Cross-Game Friendship Management Server
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Solution Overview
Problem
In conventional game systems, friendships are managed independently for each game, limiting the ability to transfer friendships between different games, and users face challenges in sending friend requests to users who may not play the same game, due to issues like duplicate names and high processing loads, as well as uncertainty about the other user's game participation.
Innovation Solution
A management server that communicates with multiple application servers and terminal devices, allowing users to search and send friend requests across different games by specifying conditions such as game usage and friendship status, while synchronizing user and friendship data to facilitate cross-game friendships.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If friendship is managed independently for each game server, then friendship data can be kept simple and game-specific, but users cannot send friend requests across different games and friendship cannot be transferred between applications
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges friendship management from multiple independent game servers into a single centralized management server. This server consolidates friendship data across different games and applications, enabling users to send friend requests across games while maintaining a unified friendship database that reduces overall system complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The management server provides universal friendship management functionality that serves multiple games and applications simultaneously. It handles friend requests, friendship status, and related operations across different game types (battle games, role-playing games, etc.) through a single multi-functional system.
2Ease of operation
If a search function is provided to find users across games, then users can locate potential friends, but processing load increases and duplicate names cause registration issues
Solution Approach 1:
The management server acts as an intermediary between users and the search function. Instead of requiring direct searches across all games, the server receives search requests, processes them centrally using optimized algorithms, and returns results. This mediator approach reduces processing load on individual game servers and handles duplicate name resolutions uniformly.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-processing and organizing user data in the centralized management server before search operations are needed. User profiles, including names and game participation information, are structured in advance to enable efficient searching without requiring heavy real-time processing when users search for friends.
3Reliability
If friend requests are limited to users who play the same game, then game participation verification is simple, but users cannot connect with friends from other games reducing social interaction
Solution Approach 1:
The patent adds a new dimension to friend requests by incorporating game participation status as a selectable criterion rather than a hard constraint. Users can specify whether they want friends who play the same game, different games, or any game at all. This dimensional approach to filtering maintains verification reliability while enabling versatile cross-game connections.
Data Source
AI summary
A management server is provided with an accepting unit for accepting identification information identifying an application, a specifying unit adapted for specifying a part or all of candidate users satisfying all of conditions out of one or more users with whom a request user's friendship is built in one or more utilized applications that the request user has utilized, a first condition in which the candidate user utilizes the application identified by the identification information, a second condition in which the request user's friendship with the candidate user has not been built in the identified application, a third condition in which a friend upper limit is not encountered, and a display controlling unit adapted for displaying the part or all of the candidate users specified by the specifying unit in the terminal device of the request user in order to select one or more users from the part or all of the candidate users.