Monthly Archives: November

A woodcutter lumbers wood, thus providing a steady supply of another important resource for settlements without necessitating the player to care for this personally. Woodcutters increase the level of pollution of the according settlement though. They are recruited at a farm.

One of the roadworks in our transition from the old 2D engine to 3D consisted of turning the world-map into 3D. Well, we finished this step already quite a few weeks ago and are quite happy with the result, as we could greatly enhance the usability of the map as well; you can now freely zoom in and out and switch different details (like settlements or resources) on and off.

The basic concept of the map is still the same: not all parts of the island are open from the very beginning (i.e. the darker parts, covered with the so-called fog of war)—players will need to buy map-extracts to explore new regions of the island.

A new feature was added here, too: you can now also harvest resources in the map-view, which essentially enables players to fully control the whole game just from the map and from their settlement and its profile—we thought this might come in handy for everybody who prefers a civilization-like gameplay over manual avatar-based exploration.

Just like a stonecutter can be recruited at a mine, a miner can be hired there to steadily produce ore for a settlement. This comes at a price of a higher level of pollution though.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a recent move of China’s State Administration of Taxation to charge virtual money with a personal income tax: “China will impose a personal income tax of 20% on profit from virtual money. The announcement, which was distributed to local tax bureaus, specifically takes aim at those who buy virtual currency from gamers and surfers and sell it to others at a mark-up. Taxation officials are granted the right to determine the original price of online virtual currency if the individual fails to provide proof of an original price, it says.“

The new tax caused a storm of Chinese protests (allegedly over 6,000 comments were left on Netease.com one day after the news had surfaced); it seems to be aimed at combating the growing problem of money-laundring in virtual worlds in Mainland, which threatens to cause an inflation of the Renminbi. Last week, Virtual Worlds News reported that “Korean police arrested a group responsible for laundering money generated by Chinese gold farming from Korea back to the mainland. Over 18 months, the group wired $38 million from Korea to a Hong Kong paper company as payments for purchases. In return, the group took a commission of 3-5% for purchasing the virtual currency in China, reportedly produced by traditional farming as well as viruses, and then cashing out in the Korean market.“

The move does not come as a real surprise, since other countries like Korea and Sweden are already rolling out their own tax plans for virtual currencies, as Virtual Worlds News has it. Still, it remains being an exceptional decision, with quite a few obvious problems—one might be sceptical if both the tax will be introduced successfully in the end and if it will really turn out as a successful measure against virtual crime.

A new ruling on software-patents by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) was sending shockwaves through the internet during the past few days. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick describes: “court has said that there’s a two-pronged test to determine whether a software of business method process patent is valid: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. In other words, pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable… Well, it may take some time to digest, but it’s likely this will be appealed to the Supreme Court, so that process may take a while.“

It’s an interesting and lively discussion which left me with the impression that it might be too soon to be too happy about the ruling—after all, the according laws are not changed but interpreted differently. If the ruling will really and finally be reaffirmed by the Supreme Court, the industry of virtual worlds and social networks would also be affected—as Mashable’s Adam Ostrow rightfully points out: “In essence, the ruling means that business ideas in and of themselves aren’t patentable. In addition to Amazon’s “one-click” patent, which is the concept of purchasing something via credit card by just clicking a single website link, Friendster’s patents on social networking also come to mind as being unpatentable based on this judgement.“
The Jaipuria-patent (currently held by LinkedIn, as far as I know) and the Friendster-patent belong to the most powerful patents in terms of social networks. They protect features like automatically setting up somebody you’ve invited as your buddy, or graphically displaying the degree of separation between two members.

In the case of Coobico, we tried to discover and circumvent relevant networking-patents like the Friendster-patent. E.g. our invitation-procedure is currently designed like this: you invite somebody, who subsequently sets up his/her new Coobico-account. Both of you then receive a message asking you to accept each other as buddies. It’s just one example which shows that it’s possible to come up with reasonable (and reasonably different) user interfaces when facing software-patents.