Actually, there were a few generations of the original ipod. The first iPods versions did in fact have buttons directly under the screen, with the scroll wheel completely seperate.
Note that you can attack enemy towns though and lay seige to them. If you're powerful enough you can raid an enemy city and kill their guards/shopkeepers/quest givers. You'll be flagged for PvP though, and enemy players can attack you as well as the high level NPCs. You don't need player designed cities to lay seige to an enemy city.
You can't do this in WoW. A major difference is that SWG is full of huge empty spaces full of randomly generated "content". So if a player creates content it doesn't disrupt anything. In WoW, all the zones are carefully designed and filled with human designed content. Any large stretch of land converted to a new town would be bound to get in the way of carefully designed quest areas. And predesigned cities are all very colorful and interesting, so cookie cutter player constructions free of custom NPCs would just detract from the ambience.
I would say that if WoW wanted to add player buildings, they would have to have instanced "neighborhoods" like everquest 2 where you can visit houses that are taking up a limited amount of in-game real estate rather than huge monotonous suburban sprawl like SWG.
You could travel to Endor and shoot Ewoks since the game was released. They're pretty tough. You can also hunt Gungans on Naboo. They're not the lowest level prey and some are tougher than others, but most are easy enough.
Despite this, the combat is repetitive and mostly skillless. The space combat is supposed to be a bit more interactive, but I'm not planning on bothering with it.
Atitd is a small enough community that a fair number of the active long term players have met at gatherings, of which there are pictures. Atitd doesn't have different races/classes/levels, and not much roleplaying, so for the most part people play as themselves rather than as a character, and there is less reason to play someone different than yourself.
"Now whether or not it was a smart idea to put the symbol in the game"
The game allows free form sculptures. The admins didn't "put the symbol in the game", some random player made a sculpture of it on their own initiative. What the devs didn't do is elminate it. The reason is that they have a system of player designed laws to deal with that sort of things. Players eventually wrote a law that allowed a concensus of players to declare a sculpture an eyesore and tear it down. Problem solved.
The symbol as used by nazis is generally a different rotation than most other uses. And when someone invokes it in a modern western context they're usually just looking to provoke trouble, not express Buddhist spirituality. That was confirmed by the title of the sculpture, which was something like "concentration camp", I think.
I think its somewhat relevant that the people who traded with this person were cheated. They got things that didn't work as advertised or were ripped off altogether. And the trader was caught with "soul jars", which haven't been seen in game before but are unlikely to be a good thing. So it was the males who ignored his behavior and traded with him anyway that were hurt here.
"Had they stayed at home, they would have become good farmers or blacksmiths (or, who knows, perhaps even philosophers, searching for a better tomorrow), good husbands to their wives, good fathers to their sons and daughters."
Nope, you can't be good at any of that without skill points from killing kobolds and giant bats. Of course I suppose a clever enough farmer might get the experience to be a great philosopher if they manage to find and exterminate an ant colony in their field.
He started out passing someone at ~90mph, so it was pretty much too late for that before he even lost control. Besides, haven't you ever found out that you were driving around with the emergency brake on? I'd never risk my car by experimenting with it, but I don't have much faith in it in an actual emergency. Of course this kind of thing will never happen to those of us with manual transmissions, or even a typical automatic.
And other people who donate to charities are selfish because all they care about is making themselves feel good or looking good to others. Its silly to try to dissect people's motives for giving. He's given more than would have been necessary just to seem nice. And he could always have married a 20 year old model and spent just a few million on creature comforts to keep her happy, if his motives were so terrible.
A bounty doesn't really make sense the way that spammers are currently prosecuted. Most spammers just get a slap on the wrist. Until spammers actually start getting serious hard time or huge civil penalties, then the value of the bounty would be greater than the cost to most spammers. This would make it beneficial for a small time spammer to partake in their own bounty.
If bounties given out were a percentage of the fines actually collected from spammers (which ideally should be really painful for big spammers), rather than some fixed range, then a bounty system would make sense. And spammers who manage to launder their profits so the fines don't stick need to get prison time.
"Seems like a damn good definition of evil to me! Evil always has a reason which doesn't stand up to logic."
Abstract evil in the sense of fairy tales and religions always hold evil as a purpose in and of itself, but thats pure fantasy.
