Even then, you are not strict enough in your interpretation of the claims. This patent covers nothing more than tallying the number of times multiple players select a given attribute for their characters in an MMO. That is it. Whether you read it as a (patentese-speaking) engineer or a lawyer, that is literally it. (Unless it gets to a jury, in which case, all bets are off...)
That is why, IMO, it is a silly patent, and why I think it should have very limited negotiating leverage. Unfortunately, the current legal system does not differentiate between "infringing" and "infringing on a nigh-useless feature", and if a lawsuit is involved it is already too expensive to argue this difference. (For the legal-minded around here, from a pseudo-lawyer perspective, I think Rule 11 could use a little tweaking.)
All the other comments in this thread talking about the merits of this patent are absolutely baseless because the posters don't even know what claims are. Yet, this is the type of rhetoric that drives patent-related discussions on online forums these days. Why should anyone, least of all "your congress-critters", bother listening to you when you all literally don't know what you are talking about?
Some other points I'd like to address:
1. You say you could pose the problem to 5 engineers and get a solution -- but what if the problem itself is non-obvious? As an engineer, can you acknowledge that it's not always the solution that is clever, but the phrasing of a problem in a certain way, or heck, even the discovery of a problem, that leads to a solution? If so, where does "implementation" end and "invention" begin?
2. If you think getting a patent should be exponentially difficult these days, congratulations, you have what you wish for! The way prosecution goes these days, it is almost quantitative, whereby almost any combination of snippets of text in any publication anywhere in the world could be used to show obviousness, it is very difficult to get patents, regardless of the merits. The game now is not to claim "real" inventions, but something narrow enough that combinations of prior art do not "make obvious" yet something that somebody else will stumble upon inadvertently. Which is how you get stupidly narrow patents like this one... which people still end up infringing!
The patent system is a bit of a mess, but for many different reasons than what most here think.
I don't know what you do. There could be an issue of context here. All I can say is that from the context of someone like me there's very little in software development that deserves a patent these days, of ever.
In fact, I'll go farther than that: Having any kind of patent granted should almost be exponentially more difficult with the passage of time. As technology develops and we, as a species, learn and become more adept most engineering falls under implementation rather than invention.
What's the difference? If I take the same problem and give it to five different people skilled in the art and they can pretty much rattle off a proposed implementation in short order, it's umplementation, not invention.
In this particular case the claims start of by describing a networked game where users can choose characters and their attributes via a UI and their selections are stored in a database. It goes on from there. If you read it as an engineer there's absolutely nothing there that was "invented". If you read it as a lawywer, well, almost anything is possible.