I've been kicking around an idea for an in-game, player regulated, reputation tracker for a while now but I have refrained from posting it because I feel like I'm missing something.
The basics:
Reputation: (High reputation modifies in-game factions slightly, allowing for better vendor pricing and early access to faction reputation gated things)
Vote up helpful chat answers, general positiveness
Vote down trollish behavior and hate speech. Enough down votes globally mutes a player
Karma: (High Karma increases the chance of a rare drop but is consumed when a drop is received, negative karma hurts drop chances and only decays over time)
Gain Karma: by being a great group member, (votes when a group breaks up after a minimum amount of time), actively in-game helping a player, spending time Mentoring depending on how the mentoring system works, and giving items to other players with much lower total gear score.
Loose Karma: Kill stealing, Training, Ninja looting, Quest NPC perma killing, BOT Farming (this could help prevent cash farmers from going to Pantheon) and other serious in-game toxic behavior that cannot be just muted.
There are tons of ways this system can be abused and miss used. Additionally vote down systems are considered dangerous enough tools for bulling that facebook will not use them but reddit does. My question to you guys is what, if any, social reward/penalty system would you like to see put in place and should it have any in-game ramifications?
Trasak
From Kilsin:
"We discussed many topics on reputation systems, leaving a + or - against players after grouping, points systems and many other variations and it all came back to player behaviour and reputation, in games like EQ and VG, these typically worked themselves out into a type of community justice system and if someone acted up and was an ass to someone else, that person on the receiving end would call for help and the community would usually unite to fend off the offenders, that is what social interaction and community bonding is all about, we have a much more mature community here and we believe you will all be fine in handling a lot of this stuff yourselves.
Players who act up will find it hard to group/raid/socialise/sell wares etc. to the point of hardly being able to play the game, so they have to adjust their attitude and fit in or risk being tarnished, and for those who just don't learn, we will have GMs and VR staff to deal with them. ;)"
(Source: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3134/in-game-reputation-system/view/page/1)
Hmm I should have searched, my bad. I still think it would be nice to have some way to directly reward people who help while I am otherwise incappable of providing some rewards. I would also put forward that word of mouth usually degrades in reliability if the population gets large enough without some form of Angie's list.
The problem with too much weight given to player input is that such input can be misused. There will be competition in Pantheon, not just in PvP but also in guilds going after world firsts or the best camps. The reputation system could be abused to harm enemies or competing players and start back-and-forth arguments over who did what, to the detriment of the community.
I'm all for personal ignore/foe lists, but not so much in favour of a server-wide or even game-wide system, especially one with automated punishments.
daemonios said:*snip* There will be competition in Pantheon, not just in PvP but also in guilds going after world firsts or the best camps. *snip*
This is one of reasons I was not liking my own idea. There will be plenty of situations where you will legitimately be unhappy with someone else while they have done nothing wrong. Even a character profile web page that others can look up and see what people have posted about you might be too much, both as a headache for VR and a tool for targeted abuse.
Trasak
Trasak said:Hmm I should have searched, my bad. I still think it would be nice to have some way to directly reward people who help while I am otherwise incappable of providing some rewards. I would also put forward that word of mouth usually degrades in reliability if the population gets large enough without some form of Angie's list.
Any system that you put in place that allows players to influence the gameplay of others based on good behavior or bad, can as easily become a method of the abuses that you're meaning to curb. The collectivism that you hope to foster in the game can then also be a tool to completely stomp on any indvidual, or other guilds.
Imagine the player who chooses to leave a big guild after bickering with a raid leader about some trivial matter. The system that you had in your OP would allow that whole guild to down-rate each and every thing that player ever said in public chat. Not because what they said was wrong, or trolling, or anything else. But the tool doesn't (and can't) interpret textual content. It will happily assume that the 40+ down-rates given that player are legit, and squelch that player.
Imagine the guilds fighting over contested content and using a rating system to attack the other guilds.
Imagine a person that speaks about a ninja looter being harrass thru the tool constantly by the ninja and his allies.
Imagine the moderation that would be needed to monitor and resolve accusations and untruths on a player's profile page, where anyone with a login can say whatever they like to unrightly discredit the player.
