A voting system under review by PlayStation.
Sony has published and registered a patent for a voting system that allows viewers to remove players from games. The patent, titled “Spectators Vote to Bench Players in a Video Game”, was filed in January 2020 and was granted on Tuesday.
The feature described allows spectators to vote to remove (or “bench”) players, send them messages to warn them to play better or even pay to remove them. In the patent, Sony details a situation where a certain number of spectators are watching a game (specifically indicates Twitch as an example).
According to the patent text and accompanying schemes, viewers then have access to a menu that allows them to vote to remove (or “bench”) a specific player from the game. The diagram shows the viewer getting four options to choose from: “remove player from game”, “warn player to improve”, “provide custom message” or “keep in game”.
Their vote is then compared to the votes of the other spectators and if the total number of “remove player” votes reaches a certain threshold, the player will be removed from the game. Sony says “the method can also include animation of player removal and provide visual cues to other players or viewers as to why the player was removed from the game.”
The patent also shows an alternative situation where viewers can pay to have a player removed, either with real money or in-game currency. Like all patents we do not know if and when it will ever be implemented, however it is a very interesting project.
Source: Kotaku
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