[MUD-Dev] Player run reputation system

[Jussi 'Sulka' Haro]

Hi!

I've given a thought for a user-driven reputation system for a MMORPG
and the most interesting mechanism that has come to my mind works like
this:

The game world contains a number of cities/villages/bases which
contain most of the NPC functionality such as trading, banking and
important quest elements. The villages have unique features but the
players aren't forced to visit any particular village.

Each character in the world has a "home" - one of the villages. A
player can change her home to the closest location she is to at any
time.

Each player can at any time determine whether they like or dislike any
other player they meet in the game. When setting someone as a good,
bad or "neutral" guy the player has the option of making the setting
visibly or invisibly to the affected party. The vote can be changed at
later time but there can be only one character->character relation
(ie, no multiple votes for/against one character).

The votes are calculated together on village basis, so that your
standing is different towards different villages.

When a player sees someone in the game, the character has a title
based on the reputation respective to the home of the player. (Lord
Ivan / Evil Ivan)

When a player changes her home, all the votes they've given follow the
player to the new home.

In addition to the reputation score given by others, the player has a
score of how many negative / positive points they've given to other
players. These two scores are compared, and if they go out of balance,
an additional title is given to the player. (Ivan the empathic / Ivan
the yapper) This helps people assess what kind of a person they're
dealing with.

When NPC's react to people, they adjust their behaviour according to
the reputation a player has in the village the npc is native to. For
merchants, this can range from lowering / rising prices and refusing
to sell to the player altogether. For quests, an evilish NPC can
refuse to deal with someone who's been too kind to others!

The NPC reactions would also be geared so that if they meet someone
with very little votes from the NPCs village, the NPC would be
somewhat suspicious of the player. This would make it beneficial for
the players to set their home to be the area they are in at the time.

One of the design principles has been that movement in the world is
somewhat slow, with no instant teleportation in the likes of UO around
at all.

The strong point in the system is it's player run (vs automatic) and a
single character can be evil in one part of the world and good in the
other.

Technically this is slightly demanding due to the amount of data but
then that's only a technical limitation. :)

Any comments?

Sulka
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