Raph's Website » Answering Michelle: Pooling CS data

Answering Michelle: Pooling CS data

November 17th, 2006 (Visited 3228 times) Tags:

This popped up in a comment thread, and I thought it was a good question to post as an actual post.

All VWs with rules suffer to some degree exploits and avoidances of those rules. Traditionally the people running the VW deal with their troublemakers alone, banning just them. However I’m willing to bet that those abusing one game will do so again in another. Will the time come where separate VW managements share details of those who break their ToS, resulting in “banned in one, banned in all”?

The short answer is “it’s illegal.” Sharing info like that would require sharing information about the real-life identity attached to a given account. This stuff is all locked away and subject to privacy policies — not that this alone prevents it from being shared. After all, companies exist that buy mailing lists. No, the real issue is that for most of the virtual world operators, identity is tracked by credit card in some fashion. After all, the rest of the fields can be entered as mostly garbage; the one sure guarantor of identity right now is the card. And you can’t share credit card info, of course, by law.

It’s getting to be less and less of a good identifier, of course. The average household these days has over ten credit card number floating around, and it’s easy to get more if you really want them. Ironically, the credit card companies do have pooled information, in the form of the credit bureaus. But the credit bureaus have special status.

This is one of those things that comes up every few years. “Wouldn’t it be nice if..” After all, if EA went to all the trouble of identifying tons of nasty griefers, wouldn’t it be nice for Blizzard to skip the hassle of identifying them all over again? Arguably, it’s not a real advantage to EA to share said database anyway — after all, they weeded through the griefers already, so if Blizzard has a higher dose of them until they manage to weed them out, all other things being equal it’s actually a competitive advantage for the company that has the “cleaner” user base, so to speak.

There’s also the question of whether you want this sharing to happen. What if one service banned you not for true griefing, but for the equivalent of political reasons? It’s really not that unusual for people who are passionate about a cause and somewhat intemperate in forum speech to get banned. Should they be banned from virtual worlds for life? What if they were a punk teen when they told the forum mods that they were f- c-ks-g m-f- b- sm-gm-g-bbl-g horseradish c-s? Is there a statute of limitations? Juvie court?

Longterm, what many have advocated is needed is a system of persistent reputation that carries beyond a single given virtual world. This would serve merely as a way for CS reps, doing things the usual way, to quickly get a “background check” on users. Said independent service, perhaps akin to Playerep, would of course have to be bought into by the companies as a useful tool, but more importantly be bought into by the bulk of the users, to make it worthwhile.

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Faith wrote on November 17th, 2006 at 5:50 pm:

[...] Comments [...]

Mega search cover cd wrote on November 17th, 2006 at 11:51 pm:

Original post: Answering Michelle: Pooling CS data by at Google Blog Search: t it

Jeff Freeman » Banning wrote on November 18th, 2006 at 10:12 am:

[...] Michelle asked the following question in a comment thread over at Raph’s place, to which he posted a reply front-page-update style. All VWs with rules suffer to some degree exploits and avoidances of those rules. Traditionally the people running the VW deal with their troublemakers alone, banning just them. However Iâ€™m willing to bet that those abusing one game will do so again in another. Will the time come where separate VW managements share details of those who break their ToS, resulting in â€œbanned in one, banned in allâ€? [...]

Darniaq: Verbosity Unleashed wrote on November 19th, 2006 at 1:55 am:

futurist concepts, to the dupe bug in Second Life. I just haven’t had much time to do anything but work and, well, go home and work. It really kinda bites because it’s dropped even my gaming time down to nothing, and I just got my hands on

Multiverse Network :: View topic - Question about global banning of exploiters here in MV wrote on August 12th, 2007 at 5:40 pm:

[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/17/answering-michelle-pooling-cs-data/ What Raph Koster discusses here is if you catch and document someone breaking a EULA and can legally ban that persons account, can you ban his accounts in other games? I was thinking, that since MV is taking care of the billing for all of our games, then technically they are able to ban someone in all MV based games. Since Raph said that it would be tricky otherwise, due to sharing credit card info which would likely be the only reliable way to track a players account. Would this be something MV would consider doing, since if there is one major problem with exploiters, gold farmers, and hackers, is that they just go on to another game, or boy another account and start doing the same thing. But their credit card is likely to remain the constant._________________CEO and lead developer of “Feudal Times” … A Medieval Sim/Adventure [...]