I hope that Pantheon has a more mature and kind community than many MMO's, but I have no faith whatsoever that there won't be a percentage that would use a rating system to make the lives of innocent people hell.
[edit]
And for the idea about influencing factions in game for good ratings; What's the stop guilds (and all their alts) from just using the system to min/max all their members for an unofficial "Big Guild Bonus".
I'll add my two cents, for what it's worth... The points made by others about large guilds abusing the mechanics seem feasible, however the system might be made smarter to account for these potentiual abuses by weighting downvotes both from the downvoter's own reputation and from same-guild downvotes. You'd have to play with the numbers, but it should be fairly trivial to take full downvote credit for the first 1-3 downvoters in the same guild IF their reputation was spotless. After that, more downvotes from the same guild could count for nearly nothing unless backed by a variety of downvotes from other reuptable people. Basically you'd be looking for a spread of reputable downvotes from players who aren't in the same guild, who don't spend > 20% of their time grouped, etc.
Additionally you could offer consequences to the reputation of those who downvote maliciously and be very vocal about these consequences whenever someone is about to downvote another player. Rife abuse will have to be spotted by GMs unfortunately. Being a staff engineer with a background in infrastructure and automation, I strongly detest anything that has to be handled by a person but I'm having a hard time imagining a system where consequences for malicious downvoting coud be safely automated. Having said that, just the possibility of losing reputation for maliciuosly downvoting someone else would likely prevent most mass-downvoting I suspect. Consequences would only be doled out for mass-abuse (which is where the danger lies in a downvote system, anyway).
On a final note, it seems a bit unfair to reward group players with literal loot bonuses for good karma (though I like the idea in theory) when considering solo players who might behave nicely and remain courteous but wouldn't receive good karma for it and, as such, would miss out on better loot despite behaving well in-game. I personally LOVE playing solo with a pet as much as I like grouping, but this rule would sway me toward grouping even if I felt like enjoying the game on my own for awhile. Just a thought. =)
Bruce
philo said:All I want is an area in game where I can keep private notes so I can keep a list of people with a short blurb about any issues we had.
^that should be enough to keep track of reputation.
Bingo. I love this. Just a small addition to our Friends/Ignore lists so we can remember why they made it onto whichever list they occupy.
It would be nice to be able to share friends and ignore lists and notes amongst friends and guild mates. I would hate to have a terrible experience with a troll who I add to my blacklist then my wife, when she is playing on her own, also has a terrible experience with said troll that could have been prevented if she had my list. Though now that I think about it I would guess that the ignore and friends list becomes a text file on your hard drive that you could infact email to everyone.
Trasak
However .. such elaborate reputation tracking mechanic could be a thing for factions
Where NPC's would not be just more inclined to talk to you, but may proactivly be of service, or skellies would show a necro which grave has burial gifts
Where NPC's would tell players about death toll, or NPC's set traps for certain players to protect their camps if they got raided too often
We had a very short phase of that upvoting and down voting set up on this very site in the early days. It is easily abused. People can gang up on someone they don't like or the reverse upvote their favorites..whether deserved or not. :) Very open to abuse and hardly fair for the persons concerned.
Rydan said:However .. such elaborate reputation tracking mechanic could be a thing for factions
Where NPC's would not be just more inclined to talk to you, but may proactivly be of service, or skellies would show a necro which grave has burial gifts
Where NPC's would tell players about death toll, or NPC's set traps for certain players to protect their camps if they got raided too often
What prevents horrible people from downvoting perfectly nice, polite and respectful people, just to be ... trolls.
I think in general everyone seems to be in agreement that anything that could be used by players to affect other players is likely enough to be misused as to make it unuseful. In general we are back to word of mouth and personal experience within game and perhaps guild forum/website sharing of personal experience out of game to know who we are likely to enjoy interacting with and possibly who we would not.
If you guys are willing to continue down the rabbit hole with me, I’d like to shape this conversation more into a discussion of what is good behavior and what is bad. It occurs to me that many of the next generation of MMO players may never have experienced a non-toxic online environment and so quite literally do not know how they are expected to behave. If there is nothing we could point them to then perhaps they could believe they are acting acceptably when in fact they are not and sadly “play nice” doesn’t really carry that far.
In other words what do you feel would be tenants of an in-game code of ethics or honor system?