Most examples of real world evil are just people trying to do the best they can for themselves without taking into consideration how it affects others. And yes, that makes minor acts of evil very very common. A large proportion of "good" people only do the right thing because they know they could face severe consequences if people find out they do the wrong thing. Sometimes evil is misguided and it isn't actually in anyone's best interest, but often enough evil actually is in someone's best interest, as long as other people don't factor into their calculations of success or failure. However much we'd like it to be, the universe isn't actually set up to perfectly balance karma and make sure that evil is ultimately punished or good ultimately rewarded. This is one reason that people have invented an afterlife which will take care of unpunished wrongdoing and unrewarded good deeds.
The vast majority of people are somewhere between true good and evil (hopefully leaning towards good, but it doesn't take much to push people the other way). And they base the vast majority of decisions on a sense of enlightened self-interest (though they are often not clever or disciplined enough to have the correct answers about what is in their best interest), rather than basing most of their decisions on notions of morality.
Take a moment to read it then. They do change your appearance based on using heavy weapons vs light weapons vs magic. A barbarian type will be burly and scarred, a thief will be lean, and a lazy glutton will be chubby.
There are greenhouses for growing grass without clicks. There is no need to gather thousands of grass by hand. Greenhouses aren't researched yet in beta, but you don't have a pressing need for a camel and a huge compound just yet either. Everything gets easier as technology progresses. Its a grind if you try to do everything right away and do it by yourself, but that isn't the only way to play the game, and its a rather ineffective strategy, as you've already discovered.
While the player count is smaller than most commercial MMORPGs, all of the players are on a single server, whereas most larger games are split up into several shards. Also, each player in atitd has lots of buildings, so their presence is felt even when they aren't online.
Thus, while the total subscriber count may be less, the few thousand players all sharing the same world, and all having a noticeable affect on it, still qualifies it as "massively" multiplayer, instead of just being a MORPG.
The differences of atitd compared to nearly every other mmorpg makes it newsworthy and interesting to follow (and the fact that it has a linux client doesn't hurt its chances of getting a mention on slashdot.) If this were generic fantasy murder simulation number 500, then it would be flying under the radar with only a few thousand subscribers.
You said that when someone dies, they can't get another account. Totally unenforceable, not to mention suicide for a for-profit business. The jackasses of the world will get new accounts, play for a few days, go on a killing spree, then repeat.
What all games lack by their nature is true accountability. The worst that can possibly happen to you is you can't play that one game anymore, but there are always hundreds of other games, plus real life, waiting for you. Everyone quits a game eventually, and when they do, they might as well go out with a bang. But most people don't commit suicide even once in their lives. Thats a major difference. Another major difference is lack of persistence. You can't be on call to defend your property 24/7 in a game, if you have a life. Real life is persistent. In games people log in and log out and can only be expected to be there a small fraction of the time, and not the same fraction of time that others are there. These fundamental differences make total realism with regard to violence unworkable.
Unrestricted PvP totally changes the nature of the game. Not everyone wants to pay to log into a game just to watch their back the whole time. You went afk for a few minutes to answer the phone? Too bad, you're permanently dead. There are PvP games out there to choose from, but they tend not to do as well. If thats really what people want, they're sending the wrong messages to the market.
You could try, and they would definitely implement it if it passed. But it would not have a chance of passing. Atitd players are mostly libertarians, and they resent any laws that they perceive as granting special power to an elite subset of players. 2/3 means twice as many have to vote for something as against it, and at least 1 in 3 are always too obstinate to vote for anything with major consequences. They also voted down a law lowering the threshold from 2/3 majority to 1/2 majority, out of fear that more controversial laws would pass.
I'm not sure where you're coming from, but its funnier when you know that it isn't satire. Jack Chick produces a slew of these unintentionally hilarious religious comics, and earnest born again christians distribute them to passersby while they try to convert you. I once had a Jehovah's Witness hand me the classic evolution strip "Big Daddy?"
Fresh organic fruits and veggies from a farmer's market usually cost about the same as limp, insecticide sprayed fare that has been sitting in a grocery store for a couple of days after a week of transit. But even if it is slightly more, we're still talking a few dollars a day to eat tangibly better quality food. I don't know where you shop that you see more than a 50% markup for an organic version of the same food, but that certainly hasn't been my experience. If any type of food is breaking lower income peoples' budgets, its probably the unnecessary processed foods, and not basic raw foods.
