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Selling Blueprints Exploitation


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I was talking to a friend the other day about being able to create blueprints of your creations and then selling them to players.  He brought up a really good point.  In Second Life they tried something similar, but ran into problems because players would exploit this system.  They would buy blueprints, change a single texture or alter it in a tiny way, and then resell the design as their own.  I am curious if there are any ideas or strategies that will be implemented to try and avoid this (if it's possible)?

 

The only idea I can think of to avoid this is to have the designer bake in a signature of some sort into the design.  A signature that would remain even if the overall product was slightly altered.

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10 minutes ago, KesGarren said:

I was talking to a friend the other day about being able to create blueprints of your creations and then selling them to players.  He brought up a really good point.  In Second Life they tried something similar, but ran into problems because players would exploit this system.  They would buy blueprints, change a single texture or alter it in a tiny way, and then resell the design as their own.  I am curious if there are any ideas or strategies that will be implemented to try and avoid this (if it's possible)?

 

The only idea I can think of to avoid this is to have the designer bake in a signature of some sort into the design.  A signature that would remain even if the overall product was slightly altered.

AFAIK, you wont be able to blueprint something which itself is the product of a manufactured blueprint.

 

 

In the example you  mention above only the alteration would be able to be blueprinted, not the entire construct. At least thats my understanding.

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1 hour ago, CoreVamore said:

AFAIK, you wont be able to blueprint something which itself is the product of a manufactured blueprint.

 

 

In the example you  mention above only the alteration would be able to be blueprinted, not the entire construct. At least thats my understanding.

 

IIRC you will be able to blueprint the alterations and sell those separately, but you wouldn't be able to snapshot the whole ship and sell it as your own simply because you made one change. 

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Some kind of signature that can't be altered would be a good idea anyways I think. Someone could always reverse engineer and create their own construct from scratch that looks similar.

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25 minutes ago, Haunty said:

Some kind of signature that can't be altered would be a good idea anyways I think. Someone could always reverse engineer and create their own construct from scratch that looks similar.

it would be as 'simple' as marking each voxel that come out of a manufacturing environment as non-blueprintable.

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7 hours ago, CoreVamore said:

it would be as 'simple' as marking each voxel that come out of a manufacturing environment as non-blueprintable.

That wouldn't prevent manual copying though, just place a core and build a copy. Tedious but people could do it, especially with small/simple constructs. That's why it would be nice to see who the original designer is in the market before you buy it.

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I wouldn't be quick to disregard that because the problem doesn't exist now, it won't exist in the future.  Especially since the game hasn't even reached Alpha or Beta.  If there's one thing I've learned about users that use our applications at work, it's that they will find a means to exploit it.  

 

Making the blueprints not editable still will not stop someone from reverse engineering something from scratch without a blueprint.

 

I like the idea of connecting a design to an original designer.  Maybe make it so that the system can recognize similar builds on the market and display them to the user with timestamps.  That would reveal copycat builds and allow players to perhaps flag them as such.  Of course, then we get into the grey area of: how similar is too similar?  I can see why this became a mess in Second Life the more I think about it.

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On 15/08/2018 at 9:19 PM, Haunty said:

That wouldn't prevent manual copying though, just place a core and build a copy. Tedious but people could do it, especially with small/simple constructs. That's why it would be nice to see who the original designer is in the market before you buy it.

If they want to go to that detail, go for it. That to me would be flattering and its not really stoppable in DU or RL. In essence thats more like reverse engineering.

 

Also I think that any form of market "this ship looks like this other ship" type of tool would be a waste of NQ's efforts and resources.

 

Copying will always occur, but long as people can manufacture items from my blueprints that I sold them, without them then being able to blueprint the manufactured item (or parts of it), then I'm all good. (And it appears that is/will be the case). So again, I'm all good ;)

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Would it not be possible to "Tag" the voxels and elements that are the product of a blueprint as being a copy. And then exclude marked voxels from being blueprinted if you don't own the rights ... and thus Like Lethys suggests "it would have to be completely rebuild voxel by voxel.

 

this could/ would mean that

- each play would create a unique tag based on player id, date and blueprint (+version),

- players can alter/ update there own blueprints without worry, (buyers will be able to see the version of blueprint)

- the blueprint will be back traceable to owner,

- marked as master blueprint or authorized copy ( as is intended by the devs) 

 

and to make it harder to reverse engineer, it could be implemented that no warning wil be given if there still is a "Marked" voxel / element in the to be created blue print that were excluded from the new blueprint ;) so just replacing blocks of the build, block by block will get a lot harder to manage on larger builds.

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if you craft something it can just say “created by ___” and they can set it to not be editable. It can just have build mode disabled on it. That simple.

 

They don’t need to do more than that. It’s crazy to want to control peoples creative freedom like that, just to make people buy your design. A lot of people are going to want to build their own stuff, and you’re not entitled to anything if someone makes something similar to yours from scratch. It’s highly likely that people are going to end up making similar designs without even knowing it, and you can’t go back and tell them that’s not theirs, or assume they’re ripping you off. If someone takes a design and tries to reproduce it, so what. That just means they think you’re charging too much and they’d rather invest a bunch of their own time to make one themselves. The price has to be convincing. The game isn’t going to be fun if you have people trying to control other people and limit them just for your own personal gain.

 

Things like programming and custom UI features that have been coded, now that’s something I’d want to buy from someone else. I have fun building but don’t know how to program. Make stuff with really cool scripting and people will want to buy it. Make things with fair prices and people will want to buy it instead of investing a bunch of time in it themselves.

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