Michelle Readman said on November 17th, 2006 at 5:02 pm:

A typo, your 3rd paragraph: “all other thigsg being equal”
Seperate comment so you can hide the evidence

Michelle Readman said on November 17th, 2006 at 5:16 pm:

Thank you, Raph!

I actually thought it may be something you’d like to write a proper post in response to!

I didn’t know that passing of credit card details was illegal, but I am sure glad to hear that it is.

The long term solution really rests in being able to acquire some form of persistant identifier for the player. Such a thing will benifit more than just virtual world operators, I can see online shops and even those systems traditionally considered ‘offline’ (banks, etc) finding a reputation system useful.
But for this to be, the persistant identifier issue needs to be solved, be that by force (laws), biometrics or even simple rewarding the persistant voluntary use.

I’m going to have to go digging through your past articles on reputation now, as I know you’ve written on this before.

Raph said on November 17th, 2006 at 5:19 pm:

Pff, you clearly haven’t hung around the blog enough, or you’d know that only one typo is remarkably low!

Or my wife hadn’t caught it yet.

Michelle Readman said on November 17th, 2006 at 5:29 pm:

True, true, but I try to be kind… and I normally wouldn’t pay so much attention to the typos, but I think I’m excused in this case

Myself, I tend to just type the entire wrong word or verb form, which is strange considering I only speak english…

Been reading here for quite a while now, although I tend to lurk on blogs. Helps to ensure that when I comment, I manage to stay more professional than I’d be on a typical forum.

That said, I do use emoticons/smilies more than most, in an attempt to get around the problems with a text based medium. Just like the tone of the writing, which I normally adjust to what I’m replying to.

So don’t be offended if I don’t reply more in the future. I’ll still be reading, just making an effort to not troll you

Although you could argue that citing this blog regularly on forums on matters of game design is indirectly doing just that

Rik said on November 17th, 2006 at 9:42 pm:

All VWs with rules suffer to some degree exploits and avoidances of those rules.

Let’s dig deeper into the Second Life pit.

There are these things called “Camp chairs”. You sit in them, and you are given in-game money. Sit for 10 min, get 2 “Linden Dollars”, almost a penny US. Some are not actually chairs, they are bean bags, or dance pads or something more interesting. Now this doesn’t seem to be a good way to earn money until you review your choices: 1) “Escort” service or 2) Learn to build and create interesting in-game objects which you can then learn to market to a diverse group of people. Option 2 will take weeks, if it ever pays off, and some up front capital. And my wife would really frown at option 1. “But honey, I needed to get a cool ray gun HUD”. Then comes the real electric bolt of energy: You can do it AFK. Set the computer to a good spot, go to bed, get up, 100 Lindens, baby. Go to work, come home, another 100. That’s almost a dollar US, and all it cost me was 16 hours of having the computer on. (wait a second, how much does that cost me? I better not look too closely. )

OK, so now we have the player motivation for sitting, why is anyone paying them to sit? Well, the in-game search engine lists everything by trafic. The more “popular” a place is, the better, right? And any place with 12 AFK zombies all night long must be a very good place to shop, clearly.

To make matters worse, those people, afk with their cool hair and color changing shoes cause what is nowadays called lag. It makes it difficult even with a top of the line computer to visit that location and walk around. Builders often hide the campers upstairs but the radius for loading objects appears to be an x/y circle and it loads things at all heights. (That’s “appears” as in “seems to me”, feel free to correct me if you know the score.) And if you don’t play this game, you are unlikely to rank well and get good traffic, even if your mouse trap is better. And while it doesn’t cost much to get those zombies, your business is unlikely to be making much. (Speculation about how many businesses can afford a small group of zombies and still break even removed as out-of-scope for this rant.)

So now we have the newbie players and the high-end landlords exploting the system, making it look like there are more people online than there really are. I wonder why Linden Labs doesn’t crack down on this? (That was sarcasm, by the way. I point it out because sarcasm on web pages is often misread. Clearly Linden Labs is trying to punch up their numbers to appease current investors and attract new ones. My point is they do it at the expense of their existing content, customers, and the tool that helps them find each other.)

StGabe said on November 18th, 2006 at 12:19 am:

You’d have to make it an opt-in service.

That is, plenty of agencies do circulate private information, including financial information, they just do it with permission from the people in question. To setup a global griefer database you’d have to require users to opt-in to sharing their credit card information in order to play your game. As far as I can tell it would be legal at this point although it may have some sort of consumer backlash (at which point it might make sense to essentially recreate a “credit bureau” which essentially holds the griefer database in escrow and does not publish it but allows queries on specific credit card holders).