What types of behavior do you find most positive and what types do you abhorrent? From intentionally training a pack onto a raid in order to wipe said raid to give your guild a chance first, down to leaving your mic open all the time with a greek soap opera playing in the background, old guild member was notorious for doing this.
This might be too deep of a topic for the boards or enough off topic from my original post to make this thread worthy of locking.
Thank you for your time,
Trasak
Feyshtey said:
What prevents horrible people from downvoting perfectly nice, polite and respectful people, just to be ... trolls.
I was talking about using such system for NPC's.
So, NPC's are horrible people ? ... maybe you have a point or offended some devs, lol
I think the assertion that any game has ever been "non-toxic" is something that probably needs to be discussed first, because a lot of arguments are contingent on this being true. It's important to look at this "per capita", as well.
Are games more toxic, or has the increasing popularity of games caused people to be exposed to more personalities? Does this inceased popularity increase the number of negative experiences, which demonstrably sticks out in people's minds far more than positive/neutral experiences?
What people perceive may not be an accurate reflection of how things actually are. That is my point.
People's perception of what is good or bad in values and respect change over time, albeit it slowly. So a game 20 year hence might deal with undesireble behaviour differently.
Stil I think Trasak has a valid concern
Personally I think that taking others into account, live and let live, has deminished in the past 20 years, though I also think that speed of communication compensates for a lot, if not more.
Letting the community deal with bad behavious could not be a bad thing.
Adding a system of reporting for excesses could take away the edge.
(I did not look up if there are such support systems planned)
Liav said:I think the assertion that any game has ever been "non-toxic" is something that probably needs to be discussed first, because a lot of arguments are contingent on this being true. It's important to look at this "per capita", as well.
Are games more toxic, or has the increasing popularity of games caused people to be exposed to more personalities? Does this inceased popularity increase the number of negative experiences, which demonstrably sticks out in people's minds far more than positive/neutral experiences?
What people perceive may not be an accurate reflection of how things actually are. That is my point.
I think games are more toxic now but they have never been non-toxic. It was perhaps less frequent in the early days but as video gaming has grown to appeal to larger more varied audiences and the fact that toxicity feeds on itself spreading in a positive feedback loop.
Back in my Half-Life multiplayer days and on into original Counter Strike I would figure you'd have jerks in around 1 in 5 games or so. Now? I'd say every other Overwatch match has it, when I played LoL it was around 75% of games, other games it's certainly up there.
Competition + Dependence on others to perform well for success + Public platform to express grievances = Toxicity
Makes me wonder if the toxicity was always there but public chat channels have given a much more public outlet for it. I don't play with public chat channels enabled unless I want to sell something. Even then it's hardly worth the tradeoff of being exposed to an entire server's worth of stupidity.
When I was younger I trolled EQ2 general chat like nobody's business. If it weren't for that platform I'd probably have reserved it to much less public-facing places, like third party forums.
Liav said:Competition + Dependence on others to perform well for success + Public platform to express grievances = Toxicity
Makes me wonder if the toxicity was always there but public chat channels have given a much more public outlet for it. I don't play with public chat channels enabled unless I want to sell something. Even then it's hardly worth the tradeoff of being exposed to an entire server's worth of stupidity.
When I was younger I trolled EQ2 general chat like nobody's business. If it weren't for that platform I'd probably have reserved it to much less public-facing places, like third party forums.
It's possible that it was less back then due to the lack of any kind of ranked play or matchmaking. Paired with older online games using server browsers instead of matchmaking so you could become a part of a micro community in the game when you found a server you liked and became loose friends with the other regulars.
Liav said:Competition + Dependence on others to perform well for success + Public platform to express grievances = Toxicity
Makes me wonder if the toxicity was always there but public chat channels have given a much more public outlet for it. I don't play with public chat channels enabled unless I want to sell something. Even then it's hardly worth the tradeoff of being exposed to an entire server's worth of stupidity.
When I was younger I trolled EQ2 general chat like nobody's business. If it weren't for that platform I'd probably have reserved it to much less public-facing places, like third party forums.
hehe, I dont use the avatar Q for nothing. :) I;ve had my troll moments and even enjoyed it.
Popularity ranking as described will just result in more griefing.
The population will determine actions if name changes and server transfer are not allowed.