Read by Council Hinder design theft

[Spoolooni]

Agreed. I am in full support of protected blueprints. Schine is of no concern of any of us. While they may use our work to improve the game (NPC fleet submissions for example) they aren't going to directly impact our experience in multi-player. The purpose of this thread is to allow for in-game profit from ship manufacturing and to either prohibit or de-incentivize malicious and lazy players from stealing other players' work.

I actually do think theft or vehicular theft is a prominent part of warfare as a means of espionage. But,I entirely come from a different standpoint to yours. I much treasure the identity and prominence of the artist hand and authorship means a lot to me when I create ships on Starmade that mirror my own creative intellectual property being a table top RPG I am working on. My biggest fear is having my work so easily stolen, reproduced or even reuploaded seeing that exporting models is such an easy task to do and it is one button away right after saving someone's blueprint. It's also why I sketchfab my WIP's and have tiered documentation of my work in order to prevent such a thing from happening; I always prepare for the worst. However, I think I am alright with having my ship stolen in game, cannibalized and wiggled into enemy hands as long as the game protects my intellectual property. While we can't solve people manually plagiarizing designs, at least by making it harder, there is a level of difficulty that comes with a large margin of error similar to fake products in the real world that are "boot-legged."

I actually share an even more conservative point of view in a sense that intellectual property protection or security should be mandatory on any server. While some gameplay mechanics to allow shipyards to reproduce a creator-branded spacecraft should also be available to allow espionage to be a legitimate gameplay experience.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

I actually do think theft or vehicular theft is a prominent part of warfare as a means of espionage. But,I entirely come from a different standpoint to yours. I much treasure the identity and prominence of the artist hand and authorship means a lot to me when I create ships on Starmade that mirror my own creative intellectual property being a table top RPG I am working on. My biggest fear is having my work so easily stolen, reproduced or even reuploaded seeing that exporting models is such an easy task to do and it is one button away right after saving someone's blueprint. It's also why I sketchfab my WIP's and have tiered documentation of my work in order to prevent such a thing from happening; I always prepare for the worst. However, I think I am alright with having my ship stolen in game, cannibalized and wiggled into enemy hands as long as the game protects my intellectual property. While we can't solve people manually plagiarizing designs, at least by making it harder, there is a level of difficulty that comes with a large margin of error similar to fake products in the real world that are "boot-legged."

I actually share an even more conservative point of view in a sense that intellectual property protection or security should be mandatory on any server. While some gameplay mechanics to allow shipyards to reproduce a creator-branded spacecraft should also be available to allow espionage to be a legitimate gameplay experience.

Are our points of view really that different?

I value authenticity of a design just as you do since, the concepts behind my designs are literally 4 times older than StarMade itself and not found in any other sci-fi universe. This game is about creation and self-expression. With that having been said, it is not uncommon for someone to like your work so much that they ask you to flat out give them a design. Looking at this situation from a cost/benefit standpoint, I see a few major problems.
- You can't profit in-game from your own creativity, since if you sell a ship, you lose the ability to profit from its design.
- You can't be generous without risk of the design going public.
- Any work used in multi-player risks being stolen and re-uploaded by other players.
- The simple act of uploading to a multi-player server compromises the security of the design since admins have access to your blueprint.

Like I said earlier; if someone likes my design so much that they actively fly into my territory, steal a ship, fly it home, then manually take it apart, to replicate its design, I'm cool with that; that is true espionage. But what we have now; this one-button-copy capability of the current blueprint system is taking away from the game's creative energy as a whole.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

To be fair, the core of this argument is, literally: We the designers cannot have sustained in-game profit of our work, because we have no method of preventing anyone from infinitely copying the ship.

The closest real-world application is Automobile Manufacture and sales therof, and Shipbuilders.
Note that the automobile manufacturers have many, many methods in place to prevent "just anyone" from infinitely reproducing one of their vehicles, and nearly as many methods preventing another Automobile Manufacturer from doing the same.

