? Yes, they really do not understand how average people work. They still believe a majority is rational.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Notifications aren't a terrible idea, it was the implementation that caused problems. Specifically allowing sites to request them, rather than displaying an icon somewhere that the user could click to enable them. Similar to how bookmarks work.

    • This is the kind of shit executives think of to squeeze money while any serious or competitive gamer instantly cries when they hear ideas like this. You would be better off making digital "members clubs" for different games/servers but again I think the objective here is just to squeeze money.

      Just imagine the rich troll, probably from some place like SA or China who fucking boots the whole game for a popular stream.

      • Just imagine sony employees paid to get themselves booted from the game to milk the gamers.
      • Or the players getting their fanboi's to boot serious competition in order to win.

        • Re: What a horrible idea... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by v1 ( 525388 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @08:06AM (#61913121) Homepage Journal

          Impartial mods are the only way to boot griefers. The only way to have mods that are impartial are for the referee to select them. (ie the platform has to hire them) But they're seeing this as something to monetize, and so spending money would defeat the true purpose of the move.

          I'm sure this is a result of a brainstorming session somewhere that asked "how can we make money off the griefers?" and THIS is the best answer they could come up with.

          The underlying premise is good, but the entire implementation is just rife for abuse. This is worse than "pay to win", this is "pay to make others LOSE". And they're betting they can make more money off the griefers than they'll lose due to fallout from the inevitable abuse that will result. They're not idiots, they know this is abusable, they've just decided it's worth it.

          I don't know about you, but I definitely see "pay to cheat" as more toxic than "pay to win".

          • There is the option the patent exists to prevent everyone else from implementing that. During the xbox one era, MS filed for a patent to use its motion camera to count how many people are watching pay-per-view, and if there were too many people, it would pause playback until you called in and paid more money to increase your license. Last I heard it never actually ever was Implemented.

        • Would Sony really complain about the money pouring in to make that happen?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's just a patent, and actually reminds me a bit of Formula E. In that real life racing competition they have "fan boost", where viewers can vote on who gets power ups like extra energy.

      Also players have been effectively doing this for a while anyway. For example, Mario Maker 2 is extremely sensitive to lag and high ping times, so when players end up in a laggy match they often add whoever they think is responsible to their personal blocked account list, meaning they never get matched to that person again.

    • Re:What a horrible idea... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SniffTheGlove ( 1261240 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @05:12AM (#61912901)

      I agree with you!! This WILL be abused on mass.

      what makes me really smile is how shit the patent system is. How can this be patentable, it's not some hardware idea or even complicated software. It is just a bit of software attached to a button and counter etc. Many online games like BF4 have this already built in where you can vote players off for cheating or being dicks.

    • This isn't toxic at all, and will never be abused. /s

      But it might make money, so...

      It will make money. Patents aren't free, and Greed doesn't give a shit about morals or ethics.

      Never has. Never will.

    • They patented American Idol, but for livestreams instead of live television.

    • If only we could vote out those highly skilled players who think they're the only ones who matter.

  • This was granted a patent? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gakenfay ( 6631164 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @03:16AM (#61912695)
    What ground breaking technology created this? Did the code get the patent or the idea? Either way...what?
    • Patents don't need to be groundbreaking ideas, they just need to be a novel twist that so far hasn't been utilised. In fact, there's no burden of proof that your concept even has to work or is in any way practical. I could patent a faster-than-light intergalactic spaceship and i'm sure it would be granted

    • What ground breaking technology created this? Did the code get the patent or the idea? Either way...what?

      Yeah, not sure how you technically describe a patent for a bunch of assholes playing Viral to kick the Protagonist of the Minute, out of a game.

      But Greed liked the idea, so...patent granted!

    • Sony basically patented money-based griefing and bullying.

      I always thought that some rich trash celebrities with their own reality show have prior art on that.

