If this system became important it would soon be so broken as to be noise only.

Evan has a pretty good ideal there, but really I think you only have a problem when you are taking the data too seriously. If you look at a persons profile page and judge that person you are the one making the mistake. The idea is to formulate a community that feels responsible for their actions/inaction. It’s a stepping stone to growing a social circle more efficiently.

Final note. I think the word of mouth on this could be very good. Uber raider guild #1231 implements it and that gets their enemies into the site. Then it gets the guilds recruits into the site. All of a sudden you have a nice little circle of feedback to go through the grinder. And Tide seems very competant with the grinder.

If this system became important it would soon be so broken as to be noise only.

At the risk of making a statement that is easier said than done; don’t make the system important and filter the noise.

The first part of that statement is fairly easy to do. If it’s just a feedback system that lets you see a person’s score then it isn’t going to be gamed as heavily. If you make a system that gives big in-game rewards for a high positive score then you’ll see it abused more than if the benefit of a high positive score is that more people will be asking you for help (because you’re high on the list of helpful people).

Filtering the noise is harder, but not impossible. By deprecating the value of a vote based on proximity between people on the social web the impact of reciprocal links and voting rings can be reduced. The voting links people possess can also be used to determine the ‘trustworthiness’ of their votes to allow for additional corrections.

Most people beginning these BBB’s in fact are just clustering together a tribe of friends from a niche group and declaring “we’re the smart ones, surrounded by idiots,” and approaching others, who often are their competitors in the same sector, with suspicion.

I agree, but if the members of this (and every other) niche tribe can’t use the in game trust system to see that they trust each other what use is it? If one of this niche group invites a RL friend to the game he’ll mark him as trusted. Now would the rest of this niche group want to trust this new player? Probably, depending on how much they trust the opinion of the person who invited him, but if you only have one trust value the in game highlighting won’t work and they’ll have to do things the old way anyway. Yes guilds do perform this role, but very coarsely.

I’m in my own niche, and I’ve seen one or two of this group of players stealing a kill/ripping off my friend. I don’t want to trust the new guy, and I might like him to be marked in some way. People who trust my opinion might like to have my dislike for this group passed on.

Those people might also be able to say, “hey I kinda like those guys, why are they marked down?”. When they see it’s me they might decide to stop trusting me as much, or the system might handle that for them if they mark the other guys up.

The maths for all this may or may not be possible without ways to game it, I’m a fan of Advogato like systems (yes I play Eve..) which Raph noted in his previous post don’t work too well for newbies. I think there’s ways around that problem, but a system with a single answer can’t cope with even fairly simple situations.

In WoW PvP Alliance and Horde would likely mark their sides good fighters up and the other sides good fighters down, so they know who to kill first. Which side would the single answer favour? You could have different trust systems for each side, but in general groups can’t be split with offline information and people organsing themselves into groups is inevitable.

Imagine people selling + votes for in-game gold or on eBay. From pools of alts created just to trade reputation back and forth. Supported by other pools of alts created just to generate fake reputation. Worse than that, imagine the same sorts of stuff perpetrated to blacken a players reputation.

If it is some sort of transaction that both players have a vested interest in and invest either in-game assets or in-game time to then it will be much harder to “fake” anything, not to mention too risky given the value of one’s own reputation as (presumably) such transactions will only occur between legitimate characters. Even then I think there would be problems.

Additionally they are, in my opinion, easier to abuse. A person forms a voting circle with a group of like-minded individuals and they will have a good score regardless of how badly they act since there is no way for their score to be lowered.

Of course systems that allow negative votes can lead to social griefing which is why I think a workable system needs to be able to be able to give votes greater or lesser weight dependent upon the originator.

Personally, I think it’s more appropriate in reality.