clones and idea theft

[mist]

before i get in to a full blown rant, i should probably mention that this post may well be in the wrong place. if it is, appologies.

anyway, the point. having just read a thread about better communications it seems that there's still some idea about the place that there's a load of evil pa clones out there who'll steal all of pa's ideas as soon as they're mentioned. this, frankly, irritates me.

while, in the past, games such as pia have replicated ideas found in planetarion - giving rise to these fears - is this still realistic today? have any clones stolen ideas from pax etc? if they have, i've not heard about them. pia seems to be selling itself on the idea what it's like pa used to be, dom is actually pretty different, dunno about lh or any of the others so i can't really comment. however, i've not heard anything about them stealing stuff recently.

there are a few reasons that i can think of for this, ranging from the ideas being lame to them wanting to take their game in a different direction, but either way, i think people overestimate the dangers of idea theft.

so, what if ideas are stolen... well, if they're not announced then odds are people will find them in the betas, which happen what, 3 weeks before the round starts? so either the clones will impliment the ideas quickly and still beat pa to the punsh, or will impliment them slower and start their round after pa does. so what're the concequences for these?

well, if they manage to impliment the ideas in 3 weeks, then odds are they'd have been able to impliment them in 3 weeks if they'd been announced sooner. net effect, very little. either way, there's a game running with the ideas before planetarion. whether this is viewed as good (hey, someone's making sure our ideas work for us) or bad (hey, someone's taking our players 'cus they offer the same product cheaper than we do) is fairly irrelevant at the end of the day.

if they manage to impliment the ideas after pa's started, then who cares really?

therefore, it's the point at which the ideas take more than 3 weeks to impliment, but not a lot more than 3 weeks - so that announcing them early means that the 'opposition' can launch them before pa does. personally, i think this is a good thing however, as it means that the idea gets tested and any bad points can be weeded out before things go live. it's been shown that the beta isn't good enough for that, with things that work well in a speed game translating baddly to a normal round, so if someone else wants to take the flak for a pax like mistake again, great imo.

so, what's the dangers of mentioning ideas early covered, at least all the ones i can think of, what about the benefits?

well, for a start you get some feedback about them. while spinner and the pateam are generally quite good at their jobs their playing experience, relative to however many thousand players there are atm, isn't that huge. while you can't take what the players say as gospel truth, odds are some of them will spot things about your genius plan that you didn't, which might make you want to reconsider. also, if you're announcing ideas early, you can run much longer testing cycles, and test fewer things at once - result - a better game.

as a slight asside, it's my opinion that planetarion can't sell itself on its game features alone. sure, there can be the best game there, but if you want to charge money for it when others are free you've got to differentiate your product, you've got to play to your advantages. to me, planetarion should be getting players because of their customer relations, their support, things like the manual etc etc. people should be comming to pa because of the gaming experience, not just because of the game. that's something that can't be stolen, and makes the ideas workable. for god's sake, pia had (has?) killmark on their crew, it's not *that* hard to do better! surely?

so, why not release ideas earlier? well, i've got a few cynical suspicions.

the first is that people arn't really sure what they want to do, which is fair enough. however if they'd talk to others about it, then odds are they'd be weeding out the bad ideas and developing the good ones a lot faster. however, admitting that help would be useful is a difficult thing to do.

then there's the susicicion that planetarion doesn't really follow a 'flat' development cycle. being as the game has a dedicated coder, be it part time, i'd expect them to be getting, say, 10 hours coding done a week. lets say for the sake of argument that this equaes to a new feature every fortnight. however, i suspect that actually most of the development for a new round is done in panic fashion towards the last possible minute. given the old "we can't tell you because we don't know yet" response, this seems the only development 'model' which would fit - if you started development as the current round started, surely you MUST know SOMETHING by half way through?

finally (glad?) the point of the thread. rather than keeping things close to the chest, why not share a little? it'll keep the community happy, and imo result in a more effective development process and a better game. to me, these seem like good things

-mist

[wakey]

oi i'm the one whos supposed to post long 'rants'

Oh and I agree

[Gerbie]

St@rsphere 'stole' the idea of XP (though PA stole this from others as well ofc). They implemented it pretty bad though. They also made their roid capping formula score dependent, like PA used to have it a while back: and again ruined the implementation. The game is worth having a look at just for laughs (don't bother playing it seriously).

[Tactitus]

I've always thought PA should be more open about their ideas/plans. I think the advantages would outweigh the disadvantages.

After four years I doubt it'll ever happen though. :/

[Dark-Strider]

Idd tell the community a bit about what the future game will be like