[MUD-Dev] Trust systems and Player-Run Reputation

[Travis Nixon]

The whole bit about Reputation systems and Advogato (though I'll be
the first to admit I am nowhere near grasping Advogato's
practicality) has set me to thinking.

I'm going to run on ahead and venture a guess that a lot of you are
in agreement with me that a reputation system based on the thoughts
of the players themselves would, in fact, be the best possible
solution (or at least a very good one) in a world where you want
something like reputation to be a factor.

And I think many would also concur that a bad solution is worse than
no solution at all.

Anyway, at the risk of reinventing the wheel (proposing a good idea
that has been discussed many many times before) or reinventing the
square (proposing a good idea that has absolutely no practical
impact on the problem), here's a thought:

Let's say that I have the opportunity to rate everybody I meet on a
scale.  Doesn't matter what the scale is, in fact there could be
many scales.  But for the purposes of keeping things simple, let's
say our scale is appropriately meaningless, a scale from Good to
Evil.

Now that's all well and good, but the true goal here is to be able
to get ratings on people I've never met before, that I've never had
the opportunity to rate.  I don't particularly need to be informed
that I rated that griefer Boffo "Absolute Evil", because he totally
screwed me over and I remember his name with utter prejudice.  What
I want to be able to do is avoid other people who are "Absolute
Evil" that have done similar things to other people, and to be able
to warn others about Boffo.

Of course, player rating systems have various pitfalls, the primary
one being abuse.  Who do I believe?  Do I believe the ratings of the
whole guild of griefers all of whom rated each other "Angelic"?
That can really be a problem if the guild has a lot of members.

So here's my new (to me) proposal: I want to believe the ratings of
people who rate others in the same way I do.  So when I run across
Bubba for the first time, a scan is done of the player database (and
I know I made a whole lot of people cringe just now, but ignore the
technical problems for now) and a rating is figured for me based
primarly on the ratings of people who also rated Boffo "Absolute
Evil".  Somebody who gave Boffo an Angelic rating is going to have
almost no impact on the rating shown to me.  There's a very real
obvious benefit here.  If Boffo and Bubba are members of that
griefer guild, their opinions of each other have nothing to do with
my view of them, because I already know Boffo is a jerk.  The fact
that they've all rated each other Angelic has no impact on me,
because I already know Boffo is a jerk, so I won't believe any of
them, since they all think Boffo is Angelic.

Obviously, there are problems.  First, and most important, it
wouldn't work unless the rating system was used, and used heavily.
By everybody.  If somebody you meet does a good turn for you, you
have to improve their rating.  If somebody's a jerk, you have to
decrease it.  If players don't use it, it won't work.  Obviously. :)
I'm not sure how to solve this, other than by making the system very
easy to use, and trying to impress upon the player populace how
important it is.  Well, if they want it to be useful, anyway.

The second problem, which is almost as severe as the first, is that
it is extremely imperfect for new players.  The idea is that the
more people you rate, the more closely you'll be matched with people
whose views are similar to your own.  But if you're new, you simply
haven't rated anybody else, so there's no way to do any matching.
I'm not sure how to solve this one either, other than going back to
a popular-vote system, where the rating shown to you is a global
average.  If the system were widely enough used, though, this might
not be too much of a problem, and once you've rated a few people,
any errors would (hopefully) begin to self-correct.

The third probelm is the reason you all cringed back there.  There
are definately technical issues, especially if you're talking about
a large player base (which I think is pretty much a requirement for
this to work anyway).  For example, you have the (unlikely)
potential for every player rating every other player.  You need to
have somewhere to store all those ratings. :) And, needless to say,
you really don't want to be scanning through the entire player
database every time you need to get a rating.  Wish I had a solution
for this one off the top of my head, but I don't.  That doesn't mean
there isn't one, just that it requires more thought than just
pulling something off the top of my head. :)

It also could be very interesting to apply something like this to
NPCs, or at least groups of NPCs (ala some sort of faction system),
but then your technical issues only grow.

Anyway, there you have it.  The latest probably unworkable idea from
that twisted brain of mine...

Hrmm.  You know...I've been looking at Advogato's trust metric in
bits and pieces as I'm writing this, and I'm starting to think that
maybe I just did the MUD layman's writeup of their metric, or at
least something very like it.  I'm still not sure though.

Ah well.  Just goes to reinforce my idea that there are no more good
ideas.  Somebody's thought of them all.  It's just a matter of
finding them and applying them. :)

...

More time passes, been reading more at advogato.com and have come to
the conclusion that this is not Advogato's trust metric, but is
extremely similar to this one: (link also provided by JC in his last
post on the subject) :)

  A Distributed Trust System:

    http://advogato.org/article/261.html

Now I'm going to go ahead and send this off, before I have to admit
to having absolutely no creativity whatsoever.  LOL

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