Of course, as Raph alludes to, this would require cooperation among multiple vendors. While EA doesn’t benefit from sharing with Blizzard it may benefit from a mutual relationship but it would still be hard to create that relationship in the first place. “Competitive advantage” assumes that the market is zero sum.

And of course, it just isn’t that hard to get another credit card. That is probably the biggest problem with all of this.

StGabe said on November 18th, 2006 at 12:25 am:

And of course getting past the multiple credit card problem means that at some point we’d have to use other, better forms of ID. It’s not out of the question. I give my SSN to my landlord, my bank, my employer, my insurance, etc. Why not an MMO that I (hypothetically) spend 20 hours a week on? I’m skeptical of what an MMO would do with that but not particularly more skeptical than I am of my landlord.

Cael said on November 18th, 2006 at 5:34 am:

It seems to me that something like the ubiquitous MS Passport might be useful. Of course, there are a myriad ways around it but it presents a further layer of inconvenience which might deterr the “casual griefer”.

Grimwell said on November 18th, 2006 at 6:05 am:

I’m going to jump back to Raph’s answer to Michelle’s question.

Orrey said on November 18th, 2006 at 8:32 am:

Yes - Since its so easy to come up with another card , or even IP the only way something like this would work is in reverse. Like StGabe sugested a Opt-In service. I here-by copywrite “Golden Rep” you register with the service and keep your nose clean, pay on time etc. Companies could make it worth your while by giving perks or a discount to Golden Rep players, say 12.95 instead of 14.95 or the like. If it really caught on so that companies could be assured of large population of low trouble, low support complaint players, they could even make High rep rated servers only. Give players an incentive to keep a good rep, carrot is easier to support and inpliment than the stick. This would give advantage to players also if the Rep service had search functions, find your old buddies from such and such see where they are today etc.

Grimwell said on November 18th, 2006 at 8:50 am:

Strange… I did have an answer when I typed it this morning. Now that I check back it’s gone?

My basic point that was while it’s illegal for companies to trade customer data, any company who has multiple games can use it across their games legally. Say Turbine bans someone in Asheron’s Call for being a jerk, they could ban them in DDO simultaneously if they so chose…

I don’t think that a cross-game banning is smart though. I’d ban them in the game that they made the mistake in, and then put them on a ‘watch list’ in any other subscriptions they maintain — for an object lesson to work (banning) you have to give it a chance to sink in, and then give the person involved a chance for redemption.

Raph said on November 18th, 2006 at 12:01 pm:

Jeff Freeman’s answer to this is worth reading.

Riflenomican said on November 18th, 2006 at 3:00 pm:

I agree with the first half of Jeff’s article, but allowing people to control who get’s rez’ed and not… All I have to say is “Beware of Mega-guilds.”

I could imagine a situation where 3 or 4 major guilds on a server would team up to totally control the server. Forcing people to pay their extortion or be eliminated from the server.

I believe in giving the player the ability to shape the world, but I’m not for giving players the ability to control the world.

Amaranthar said on November 18th, 2006 at 9:30 pm:

The only way I can see anything working would be for game companies to only allow players from a player buyer’s union to play. The buyer’s union (or buyer’s group, whatever you want to call it) would pay for the accounts and charge the players themselves for the accounts they purchase, through the union. If an account gets banned in any game, that credit card holder has gets his account with the union closed. In such a situation, the only one who would know an individuals credit card and identity info would be the union.

Problems with this idea abound, and they are basically the same as with any other idea tossed around here. And I agree with Jeff that this whole idea is very uncomfortable in several ways.

My thinking has been for a long time that you can’t control some peoples desire to cheat, but you can make the game play so that cheating is hard to do in the first place. Static spawns with static loot, especially high end loot, would be the first thing on a long list of things to change.

Steven "PlayNoEvil" Davis said on November 18th, 2006 at 10:04 pm:

It may be possible to share information without revealing credit card numbers using slightly clever cryptography…we were looking at doing this to address a “problem shopper” issue for online stores, but it could be done for VWs.

Is that the only limitation?

After all, casinos have a common “black book”.

kim said on November 18th, 2006 at 10:30 pm:

Hmm… As far as “illegal”, yes, it seems it would be if you’d made a promise not to share, but then I suppose you could state it outright in the terms of service.