Go ahead and look down on people for choosing quality over penny pinching, but I'd try to keep those opinions to yourself in public, since a lot of people will just consider you an ignorant cheapskate.
You wouldn't appreciate a brick machine if you've never had to make a brick. It would just be the new baseline for you.
It doesn't take long at all for the game to start branching out into different goals for you to pursue, such as tests of the 7 disciplines. When you get bored of one thing, explore a little and discover more about what there is to do in the game. Try to find a way to accomplish your goal without spending so much time on it. Its only when you single-mindedly pursue one goal at a time, and approach it with raw effort instead of finesse, that things get boring.
Forming or joining guilds is one easy way to avoid having to do so much boring work to accomplish your goals. You can get into a guild or make your own almost immediately after making it off the welcome island. Some people immediately reject this idea since on other games guilds are oriented towards the hardcore gamers, but in atitd, it is casual players who benefit most from guilds, and there are very few people who play for long without eventually joining one. Most join several different guilds, some of them their primary guild(s), and many others with specialized purposes. Your social networks will be more valuable to you in the long run than your resources or buildings, and social bonds aren't reset when the telling or beta ends. If you rule out the possibility of ever banding together with other players to accomplish things, or even just trading with more advanced players for things, then yes, you may find some aspects a little tedious, but the problem is in how you're approaching things.
Of course, for some players, any time at all not spent fragging n00bs will be intolerably boring, and those people will never see the draw of this sort of game.
Of course people have tried macroing in ATITD, but its not actually as useful as you'd think. It was only pervasive in a few areas, such as fishing, which had limited effects on the economy. In other areas it wasn't generally worth the effort of setting up and running a macro.
Thats because the game isn't all about gathering slate any more than other MMORPGs are about killing rats. The low technology that you mention is just how the game begins, and it isn't actually all that repetitive because it doesn't take too long to outgrow that stage.
Things like collecting grass and making bricks with it that are easily macro'd are things that you don't have to macro, because at moderate levels of technology you outgrow the need to do those things. You can grow grass in greenhouses and make bricks in brick machines much more efficiently. You can automate your mines. The game itself automates the things that are most tedious, and most susceptible to macroing.
More advanced technologies are much harder to macro because they require more human interaction, more thought, more diverse resources, and less grinding away. Some of them are also sufficiently entertaining that you wouldn't want to macro them.
I think you're underestimating the game based on a slow start. The beta of the second telling only has a few stone age technologies unlocked, so there is nothing very impressive to see yet, but if you had gotten a better mentor in your 24 hour trial of the first telling, you might have seen more of what keeps people interested in the game.
Whats off-topic is moderation advice from anonymous cowards. Your parent post is off on a bit of a tangent from the topic. But its not off topic from its parent, which is not off topic from its own parent. They follow a logical chain of discussion from the overall topic, which is conflict of interest in a news organization. Thats what discussion do, they drift into different corners of the topic.
There is a difference between off-topic and a mild tangent springing from the subjects raised by parent posts. And there is a difference between "troll" and a controversial but not inflammatory opinion that you don't agree with. If someone is making outrageous and irrational posts, you mark them a troll, but if they are saying something that you disagree with in a civil manner, you debate them. If we all agreed, there wouldn't be much of anything to talk about.
They are only going to bother exchanging currency for their major commercial competitors. There are already dozens of crappy second-tier MMORPGs out there that they wont be exchanging. These secondd tier games are real games that people actually designed to be fun and are played for enjoyment by players. There is no way they will exchange for all the small homemade games like this, so why would they ever exchange with a small homemade fake game that virtually nobody actually plays and is a transparently lame attempt to get money in horizons? If you don't count the graphics, there are thousands of muds with hundreds or thousands of players each, all of which have a real economy rather than a transparent fraud, and horizons obviously wouldn't transfer from MUDs, but they'd probably go for an established MUD before your game. You make it sound like there will be some automatic drone that will make these exchange decisions, but it will be human beings who aren't complete morons.
And how useful will your horizons money be in a few months anyway since the game is obviously on the road to financial oblivion already and cancellation?
Patents expire. So unless they think that change would come in the near future it wouldn't necessarily be relevant. Car companies are always coming up with funny concept cars that never make it into mass production. A patent on something frivolous like this doesn't necessarily mean that they've put a lot of thought into actually doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there were a few generations of the original ipod. The first iPods versions did in fact have buttons directly under the screen, with the scroll wheel completely seperate.