    • Agree... Prior art? https://github.com/quozl/netre... [github.com] Mon Apr 24 22:30:47 2006 * ntserv/ntscmds.c: add a vote to temporarily ban, which requires 100 non-banned logins before the temporary ban expires. If the banned IP address tries in the meanwhile, the countdown is manipulated upwards. * include/config.h.in: add a vote to temporarily ban, and disable VICIOUS_EJECT now that a ban vote is available. * include/struct.h: add a structure for temporary bans, which expire according to the number of

  • NO! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @03:26AM (#61912715) Homepage

    I'm not a very good player but I just enjoy playing the game.
    I've also been streamed on Twitch by simply being matched into the same game as some random streamer; it's not my mistake match-making systems don't always work well.
    Will I now be booted off because that streamer is very popular and can easily get a 60% (or probably just as easily 90%) quora?
    I also do not want to be continuously trolled by toxic threats telling me I must improve immediately or be banned from the game.
    As a non-competitive, non-streaming gamer, I really do not want to be submitted to this.
    Perhaps the match-making systems will allow me to not opt-in to this so we can have normal matches and the streamers can have their popularity contests?

    • Re:NO! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <[ten.frow] [ta] [todhsals]> on Thursday October 21, 2021 @04:56AM (#61912863)

      Chances are, as a lousy player you're perfect for streamers and will not be kicked out.

      Streamers want to be seen "winning" so if you're a high ranking player always killing the star of the show, you'll find yourself kicked off.

      Newbie and low skill players are cannon fodder that makes people look good. Add in a little teabagging and you're the perfect target.

      Either way, I don't see it as a good idea, so I hope Sony implements it immediately and across every game on the Playstation!

      A far better idea would be to simply allow the player and crowd to mute a problematic player. The player can play, but be completely muted. That will take care of the griefing problem since the only thing they can do is play, they can't say anything or type anything into chat. So either they have fun playing and not saying crap, or they leave because no one can hear them. Trolls only work when they can have an audience.

      • A far better idea would be to simply allow the player and crowd to mute a problematic player. The player can play, but be completely muted. That will take care of the griefing problem since the only thing they can do is play, they can't say anything or type anything into chat. So either they have fun playing and not saying crap, or they leave because no one can hear them. Trolls only work when they can have an audience.

        There's plenty of things you can do while being muted, for example:

        • Position yourself

        • Just remain AFK at spawn without helping your team in any way. (Some games auto kick for AFK, so you might have to move a little from time to time.)

          Easy to due, duct-tape a sheet of paper to the underside of your mouse, then hang it out the window. The wind will take care of movement.

          Also works to ensure the screen saver doesn't go on at your work PC while you're off doing something useful during some narcissist's presentation about his navel lint.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by N1AK ( 864906 )
          I do get the feeling when articles like this come up that a bunch of the comments are from people with no relevant experience; literally anyone who online games regularly will have come across examples like yours of how players can screw about to try and make the game less enjoyable to others. Anyone with a passing knowledge of online streaming knows that it's very common for people to try and get into streamers games to troll them or otherwise fuck around on stream.

          I'm not sure about the solution as pro

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )
      Yeah I'm with you. It'll be abused 100%, like if you were doing well, and it was making a streamer look bad, and your overall skill isn't super high, you're just having a good match, he's going to abuse that to get you kicked so they can go back to looking good. I personally doubt I'll touch any game with ffeatures like this with a 1000 ft poll

  • A patent on ostracising? (Score:3, Informative)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @03:43AM (#61912743)

    I think there's some prior art there.

    • "American Idol" the video game hasn't been released yet...

    • I think the USPTO adopted "First to File" as opposed to "First to Invent" several years ago.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gonoff ( 88518 )

        I think the USPTO adopted "First to File" as opposed to "First to Invent" several years ago.

        I think Edison and Bell used this tendency so a lot more than "several" years ago.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        Some misconceptions among Slashdot users still haven't gone away after a decade.

        The switch to "first inventor to file" in the America Invents Act of 2011 made no material change to the novelty requirement of United States patent law. Published prior art can still disqualify an invention from patentability. The change affected a much less common case, that of two inventors' pending patent applications for materially the same invention.

        • I have been denied by what might be termed first to file, but it was a fair contest, and there were no personal stakes, just two megacorp inventors contending on things that would either be forgotten or put into a cross-licensing portfolio. The good news is that the application is published and can be raised to bar future claims on anything novel in what I described, even if it was not specifically enumerated in my claims. In my case, if I understand and recall the details correctly, the examiner located

  • Let's take the worst concept of the reality TV popularity contest and bring it to gaming! No doubt this will make a lot of money because that's how f-ed up the world is these days.

