[...] 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 [...]

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is not a free service to provide.

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 don’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.

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.

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.

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 “banned in one, banned in all”?

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