Note that you can attack enemy towns though and lay seige to them. If you're powerful enough you can raid an enemy city and kill their guards/shopkeepers/quest givers. You'll be flagged for PvP though, and enemy players can attack you as well as the high level NPCs. You don't need player designed cities to lay seige to an enemy city.
You can't do this in WoW. A major difference is that SWG is full of huge empty spaces full of randomly generated "content". So if a player creates content it doesn't disrupt anything. In WoW, all the zones are carefully designed and filled with human designed content. Any large stretch of land converted to a new town would be bound to get in the way of carefully designed quest areas. And predesigned cities are all very colorful and interesting, so cookie cutter player constructions free of custom NPCs would just detract from the ambience.
I would say that if WoW wanted to add player buildings, they would have to have instanced "neighborhoods" like everquest 2 where you can visit houses that are taking up a limited amount of in-game real estate rather than huge monotonous suburban sprawl like SWG.
Also true of nearly every MMORPG.
You should try City of Heroes. After level 15, getting around town is half the fun, particularly if you take Super Jump.
You could travel to Endor and shoot Ewoks since the game was released. They're pretty tough. You can also hunt Gungans on Naboo. They're not the lowest level prey and some are tougher than others, but most are easy enough. Despite this, the combat is repetitive and mostly skillless. The space combat is supposed to be a bit more interactive, but I'm not planning on bothering with it.
Atitd is a small enough community that a fair number of the active long term players have met at gatherings, of which there are pictures. Atitd doesn't have different races/classes/levels, and not much roleplaying, so for the most part people play as themselves rather than as a character, and there is less reason to play someone different than yourself.
"Now whether or not it was a smart idea to put the symbol in the game"
The game allows free form sculptures. The admins didn't "put the symbol in the game", some random player made a sculpture of it on their own initiative. What the devs didn't do is elminate it. The reason is that they have a system of player designed laws to deal with that sort of things. Players eventually wrote a law that allowed a concensus of players to declare a sculpture an eyesore and tear it down. Problem solved. The symbol as used by nazis is generally a different rotation than most other uses. And when someone invokes it in a modern western context they're usually just looking to provoke trouble, not express Buddhist spirituality. That was confirmed by the title of the sculpture, which was something like "concentration camp", I think.
I think its somewhat relevant that the people who traded with this person were cheated. They got things that didn't work as advertised or were ripped off altogether. And the trader was caught with "soul jars", which haven't been seen in game before but are unlikely to be a good thing. So it was the males who ignored his behavior and traded with him anyway that were hurt here.
"Had they stayed at home, they would have become good farmers or blacksmiths (or, who knows, perhaps even philosophers, searching for a better tomorrow), good husbands to their wives, good fathers to their sons and daughters."
Nope, you can't be good at any of that without skill points from killing kobolds and giant bats. Of course I suppose a clever enough farmer might get the experience to be a great philosopher if they manage to find and exterminate an ant colony in their field.
He started out passing someone at ~90mph, so it was pretty much too late for that before he even lost control. Besides, haven't you ever found out that you were driving around with the emergency brake on? I'd never risk my car by experimenting with it, but I don't have much faith in it in an actual emergency. Of course this kind of thing will never happen to those of us with manual transmissions, or even a typical automatic.
And other people who donate to charities are selfish because all they care about is making themselves feel good or looking good to others. Its silly to try to dissect people's motives for giving. He's given more than would have been necessary just to seem nice. And he could always have married a 20 year old model and spent just a few million on creature comforts to keep her happy, if his motives were so terrible.
A bounty doesn't really make sense the way that spammers are currently prosecuted. Most spammers just get a slap on the wrist. Until spammers actually start getting serious hard time or huge civil penalties, then the value of the bounty would be greater than the cost to most spammers. This would make it beneficial for a small time spammer to partake in their own bounty.
If bounties given out were a percentage of the fines actually collected from spammers (which ideally should be really painful for big spammers), rather than some fixed range, then a bounty system would make sense. And spammers who manage to launder their profits so the fines don't stick need to get prison time.
"Seems like a damn good definition of evil to me! Evil always has a reason which doesn't stand up to logic."
Abstract evil in the sense of fairy tales and religions always hold evil as a purpose in and of itself, but thats pure fantasy.
