[MUD-Dev] Reputation & Trust Circles [was UO rants]

[Joe Andrieu]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wes Connell
> > The only real solution is to have players judge who is honest and
> > who is not.  But when you think about that, a whole new brand of
> > exploits involving cooperative cheating come into play, such as
> > using friends to build yourself up, or maliciously knocking down
> > the reputation of a good-hearted soul.  Right about here, you
> > realize it will take an extremely complicated system to accurately
> > capture true virtue, and you realize you could get 10 or 12 other
> > features in in that time frame. =)
>
> Agreed. Players are our bread and butter (for us commercial
> guys), but in
> the huge numbers that UO and EverQuest have the player
> population is too
> diverse to make collective decisions about other players.

Has anyone considered thinking about this in terms of trust circles
rather than as a global collective decision?

One problem with most player-based reputation systems I've heard of,
is that they assume a GLOBAL reputation.  Unfortunately, this
generates the expected problems, such as collaborative reputation
stacking, etc.  But I believe that if one were to build a mechanism
for reputations using circles of influence (or trust) it will achieve
much of what people are looking for.

A circle of influence (a sort of borrowed term I'm grabbing because it
is convenient) is a group that has agreed to share its information and
evaluations of individuals' reputations (and implicitly abide by the
shared version). Consider this for NPCs. Take for example the King's
Guard and a Thieves Guild.  People trusted by one group will not
likely be trusted by the other and all the members of either group can
be reasonably expected to have a similar outlook in terms of a
player's reputation. If one guard sees you stealing, it won't be long
before you are on the sh*t list for all the guards.

Take that concept and distribute it amongst the NPCs in those groups;
then, observations by individuals (e.g.. Thieves) can be integrated
into the reputation held by that trust circle (the Thieves guild).
Take it further and if different trust circles can communicate with
each other, then the beliefs of one circle can impact another,
depending on how they interpret the others' beliefs.  E.g., if the
merchant association thinks Shadowspawn is a thief, then they might
share that information with the Guards, who then consider Shadowspawn
a suspect (assuming a reasonable system of justice). On the other
hand, the Thieves Guild is unlikely to communicate with the Guards
about their membership, so there wouldn't be much communication in
that direction, unless the Guards see you hanging out with members of
the Guild, then you might get a reputation as a shady character.  On
the flip side, the Thieves could observe the Wanted Posters in the
post office and use that to understand how upstanding a potential
"recruit" might be--get a bad wrap with the Guards and the Thieves
might give you a chance to prove yourself. Have a clean reputation and
you won't even get a straight answer that anything like a guild even
exists. Your reputation can also be more explicitly developed, along
the lines of quests or tests or what have you, so that players can
earn a reputation with certain groups by helping them out, etc.

It's relatively straightforward to transfer this to player-run guilds.
If a Guild votes a player as an outcast, that information could
influence other Guilds positively or negatively.  So if you are put on
the Happy Tree Hugger guild's black list, the Evil Capitalist
Exploitation guild might be willing to give you a break when you need
one. And your reputation with a particular player's guild could also
influence your reputation with NPCs. The Clan of Death could easily
build a bad rapport with the guards, and anyone who is on good terms
with the COD is likely to be on the Guard's shady character list, and
possibly therefore get worse prices at upstanding merchants and better
deals from vendors in the black market.

That's the idea. Break reputations into trusted circles, both for
groups of players and NPCs.  Allow those reputations to be
determined/influenced by the members of the circle and allow circles
to communicate with other circles to modify their evaluations of
individuals. Have NPCs use these reputations to modify their behavior
towards particular individuals.

This is somewhat like the trust systems used in various security
contexts. I think JC posted a link to something like this, but I
couldn't find it in the archives.

Has anyone heard of any MUD using a system like this? Or thought about
a solution along these lines?

-j

--
Joe Andrieu
Realtime Drama

joe at andrieu.net
+1 (925) 973-0765





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