Regardless, it seems you could have a third party company that keeps and reports on such info much in the same way that there are 3rd party companies that you can obtain credit history on, given permission from the end customer.

Which makes me wonder… how long will it be before credit agencies start tracking this kind of thing as well. One could make the arguement that being prone to behavior in an MMO that gets you banned is an indication that you are a poor customer to enlist into that world - just as much as one that might miss a payment or two! Hmm…

Regardless, I think there’s another parallel from the credit-history/reputation thing: It’s a free market economy, and any companies banding together to ban someone would just open an opportunity for someone else to take them on. Someone might offer to take them on for a higher monthly subscription fee, the difference used to monitor them more closely. Or the “losing ground” mmo might take them on out of desperation to make their numbers.

Kev R. said on November 19th, 2006 at 4:31 am:

This talk of cross game punishments is missing out entirely on the reason that people “grief”. It’s exactly the same as bullying; bullies bully because they know that they’re getting an emotional response at the other end. Griefers in game know that they are wasting someone’s time, wrecking their stuff, ensuring that the pleasurable gameplay they were hoping for doesn’t happen. This affects the guys running the game because gamers who aren’t enjoying themselves stop paying the subs. This IMHO is why companies come down much harder on mere griefers than they have done on gold farmers; farmers don’t stop people paying their subs, if anything they encourage more subs!

By breaking down griefing to this basic emotional level is how we encourage people not to do it. I’ll give an example: a few years back I was an admin on a CS1.6 server (soon to be again on a Surce server this month, woohoo!) The solution I had for teamkillers and time wasters was always the same. Firstly, never ban! This only encourages the “right, I’m gonna get past their ban” mentality. Just like being jailed makes people want to escape. They’d be back in seconds with a new Steam account number. The trick was to waste people’s time. I’d kick them from the server, without banning. Then wait for them to come off and start mouthng off at the “dead” players waiting for a new round. With 1 second left to go before the round start, I’d kick them again. Usually 3 or 4 kicks was enough to make them realise that the only “fun” being spoiled was their own.

We should be taking a long hard look at what a griefer is trying to achieve. Ban them from one game, and they’re back with a new account name causing trouble again. But keep them playing, only with severely reduced abilities for a while and they start to realise that their way isn’t working.

Jeff Freeman said on November 19th, 2006 at 6:59 am:

farmers donâ€™t stop people paying their subs, if anything they encourage more subs!

Strongly disagree with this.

Farmers frequently obstruct game play, just like griefers. You have a quest to kill 10 rats. Rats drop even slightly more cash than other mobs and die even slightly faster? You will have to compete with farmers for the spawn, 24/7. They’re motivated by a need to succeed in order to keep their jobs and feed their families. You’re motivated by a desire to complete the quest in spite of having general apathy toward rat-killing otherwise.

But probably if you see they don’t speak English (after asking them to let you pretty-please kill some rats too for a minute), then you’ll assume they are farmers and call them names. Sometimes this means you’re the griefer, ’cause sometime they’re not farmers (actually you hurt their feelings even if they are farmers, though few folk care about that). So now they’ve even managed to grief-by-proxy all the non-English speaking players, and turned non-griefers into jerks for a bit, too.

They inflate the p2p economy by creating a huge amount of money which would not have been created otherwise. This can result in making some things more tedious to achieve, if not so boring that you turn to eBay to buy your way around it, from them. Some players refuse to consider doing that even if they find the task too tedious - so they quit the tedious-to-them game.

This impacts a great deal more players than the odd random griefer (which may very well be a gold farmer trying to grief you away from his spot - he has a quota to meet). The economic impact might not be directly realized, but it’s there, and they are why. It’s not “total destruction of the economy” as I’ve seen some say, but definitely inflation which makes some gameplay, in some places, more tedious and less fun.

It is completely vile that the game-money they’re selling is produced by the very activity which creates more demand for it. To me, that is tons worse than just being a dick.

How do you suppose they increase subscriptions, though?

Jeff Freeman said on November 19th, 2006 at 7:16 am:

Riflenomican wrote:

I agree with the first half of Jeffâ€™s article, but allowing people to control who getâ€™s rezâ€™ed and notâ€¦ All I have to say is â€œBeware of Mega-guilds.â€

It had a very small number of users compared to even a single-server’s population in an MMO. There weren’t enough players combined to form a mega-guild.