Most examples of real world evil are just people trying to do the best they can for themselves without taking into consideration how it affects others. And yes, that makes minor acts of evil very very common. A large proportion of "good" people only do the right thing because they know they could face severe consequences if people find out they do the wrong thing. Sometimes evil is misguided and it isn't actually in anyone's best interest, but often enough evil actually is in someone's best interest, as long as other people don't factor into their calculations of success or failure. However much we'd like it to be, the universe isn't actually set up to perfectly balance karma and make sure that evil is ultimately punished or good ultimately rewarded. This is one reason that people have invented an afterlife which will take care of unpunished wrongdoing and unrewarded good deeds.
The vast majority of people are somewhere between true good and evil (hopefully leaning towards good, but it doesn't take much to push people the other way). And they base the vast majority of decisions on a sense of enlightened self-interest (though they are often not clever or disciplined enough to have the correct answers about what is in their best interest), rather than basing most of their decisions on notions of morality.
Take a moment to read it then. They do change your appearance based on using heavy weapons vs light weapons vs magic. A barbarian type will be burly and scarred, a thief will be lean, and a lazy glutton will be chubby.
There are greenhouses for growing grass without clicks. There is no need to gather thousands of grass by hand. Greenhouses aren't researched yet in beta, but you don't have a pressing need for a camel and a huge compound just yet either. Everything gets easier as technology progresses. Its a grind if you try to do everything right away and do it by yourself, but that isn't the only way to play the game, and its a rather ineffective strategy, as you've already discovered.
While the player count is smaller than most commercial MMORPGs, all of the players are on a single server, whereas most larger games are split up into several shards. Also, each player in atitd has lots of buildings, so their presence is felt even when they aren't online.
Thus, while the total subscriber count may be less, the few thousand players all sharing the same world, and all having a noticeable affect on it, still qualifies it as "massively" multiplayer, instead of just being a MORPG.
The differences of atitd compared to nearly every other mmorpg makes it newsworthy and interesting to follow (and the fact that it has a linux client doesn't hurt its chances of getting a mention on slashdot.) If this were generic fantasy murder simulation number 500, then it would be flying under the radar with only a few thousand subscribers.
You said that when someone dies, they can't get another account. Totally unenforceable, not to mention suicide for a for-profit business. The jackasses of the world will get new accounts, play for a few days, go on a killing spree, then repeat.
What all games lack by their nature is true accountability. The worst that can possibly happen to you is you can't play that one game anymore, but there are always hundreds of other games, plus real life, waiting for you. Everyone quits a game eventually, and when they do, they might as well go out with a bang. But most people don't commit suicide even once in their lives. Thats a major difference. Another major difference is lack of persistence. You can't be on call to defend your property 24/7 in a game, if you have a life. Real life is persistent. In games people log in and log out and can only be expected to be there a small fraction of the time, and not the same fraction of time that others are there. These fundamental differences make total realism with regard to violence unworkable.
Unrestricted PvP totally changes the nature of the game. Not everyone wants to pay to log into a game just to watch their back the whole time. You went afk for a few minutes to answer the phone? Too bad, you're permanently dead. There are PvP games out there to choose from, but they tend not to do as well. If thats really what people want, they're sending the wrong messages to the market.
You could try, and they would definitely implement it if it passed. But it would not have a chance of passing. Atitd players are mostly libertarians, and they resent any laws that they perceive as granting special power to an elite subset of players. 2/3 means twice as many have to vote for something as against it, and at least 1 in 3 are always too obstinate to vote for anything with major consequences. They also voted down a law lowering the threshold from 2/3 majority to 1/2 majority, out of fear that more controversial laws would pass.
I'm not sure where you're coming from, but its funnier when you know that it isn't satire. Jack Chick produces a slew of these unintentionally hilarious religious comics, and earnest born again christians distribute them to passersby while they try to convert you. I once had a Jehovah's Witness hand me the classic evolution strip "Big Daddy?"
Fresh organic fruits and veggies from a farmer's market usually cost about the same as limp, insecticide sprayed fare that has been sitting in a grocery store for a couple of days after a week of transit. But even if it is slightly more, we're still talking a few dollars a day to eat tangibly better quality food. I don't know where you shop that you see more than a 50% markup for an organic version of the same food, but that certainly hasn't been my experience. If any type of food is breaking lower income peoples' budgets, its probably the unnecessary processed foods, and not basic raw foods.