Shipbuilding has most of the same hurdles, just at a larger/smaller scale. (massively bigger individual units, fewer total units)

Let us ignore the "time to reverse engineer" since that is a non-factor in Starmade. (ADV build and Copy-paste are a fact of life, but acceptably difficult to use on "sufficiently large" ships)
Let us allso ignore the typical resource costs. (most people IRL don't have a supply of the relevant metals and plastics to produce a car, but nearly any player in Starmade either has, or can gain the resources to clone a ship.)
Let us ignore the "most people don't own an automobile manufacturing plant", as in Starmade, everyone absolutely does.
It's called "being a player", and is an integral part of the game. (Factories and Shipyards and Blueprints simply speed up the process.)
Mind you, doing it "by hand" like that is a big-enough pain in the ass that we don't need to add any additional protection. (for a decently sized "frigate/destroyer" this could take upwards of a day, per ship. for the bigger cruisers, probably more like three days, each. Titans are basically week-long endeavours)

So, what CAN be done to limit the game such that you must actually put in effort to clone a ship that you didn't design. (and wasn't designed by part of your faction)

Well, the one suggestion I recall agreeing with was adding more meta-data to a blueprint (the catalog entry, and the item) and to the ship-entity, and presumeably to the design-item, so they all recall who built the damn thing.
With that, only the builder could blueprint it, or make a design-item in a shipyard.
This outright kills most of the "profit theft" that is the core complaint of the current system.
Additional "extra data" was:
a simple "can repair" toggle. (functionally, taking your car to a body-shop or mechanic)

Much like in Real Life(tm) this then means you need to take the purchased vessel to a "liscensed" mechanic to fix it whenever something you don't comprehend breaks, and if it gets completely destroyed? You then need to go buy a new one.
You want more than one? You must buy another from the original seller.


But this kinda breaks factions, many of which have a single player designing all the ships, and many players using, abusing, and building clones of.

So:
add a "can clone" toggle, for when you actually want the person you've sold the ship to to be able to copy it. (mostly so factions aren't immediately screwed by only their "build guy" being able to work the shipyard and assemble the fleet.)
And/or a "Faction can clone" toggle. This has the potential un-pleasantness of the original designer "defecting" to another faction, and screwing over his previous faction in the process.

Voila, the independant ship-seller economy and role is now possible, and Factions are able to have any member run the shipyard to build the fleet, or replace combat losses.

 

[Spoolooni]

Are our points of view really that different?

I value authenticity of a design just as you do since, the concepts behind my designs are literally 4 times older than StarMade itself and not found in any other sci-fi universe. This game is about creation and self-expression. With that having been said, it is not uncommon for someone to like your work so much that they ask you to flat out give them a design. Looking at this situation from a cost/benefit standpoint, I see a few major problems.
- You can't profit in-game from your own creativity, since if you sell a ship, you lose the ability to profit from its design.
- You can't be generous without risk of the design going public.
- Any work used in multi-player risks being stolen and re-uploaded by other players.
- The simple act of uploading to a multi-player server compromises the security of the design since admins have access to your blueprint.

Like I said earlier; if someone likes my design so much that they actively fly into my territory, steal a ship, fly it home, then manually take it apart, to replicate its design, I'm cool with that; that is true espionage. But what we have now; this one-button-copy capability of the current blueprint system is taking away from the game's creative energy as a whole.

You have a point then- maybe we are on the same page. C:

 

[Batavium]

Design Theft................................................................................
Page 18.....................................................................
Hostile Lego in Space Game................

Spoiler: UNGA BUNGA BUNGA

UNGA BUNGA BUNGA

Sorry could not resist.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

The Toast King has spoken...

 

[Wolverines527]

Hmmm i tend to not allow any except those im allied with to use my designs while the sellable are pure knock offs that have both less shielding and firepower then the regular stock that i use