  • Sony being greedy and intentionally pretending to be naive since they don't care about the games or players, just the dosh.

    This entire system is inherently unfair, and isn't just rife for abuse, it's built for it.

    • Yes. Please don't pretend you're surprised by this.

      The only thing I can see here is that at EA they're throwing hissy fits that they didn't get the idea first.

  • gaming. it did pass verily (Score:3)

    by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @04:30AM (#61912821) Homepage
    It was good while it lasted, right kids?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by zenlessyank ( 748553 )

      Yep. With the prices of video cards and the pollution of cheaters and trolls in online games, 2021 is the year gaming died and whatever you want to call this is born.

      • 2021 is the year online multiplayer gaming died. Single player still is a blast, as is playing MP games with your buddies.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          Single player still is a blast, as is playing MP games with your buddies.

          I acknowledge the former. The latter would require stay-at-home orders during this pandemic to end. Has that happened throughout countries in the video game market?

          • You have heard about VPNs, right?

            Here's the big thing that will blow your mind: You don't have to buy one from one of those offering them, you can actually roll your own, host your own and make it so that it looks to the game like you're all sitting in the same room. Ain't technology amazing?

  • What about if you could counter the kick by paying more money? A wealthy troll's dream!

  • Does the booted party get the collected kick-out money? That would allow crap players an income stream and potential for a lot of creative abuse.

    • Nice! I so wish I hadn't spent my mod points yesterday! :(

    • Just start a twitch stream labeled "laugh about the idiot" and have people pay to watch you suck.

      I betcha there's plenty of people out there who want to see people be utter garbage. For reference, see afternoon TV "reality" shows.

  • Some players can't "get good" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dusanyu ( 675778 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @05:01AM (#61912873)
    Sony forgets that people with disabilities that effect fine motor skills may still enjoy these games while yes they may never be top level players may still enjoy the game. i recall in my teens playin quake 2 deathmatch online and having the issues I described myself but still loved the game a system like this would have sucked

  • Problems with players of unmatched skill in games are caused by shitty player matching. By using this patent in a game the developer would be admitting that their multiplayer matching is shit.

    • AT least they'd be the first to be honest about it. Matchmaking in a lot of multiplayer games out there is utter garbage.

      Most of this in turn is due to them only considering statistics like win/loss and KDR, both of which are very poor metrics when it comes to gauging player quality. When I win most of my multiplayer games, this essentially just means that my team was better than the other one. Why was that the case? Because I was good? Because I happened to play with a lot of my friends with whom I am able

  • Fix the Match Making (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Thyamine ( 531612 ) <thyamine.ofdragons@com> on Thursday October 21, 2021 @07:12AM (#61913041) Homepage Journal
    What is this nonsense? I play many games, and have played FPSs forever. If you have players who don't match for skill level, FIX THE MATCHMAKING. Why is some new player being matched with expert players. Why is there such a disparity that you feel the fix is to allow players to pay to kick worse players. Why not allow bad players or new players to kick the player who is destroying everyone because they spend 5 hours a day playing and everyone else is trying to learn the mechanics or just have fun.

  • No boycotts (Score:2, Interesting)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 )
    Remember, gamers, you're not allowed to boycott anything based on principles, otherwise you're woke and shit.

    • I don't boycott this on principle. I boycott it because it's shit.

      • Nope, you're not even allowed to boycott it because it's shit. You're just a consumer and your role in society is to keep the games industry going no matter what. Otherwise you're just an SJW trying to ban games for everyone.

        • Ok, whatever. Take the label, put it on the pile back there, I'll ignore it later. There should still be some room between fascist and commie, just throw it somewhere you like.

          Seriously, why is everyone so obsessed about what some random bozo on the internet thinks about them?

          • Seriously, why is everyone so obsessed about what some random bozo on the internet thinks about them?

            Throughout most of history it mattered very much what all people you interacted with thought of you, and we haven't caught up to the present.

            • Yes, but these people had some serious impact on you, or at the very least had the potential to have some serious impact on you. Some random yahoo on the internet can as well take his opinion and stick it where the sun wouldn't even want to shine if you paid it.