Go ahead and look down on people for choosing quality over penny pinching, but I'd try to keep those opinions to yourself in public, since a lot of people will just consider you an ignorant cheapskate.
You wouldn't appreciate a brick machine if you've never had to make a brick. It would just be the new baseline for you.
It doesn't take long at all for the game to start branching out into different goals for you to pursue, such as tests of the 7 disciplines. When you get bored of one thing, explore a little and discover more about what there is to do in the game. Try to find a way to accomplish your goal without spending so much time on it. Its only when you single-mindedly pursue one goal at a time, and approach it with raw effort instead of finesse, that things get boring.
Forming or joining guilds is one easy way to avoid having to do so much boring work to accomplish your goals. You can get into a guild or make your own almost immediately after making it off the welcome island. Some people immediately reject this idea since on other games guilds are oriented towards the hardcore gamers, but in atitd, it is casual players who benefit most from guilds, and there are very few people who play for long without eventually joining one. Most join several different guilds, some of them their primary guild(s), and many others with specialized purposes. Your social networks will be more valuable to you in the long run than your resources or buildings, and social bonds aren't reset when the telling or beta ends. If you rule out the possibility of ever banding together with other players to accomplish things, or even just trading with more advanced players for things, then yes, you may find some aspects a little tedious, but the problem is in how you're approaching things.
Of course, for some players, any time at all not spent fragging n00bs will be intolerably boring, and those people will never see the draw of this sort of game.
Of course people have tried macroing in ATITD, but its not actually as useful as you'd think. It was only pervasive in a few areas, such as fishing, which had limited effects on the economy. In other areas it wasn't generally worth the effort of setting up and running a macro.
Thats because the game isn't all about gathering slate any more than other MMORPGs are about killing rats. The low technology that you mention is just how the game begins, and it isn't actually all that repetitive because it doesn't take too long to outgrow that stage.
Things like collecting grass and making bricks with it that are easily macro'd are things that you don't have to macro, because at moderate levels of technology you outgrow the need to do those things. You can grow grass in greenhouses and make bricks in brick machines much more efficiently. You can automate your mines. The game itself automates the things that are most tedious, and most susceptible to macroing.
More advanced technologies are much harder to macro because they require more human interaction, more thought, more diverse resources, and less grinding away. Some of them are also sufficiently entertaining that you wouldn't want to macro them.
I think you're underestimating the game based on a slow start. The beta of the second telling only has a few stone age technologies unlocked, so there is nothing very impressive to see yet, but if you had gotten a better mentor in your 24 hour trial of the first telling, you might have seen more of what keeps people interested in the game.
Whats off-topic is moderation advice from anonymous cowards. Your parent post is off on a bit of a tangent from the topic. But its not off topic from its parent, which is not off topic from its own parent. They follow a logical chain of discussion from the overall topic, which is conflict of interest in a news organization. Thats what discussion do, they drift into different corners of the topic.
There is a difference between off-topic and a mild tangent springing from the subjects raised by parent posts. And there is a difference between "troll" and a controversial but not inflammatory opinion that you don't agree with. If someone is making outrageous and irrational posts, you mark them a troll, but if they are saying something that you disagree with in a civil manner, you debate them. If we all agreed, there wouldn't be much of anything to talk about.
They are only going to bother exchanging currency for their major commercial competitors. There are already dozens of crappy second-tier MMORPGs out there that they wont be exchanging. These secondd tier games are real games that people actually designed to be fun and are played for enjoyment by players. There is no way they will exchange for all the small homemade games like this, so why would they ever exchange with a small homemade fake game that virtually nobody actually plays and is a transparently lame attempt to get money in horizons? If you don't count the graphics, there are thousands of muds with hundreds or thousands of players each, all of which have a real economy rather than a transparent fraud, and horizons obviously wouldn't transfer from MUDs, but they'd probably go for an established MUD before your game. You make it sound like there will be some automatic drone that will make these exchange decisions, but it will be human beings who aren't complete morons.
And how useful will your horizons money be in a few months anyway since the game is obviously on the road to financial oblivion already and cancellation?
Patents expire. So unless they think that change would come in the near future it wouldn't necessarily be relevant. Car companies are always coming up with funny concept cars that never make it into mass production. A patent on something frivolous like this doesn't necessarily mean that they've put a lot of thought into actually doing it.