Player-driven Reputation System: How and why
The MMO should have a system for player reputation in which players can rate their interactions with other players and check on another player's reputation before, for example, joining a group/guild with them.
Why player reputation is one of the most important aspects of an MMO
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Hero Fantasy: Player like to be known on the server, it is part of the power fantasy of being an epic hero. This was easier in the old days when MMO's had less players in one server, but new developments have shown that players like bigger servers to have an easier time to find groups etc and technology is now allowing for this. However, player reputation has suffered through this. It is harder to be remembered in a server with 10-50x the number of players as in the past.
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Accountability - Actions -> Consequences: Ninja looting, misbehaving, racist remarks, shouvinism etc have always been a problem in online games. The reason for that is that players are anonymous and there are rarely consequences to one's actions. If players are rate by others, they will think twice before acting out, which will result in more positive interactions between players and an overall better player experience.
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Immersion: If the actions of players have consequences, it will feel more like an alive world where players actions have consequences. Be nice and others might be nice to you later. This will result in deeper immersion and in a virtual world that feels more alive.
Linked from:
@Mr.NobodyIntegrating reputations into cities
Once the #tags system is in place, the gam can allow players to vote on which custom reputation #tags the city guards should react friendly or unfriendly to. A few examples:
- Players can vote for a city to be unfriendly to players that ninja loot.
- Players can vote for a city to be unfriendly to certain races (elves, orcs, etc).
- Players can vote for a city to be unfriendly to certain custom tags like #racism.
- Some cities can be friendly to players who engage in player-killing (city of thieves).
And this can also be used to determine the price of items in a city, giving discounts to players who have better reputations.
- In reply toMr.Nobody⬆:@Mr.Nobody
Preventing Abuse
To prevent abuse, we want to keep players accountable for the votes they give. Some ideas:
- only allow reports from players that have a minimum reputation (how earn first reputation then?).
- do not allow multiple-reports per hour. Multiple player can up/downvote the same report, but can't create multiple separate reports. This way, if the report is flagged as a "fake report" all those players that helped vote it up can lose points for participating.
- allow for different reputation depending on who is checking. A player might be loved in one guild but hated in another. So if your close friends hate someone, that person should display a bad reputation, even if overall on the server his reputation is good. The score given by people you respect (people you upvoted) should outweigh the score given by random other people from the server. This is also important for factions: elves might be at war with orcs, but inside each faction those heroes might be loved. Reputation should not be a "one score for all situations".
- In reply toMr.Nobody⬆:@Mr.Nobody
Implementing reputation #tags
A system like this should be pretty easy to use and understand. The approach that I think makes most sense is to allow players to rate others with a positive (+1) or negative (-1) punctuation on their actions in-game.
And to give this a bit more depth, there should be a handful of categories in which the player can be rate in.
Something like this:
The game would then generate an average of all of the votes received from the player, and use it to generate a final score that is displayed to other people they meet in the world.
And since rating issues change over time and different players might want to rate others on different aspects like RP-play, PVP, racism etc, the game could allow players to create additional categories like #tags to rate those players on:
- In reply toMr.Nobody⬆:@Mr.Nobody
Integrating the #tags into the game
The same #tags can be used for in-game faction reputations. Every faction reputation should consist of of 2 oposing factions, and the actions of the player will move him to be friendlier with one of the factions or another (or neutral with both).
So players who have a positive (+) reputation with a group of NPC's that is defending an area, will get a negative (-) reputation with the faction attacking it.
This allows players to individually decide which factions they wish to be friendly/unfriendly with, giving the game much more depth and freedom.