[Suggestion] Patenting your work

[Hikari]

I was thinking about a way to make (somewhat) private inventions to stay private, without totally breaking the economics. So the premise is:
If you've never seen the invention, you have no way of crafting it. However, once you see the invention and have a basic idea how it works, you will be able to copy it with few tries and fails. (Except overly complicated stuff like flying airships or something like that). That way if person decides to never share the work with the world, it will stay that way. (Ie having a secret laboratory in your private home which I am totally not planning to have). Of course, we'd make it so that if you want to sell the invention for 1,000,000,000 you'd have to actually show it to the person who will gain knowledge on it and easily be able to recreate it. This was you could just make inventions private without much advantages.

[Lavinia]

The thing is, if someone wanted to create your item, they could just research it themselves and cause double the work for the mods. I have another idea.

I like the patent idea. Similar concept to contracts, no other person may craft the item for a certain time period. The time period would need to be in a OCC sense, like a month or some sort of formula depending on item level.

[Murasaki]

Economics is entirely relevant. You're giving a single RPer a monopoly on a craft. And personally, if this gets implemented, half the recipes on the list in a few months' time will be patented. While your point makes sense in real life, we don't want to encourage a selfish economy on a roleplay forum. No existing MMO would allow this.

Let's say you come up with a recipe for a Revolver and then use some sort of patent system to make yourself the only one able to craft it. Then you go inactive one day. The recipe is now unnecessarily locked to an inactive person. Otherwise, people are most likely just going to copy the idea OOC and just make a similar recipe. You patented your Revolver. Now, someone researches a new recipe for a Pistol. The item works in RP almost exactly the same as the Revolver other than its aesthetics. The person can say that although they the RPer saw your recipe (maybe they didn't, even), their character just thought it would be neat to craft a gun. It's something that just causes a lot of unnecessary red tape for everyone.

Silly's idea is more reasonable. Patenting would allow the crafter to get a week or month where only they may craft something before word gets out.

[Haneroze]

There's two problems thought:

-Multiple can easily come up with the same idea at the same time.
-Once you know something is possible, most people could simply try it themselves, or even demantle it if they got a copy.

This means that once someone successfully craft a whole new kind of object, the moment this object is seen, anyone can simply try to craft it. The only way you can essentially be the sole person able to craft it, is if you researched something very original, and only use it as a trump card to prevent others seeing that item.

And such an item, I see only one example. Someone wants an Heretic that, through a machine, converts Landers into miasma or something. Not something anyone would come up with, and it's most likely going to be used behind the scenes and never sold to anyone. This is the kind of item that could gain monopoly, until someone else discovers its existance and spreads the news.

[Hikari]

Perhaps we can make it so the instant you take your invention in public/use it in public the other players will also receive the word about it in 24 hours? That would fix most problems I assume...

[Kumori]

I think the point is... people can charge ridiculous prices for these patents just so that another crafter can craft them. The point is not to make a monopolization on the economic goods... and where the economy of the forum is mostly pointless (and as I have stated time and time again that trying to integrate OOC and IC is near impossible) it is pointless to implement patents unless you really want to restrict people from crafting items, which to me, doesn't make sense.

In addition, IC, if you want to have a secret invention, then just don't submit it to research. It does the same thing. You wouldn't be able to use it for any official fight thread or any thread whatsoever except for your solo, so why bother other people about it? If you don't want to show your research, don't claim it. If you want people to know about it, claim it. Easy as that. Just don't expect anybody to take your inventions seriously unless they've been claimed via research. The point of the research claim is to make it so that items aren't ridiculous to the point where it will break the game. If your invention breaks the game, it doesn't exist until it's modified by the staff team.