Though even if they did, the mega-guild just becomes “the users”. Having to join it to really play, it’s just an in-game review of the initial application process at that point.

That sort of thing just turns into what the a game is about, though. Inter- and Intra guild drama, rise of a single central government, politicking within and rebelling against without. Sucks if you’re there to pull whiskers off rats, but I bet there’s an audience for that on the MMO level.

It won’t happen now til some MMO publisher has so many games there’s just nothing else left.

But really, I mentioned the player-control thing only to say, “When turning over control to the players, I had to consider just how much control I actually had. Character deletion was it. Banning was a farce.”

Raph said on November 19th, 2006 at 8:07 am:

Basically, with a system like that what happens as the game gets bigger is that there’s rival groups willing to rez different people for different reasons. When it’s small enough, you get one group. At larger scales, you get two or more, and probably one of them will be made up of aggressors who rez bad guys and the other of defenders. Then it becomes a culture clash, classic “rise of civilizations” sort of thing.

As one might expect, it’s the ruthless ones who end up winning a war of attrition.

Raph said on November 19th, 2006 at 8:10 am:

Hmmâ€¦ As far as â€œillegalâ€, yes, it seems it would be if youâ€™d made a promise not to share, but then I suppose you could state it outright in the terms of service.

Regardless, it seems you could have a third party company that keeps and reports on such info much in the same way that there are 3rd party companies that you can obtain credit history on, given permission from the end customer.

It’d only be illegal if you break privacy laws regarding financial info, at least here in the States. Opting-in for sharing other sorts of data happens all the time — every time you say “yes, share my info with select partners who might send me special offers,” that’s what you are agreeing to. Unless we’re talking about minors. In the EU, privacy laws for online databases have more stringent standards, I believe.

But yes, third-parties who basically get special safe harbors of some sort can build DBs of financial info. I don’t know the details, but that’s how credit bureaus and all those pesky credit card, mortgage, car loan, and other junk mail offers find you.

Steven "PlayNoEvil" Davis said on November 19th, 2006 at 11:06 am:

A couple of comments on identity and reputation systems. First, you can’t have a meaningful reputation system without a credible identity system. If players can create arbitrary reputation identities without a meaningful link back to a “hard” identity, it can easily be spoofed and griefed.

While a lot of us focus on credit cards for intra-game authentication, increasing numbers of players in the US use anonymous stored-value cards that are further weakening identity. These cards are also widely used outside of the US.

The issue of online identity is becoming critical for a lot of folks online (not just game companies). Without credible identity, there is no trust, with no trust, you can’t do commerce… and things go downhill from there.

Allen said on November 19th, 2006 at 12:54 pm:

In principle and as a player advocate I cant agree this is a good idea AT ALL…

What criteria are you going to use to determine whos a bad apple? (besides an arbitrary one)

And who gets to frame that criteria? (You really want to propose credit breau-like domination of the game space? Think about how this would morph over time? Regulation only EVER expands….and what happens when that which you propose eventually seeks to regulate you (a designer).

Game Companies are already ass-backward when dealing with players, how can designers on the one hand promote increased community involvment while also proposing black listing players? I think improving player-dev-company relationships would go a lot farther

There are better ways to facilitate order among players, and it seems to me that the values and mechanisims you opt to instill in your VW are more important in preventing griefing than the business end of a nerf-ban-bat….

I think players expect a little more imagination and creative solutions from designers than some crude police state mechanisim.

VW that are secure and safe and pleasant to be in, but mostly empty are not extremly fun….thats the risk of a heavy handed approach

The goal should be optaining player buy in for the value proposition of your VW, no player buy-in to use thier information against them at some future date if they happen to piss you off….

StGabe said on November 19th, 2006 at 7:41 pm:

Companies would just get data. It’s up to them to decide what to do with it.

They would see that, you had been banned by company X. They may or may not care about that. Maybe they find that company X bans in a fashion that is far too arbitrary for them and they ignore that data.

How many bans does it take to get auto-banned from your service? That is also a decision to be made. Maybe you auto-ban someone if they’ve ever been banned elsewhere. Maybe not. Maybe it takes 3 bans or you get X point to lose. Maybe your subscription rate just increases for prior bans. Fines aren’t a perfect punishment but they’re the best things we’ve come up with for most smaller crimes in real life.