              There are very, very few people whose opinion about me actually matters. And fortunately, all of them are sane.

    • Someone is living in your head rent-free. I don't know how it happened, but I hope you get better.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @08:00AM (#61913109)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Somebody get security on the line, there's someone talking about our secret R&D stuff that's not patented yet.

    • You can bet that anti-poors point defense has been considered by many. In the future, an automated cannon will simply eliminate anyone not driving an expensive enough vehicle through the enclaves of the wealthy.

  • Which could mean that nobody else will taint their games because they'd have to pay to ruin them now.

  • On the one hand, it's a dumb patent. Voting to kick a player out of a game has existed probably within a couple of weeks of the first time mankind played anything resembling a team sport. Online games since near the inception have had vote to kick, even people in spectating mode, which would seem to be exactly the Twitch case, just in-engine. The only novelty is "do what people can already do, but pay to do so".

    On the other hand, if it discourages competitors from implementing such a scheme for fear of in

  • Big companies like Sony and Apple file patents all the time for crazy ideas they have that don't always get implemented, in case they might want to implement them. Let's hope that Sony sees the light here of how terrible of an idea this is and doesn't actually go forward and implement it.

  • Now the max-level rich kid can also pay to publicly boot you, adding to your strife after you just barely got the cash together to get subscribed to play.
  • Survivor: Call of Duty 5 Edition!
  • As if 'gentrification' in housing isn't bad enough, now they're going to bring it to video games as well?
  • Paying to kick someone ... what could POSSIBLY go wrong? /s

  • It seems the devs watched or read Hunger Games and decided it would be a good idea to let the viewing public be patrons to players they like by assisting them. Giving non-playing haters power to influence a game can only end in some of the legitimate best leaving the game.

  • Just checked my Calendar and it's still not April 1, nowhere near it

  • I was booted a few times from World of Warcraft dungeons for being a shitty healer. If I remember right, that was an in-group vote with no say on my part.

  • It's 'in the cloud' ?

    Many game servers have vote kicking disable simply for the reason it gets abused, now you will have people with money and high skill kicking out lower class players or worse abusing their 'upper' class status.

    How long before flash spectator mobs rove the gaming servers voting to kick random players? Or worse targeting players they don't like?

    What can possibly go wrong?
  • This sounds like a good way of knocking those annoying streamers out of the game. Given their extreme amount of game play they throw the balance of the game off significantly.
  • Quite often if a player is doing poorly, they'll blame other players. Lots of people try to game their statistics to. So a "skilled player" making mistakes or demanding the entire team support them to make them effective (Even if the overall strategy isn't as effective) will try to get people kicked as "bad" because they themselves are sucking. Say it's a moba, a player will run off on their own, engage 2 or more enemies while the rest of the team is on the other side of the map, and then blame the team fo

  • So I can tell Sony "I told you so" when people get pissed that women and trans gamers are being targeted by a mob of incels bent on sucking the fun out of everything they touch.

    I do I hope I'm wrong because I feel like such a damn cynic. Maybe the community has changed since I was last involved. *shrug*

  • I have heard discussions of this many times in the past. This is an idea that already belongs to the public. It has just never been implemented because of the often discussed massive potential for abuse. This should not have been patentable.
  • Kick out people who have unpopular ideas! Nix those who rock the boat! Kill the ones who say "the emperor has no clothes"!!!
  • Sony could pay folks 1/4 the price to be toxic... folks pay-to-boot them, Sony collects 75% of the fee and shares it w/ the toxic players. What a perverse incentive.

  • Now, not only can I not buy a single player game anymore because nobody makes them, but I can get yeeted out of the game I paid money to be able to play because I've not had a chance to git gud (because every time I play, I get yeeted for not yet being good.)

    The day Sony does this on one game on their platform is the day my PS5 becomes a display item and it's Xbox from then until forever.

  • Voting to kick toxic players out isn't new. It also doesn't work very well when there's enough timid, passive players who secretly admire the toxic ones while also trying to stay on their good side.

    In mostly toxic playerbases, who is most likely to be kicked out?

    According to Sony, it's bullies and people who just refuse to become "high-skilled". Or who somehow aren't skilled at the game when they start?

    Who is actually going to be kicked? Women, minorities, players who dare to win against high-profile stream

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