[MUD-Dev] Reputation systems: a possible path for investigation

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

J C Lawrence wrote:

> Reputation systems

A very interesting post.  A few comments from my experiences and
knowledge:

> Guilds and other player group formations have partially coopted
> this reputation space, using membership and internal group
> management as a way of establishing and maintaining reputation at
> a group level ("He's a member of guild XXX.  They're all PKers!").

[snip]

>   Of course if these needs and wants were fully satisfied by the
>   base system it would remove one of the significant functions
>   which drive group formation and interaction on our services.
>   Depending on the exact definition of your service and audience
>   this could be a problem.  In the general case however I expect
>   that the other forces which drive group formations like guilds
>   would still dominate.  However it would change some of the basic
>   definition and functions of guilds with games.

One interesting thing about Meridian 59 is the information economy.
One of the biggest bonuses of allying yourself with another guild is
getting their information about opponents, particularly which
character builds often do the fighting, and what strategies
particular opponents rely on. "Bubba likes to rely on bows a lot and
we don't, so casting Winds to counteract his bow is the best
option."

When the PK hunters are most active, you will regularly see lists
posted of known PKers and their fighting styles.  A fully developed
reputation system would definitely hinder a niche group like this.
The tradeoffs are interesting.

One huge pitfall of having an automated reputation system instead of
a player-driven one is people attempting to game the system in order
to provide false information.  In most cases there will be a way for
someone to use mules or cronies to skew the system in their favor.
With player judgement behind the reputation systems, you have a few
more common-sense failsafes.  (Example: That person has been accused
of being a scammer twice, and his only supporters are rather
young/low level characters few people have heard of....)  This isn't
to say that players cannot be fooled as well, but there is a
difference.

That difference is that people will accept that humans make
mistakes, but will probably expect a reputation system provided by
the game to be much less prone to error.  It's easier for humans to
quickly adjust information that has been demonstrated to be
incorrect.  If you as a designer allow any significant amount of
errors into your system, you will most likely find that people will
not pay attention to the system you're provided.

> Content creation costs are a significant expense, making community
> authored content attractive -- if only the risks of "bad content"
> could be managed (where bad can refer to legal branding, service,
> product definition or other implications).  Reputation systems are
> a possible approach to helping to automate the detection and
> handling of bad content so that human supervision and vetting
> costs for instantiating and official sanctification of community
> derived "good content" (if your model calls for that) can be
> constrained.

While interesting, the biggest problem with player content creation
remains: copyright infringement. This is the single biggest thing
that keeps us commercial types up all night when it comes to player
content. Even the nicest person that is loved by all can
"accidentally" violate copyright, potentially getting the game
operators into a whole bunch of trouble.  Most big companies don't
want the liabilities, and most smaller companies couldn't survive
the lawyers that large companies would send at them for copyright
infringement.

This also falls prey to people that try to game the system.  If a
player can get a good rep from his mules and cronies in order to use
your system as his personal warez FTP server, I'm sure someone will
do that if the costs aren't prohibitive.

My thoughts,

--
"And I now wait / to shake the hand of fate...."  -"Defender", Manowar
          Brian Green, brian at psychochild.org  aka  Psychochild
         |\      _,,,---,,_      *=* Morpheus, my kitten, says "Hi!" *=*
   ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_               Meridian 59
        |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'        http://www.meridian59.com/
       '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)            An online RPG with character
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