Our current, real life justice system, is already fairly arbitrary at times. Odds are good that someone was once arrested and successfully convicted for something that you have done. Yes, that’s a problem. But you can’t have justice without getting your hands dirty and setting (probably imperfect) lines and attempting to enforce those.

I’m not sure I’m in favor of something like this but I do think that a lot of the objections aren’t necessarily relevant. I do think that we can find a way around privacy restrictions. I don’t think the punishments we might enforce would be perfect but I also don’t think this means that nothing can or should be done at all.

JuJutsu said on November 20th, 2006 at 7:20 am:

A couple of comments on identity and reputation systems. First, you canâ€™t have a meaningful reputation system without a credible identity system. If players can create arbitrary reputation identities without a meaningful link back to a â€œhardâ€ identity, it can easily be spoofed and griefed.

Then let it be spoofed and griefed. This smacks of some of the commentary on the “Calling all Alts” thread on Terra Nova. I don’t want other players to be able to track back to a “hard” identity and I sure as hell don’t want game companies to share info so that they can try to do the same. I find it alarming that the game designers responsible for the games of the future are even thinking about doing this sort of stuff.

I have more than enough Big Brothers in the real world, I don’t need a new batch in the virtual ones.

Will the time come where separate VW managements share details of those who break their ToS, resulting in â€œbanned in one, banned in allâ€?

I sure hope not. Any VW that moves in that direction won’t get my custom.

Steven "PlayNoEvil" Davis said on November 20th, 2006 at 8:32 am:

You can’t have it both ways. Customers want a game free of griefing and abuse. They call the game company’s customer service reps when they have problems.

This is not a free service to provide.

It is certainly the choice of the game company as to how they will operate and for the players where they want to play.

My real point on the whole “reputation system” issue is that these are not effective in an online environment when they are not linked to actual identities. Reputation systems are often mentioned as some sort of silver bullet to address griefing and other problems without the expense of customers service… and it ain’t gonna happen.

There is also a large difference between the service provider being able to track back from an online identity to an actual person and another player being able to do the same. I don’t think anyone is currently discussing a system for providing that information to players.

JuJutsu said on November 20th, 2006 at 9:25 am:

You canâ€™t have it both ways. Customers want a game free of griefing and abuse. They call the game companyâ€™s customer service reps when they have problems.

I know. I wanted to make my preference be clear thats why I said “Then let it be spoofed and griefed”; a reputation system that requires cross firm sharing of identity info is a cure worse than the disease imo.

Yes. I have little or no expectation of customer service in a free-to-play game. I do expect a modicum of service in a game that I’m paying to play.

There is also a large difference between the service provider being able to track back from an online identity to an actual person and another player being able to do the same. I donâ€™t think anyone is currently discussing a system for providing that information to players.

There is a huge difference, I agree. The reason that i brought up the Calling all Alts thread was that much of the argumentation there was [to my mind] similar. I don’t want other players in Everquest II to know that Barak is an alt for JuJutsu. I REALLY don’t want both SOE and Blizzard to know that JuJutsu and Mikado are both creations of Terry Amburgey.

Jessica Mulligan said on November 21st, 2006 at 1:41 am:

JuJutsu said: “I REALLY donâ€™t want both SOE and Blizzard to know that JuJutsu and Mikado are both creations of Terry Amburgey.”

You can get around this by having an independent 3rd party own the ID servers and issuing only relevant info back out to the client companies. So if SOE banned Barak, all Blizzard would get is a notification that Terry Amburgey was banned in some other, unidentified, game, with a ban code/reason.

I understand your hesitance on this one; there would have to be careful planning to prevent abuse and minimize the risk of a mistake. As someone who has run MMO customer service organizations in the past, however, I like anything that helps me identify and neutralize that 0.1% of players who cost me 40-50% of my CS time and money and that tend to drive away otherwise satisfied customers before they are caught and dealt with.

As Jeff noted, though, it is probably moot; we can’t stop griefers who use game cards or pre-loaded temp credit cards, which are becoming more popular.

Therefore, I propose that anyone signing up for an MMO must put up a vital organ as bond for good behavior; step out of line and feel the pain.

Allen Sligar said on November 21st, 2006 at 10:31 am:

Jessica,

The long term ROI for this would be questionable I would think, and the overall impact to the paying customers economic goodwill they show the company would be completely negative.

To do this youd have to be transparent with the customers about using this service, otherwise you risk a mass exidous when games feel burned.

Further if credit reporting companies, credit card processors as well as major banks cant be trusted to have secure, reliable and accurate consumer data how can a 3rd party video gamer reputation tracking system be expected to have reliable data/information about a transitory consumer base?

I’m not getting on your case here, but what I am saying is keeping CS about the game rather than about the player seems like a better alternative. What I mean is that IMO players are more amenable to structured social constraints (think about how far an Ebay type rating system would go over in an avatars profile) and mechanisims in game, than 3rd party tracking systems that take away the discretion of well trained CS personnel.

Further, I’m not sure there would be a whole lot of voluntary buy-in for this anyhow, the people youd want to buy-in (bad apples) would opt-out. Also I can validate one thing, its very difficult to get gamers (I wont even get into console gamers) to give you even the most rudimentary demographic information, but if you want to tie those data points to financial information for tracking….well, thats a very very steep hill to try and climb.

Requiel said on November 21st, 2006 at 11:52 am:

A couple of issues with globally banning by credit card info. Firstly you’re looking at a fair amount of collateral damage. Let’s say me and my brother are keen on MMOs but we’re too young to have a credit card so dad pays for us. I’m a jerk but my brother is a decent player. My mad ’slpoitz get me banned in game A who pass details onto the providers of game B. Unfortunately my brother plays game B and when they shut down my access to the game based on my billing info, my brother also loses the right to play their game too.

I work as a customer service manager for an MMO and while there have been times I’ve banned multiple accounts for an infraction by only one of them, it’s something I’d only ever do based on my own detailed investigation and after satisfying myself beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt that no-one who hadn’t done wrong was going to get slapped.

As others have said, I too am fairly sure that someone who bots and cheats in one game is going to be pulling the same stunts in my game too, however I’m not going to ban them on someone else’s say so.

Phil Wallach said on November 22nd, 2006 at 5:17 am:

One potential solution is to turn the problem around. You could track “good reputation” as opposed to “bad reputation”. In other words, you would get plusses for long-term trouble-free active play. Players could then take their good reputation with them from game to game.

This solves the identification/privacy problem, because the player wants their identity to be known.

It is still possible to subvert the system by running “good” accounts and “bad” accounts; but that is a lot of work for not a lot of benefit.

The problem here though is what you get for your good rep. Perhaps you could play on a “good” server, while new (unknown) players were on a “public” server. Whatever it was, it would require the game to be designed with this in mind.

The second problem is - how many players really play multiple games? Are there enough players playing enough games to even make this approach make sense.

As far as a company “banning” a paying customer just because someone else did; I don’t see it.

Kevin Bjorke said on November 22nd, 2006 at 8:54 am:

Phil I think you have it right. Giving people a ‘gold card’ for being upstanding citizens is a much better solution.

Do any games use reputation systems as part of player matching? Or just levels?

Andy Havens said on November 23rd, 2006 at 10:37 pm:

This is all hot air. It ain’t gonna happen, period. Why? Couple reasons.

One. Cost benefit ratio ain’t high enough. The money involved in Las Vegas gambling and the “black books” that get passed around for those very few (percentage wise) players who get banned is in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. The idea that gaming companies would risk the liability over $14.95/month accounts? Not likely.

Two. Sharing info about my customers, either good or bad, with other companies? Hmmm… My marketing word for “other companies” is “competitors.” Let’s see…

If I give lists of *good* customers — the ones that play nicely — with other companies, what does THAT do? It makes it easier for them to cherry pick those excellent, well-behaved customers when new games, add-ons, sales, etc. come out. Smart? I don’t think so!

If I give lists of *bad* customers to them, then they may avoid having some of the hard-time, money-sinking, troublesome flava ding-bats that have already brought down MY net-net. Hmmmm…. Helping my competitors keep costs down… A novel way for me to spend money on my “enemies’” products. I’m sure my stockholders will be thrilled.

As has been pointed out, any one of these proposed systems can be easily gamed by the folks who want to grief. In fact, it just gives them another system to grief; the “Gold Gamer Trust System” or whatever it ends up being called. They’ll generate super-high-trust players/characters or whatever and use them to spread trouble at that macro level. Yeesh, guaranteed. “Tee hee hee. I just spent 6 months playing by-the-book, building up brownie points so I can be a Gold-Star Boy Scout on the Big Board and get the Seal of Approval from the Awards Bureau… Now I will go cause even more havoc among people who trust that the system means something….”

The cures for griefing is good design, good customer support and good tools for reporting and taging grief.