Kerri, absolutely, but you still need to deal with the new player integration angle, because sociopaths won’t game the rep system anymore, just abuse the fact that new players can’t tell that they’re sociopaths yet.

There really needs to be some way of easing the players into communities so that they can be protected from that sort of predation.

Though, come to think of it, you could probably significantly reduce the complexity of the system if it’s instituted on a community wide basis, and then you formalize community structures. Membership would have to allow for overlapping groups, but that’s not a huge deal. Instead of individual profiles, all you’d need to do is look at how the community members set ratings, which would only show up to members of the community. If there are people that try to abuse this system, they’d likely get pushed out of the community pretty fast, unless the community is a community of griefers.

If I’m reading this right, Bartle’s proposed system is similar to Netflix’s suggested titles or Amazon’s recommendations… the system builds a profile of each user based on the rankings they’ve been giving, and then it looks at how closely that profile matches the profile of other people, then provides greater weight to the rankings made by people similar to them. It’s not really gameable; your ratings only show up to people who have a similar rating pattern. If you try to deliberately mark a bunch of people down, you’ll end up with an atypical pattern and won’t weigh heavily on anyone else’s list.

I’m not sure how well this would work in the MMOG space though; since you have an incomplete profile when you’re newer, newbies will end up denied the benefit of the ratings system. This is kinda bad, since predation usually ends up directed toward newbs, not elder players. They need to know, more so than anyone else, who is trust worthy and who is not. At it’s best, though, this system would be a way for older players to rate a newer player, or in really big games, it could be useful for rating players that are outside of any given player’s subcommunity, so there are definite benefits. You just need something else to balance out the fact that you lose the ability to provide guidance to newer players, but perhaps a strong mentoring system coupled with this might work?

Correct. Otherwise it’s mau mau.

Can you explain what you mean here? How can a clean alt be used to exploit this kind of system? It seems to me that the worst they can do is establish a set of honest responses, then do one bad one on a newbie.

Nice three, trash one, nice three, trash one… as long as the player and his gang keeps the ratio of normative responses high in relation to the character assassinations, they’ll be weighted the same as if they were ‘normal’ players, particularly in a system where most players don’t want to be bothered to rate others.

I’m not familiar with the Netflix system, but I wonder how it would hold up to a situation such as that with Spore, where every review site was flooded with user comments and ratings trashing the game, primarily due to EA-Maxis’ ill-conisidered protection schema.

Morgan Ramsay>The problem with that approach, Richard, is that you just end up promoting groupthink.

But the group is of people who think the same way as you. It’s not that you just follow what the group thinks – you have to do some ratings yourself so you can find the right match. If your opinion is so diverse that no-one else rates the same way you do, OK, well in that case you’re not going to get any matches and you have to rely on your own notes instead.

>we just need a way to express our dislike, so those feelings are effectively vented.

What’s stopping you from doing this in the system I described? The more you state an opinion, the better the matches with other people’s votes are going to be.

Michael Chui>I’m surprised no one has pointed out that Netflix does this

I didn’t point it out because I’ve never heard of Netflix..!

So does it work, then?

Richard

As a player of MMOs I have to say I’ve been hoping for some kind of negative karma system for some time.

Say you play a random instanced adventure with 5 other people and one guy is a real jerk. If you and the others can flag him as someone unpleasant it would make the internet anonymity jerk syndrome much less prevalent.

Obviously it could be abused but as long as it’s tied to some kind of shared activity that is intended to be cooperative I think it would do more good than harm.

The guy who afk leeches in Alterac Valley really does deserve to have 39 players on his side give him negative feedback.

It is subscription to authority, Richard. It is like rating the best schools (say Harvard, MIT, etc.) then giving preference to employment candidates with degrees from these institutions. Aka, choosing the chooser of choices (the real basis for power in society).

It’s a rather old way to get it done. The difference now is dynamic assignments that potentially keep the rankings from settling into suboptimum minima as a result of positive feedback: ie, once a country star, always a country star over ‘what have you done for me lately’.

For the IMDb, what you need is not a list of opinions. What you need is a list of opinions of people whose opinions you share.

In a first-order system to tackle this, you’d read reviews of movies you’d already seen, and if you disagreed with them you’d mark them bad. If you agreed with them, you’d mark them good. No-one else need see these ratings – they’d just be your opinion. For subsequent reviews, you would see reviews from reviewers you agreed with first, and ones from reviewers you disagreed with last.

This is fine if there are lots of people who write many reviews. It doesn’t work so well if the person whose reviews you like only wrote 10 reviews, or there are 10 people you don’t like who only wrote 1 review. However, we can fix this by going to a second-order system.

In a second-order system, your ratings of reviewers are compared with those of other users. If they coincide, then the views of these other users can be used as a proxy for your own views. If you and I generally like the same critics and dislike other critics, then the chances are that if you’ve rated a critic that I haven’t rated, I would agree with you. Therefore, your opinions help order the reviews that I see.

Note that this doesn’t have to work on reviews – it could work for the movies themselves. If I rate a particular set of movies as ones I love, and some random person in Arkansas has rated most of those movies the same way I have, then if they’ve seen a movie they like and I haven’t, the chances are that I’ll like it too. I don’t need to know who this mystery reviewer is (in practice, there would be a set of them anyway); all I need to know is that they like the same kind of movies I do.

This kind of shared rating system can work for MMOs, too. Indeed, it was in this context that I first came up with it (although I was almost certainly re-inventing the wheel – I asked Randy Farmer if he knew of such a system and he said he did). In the above Sims Mafia example, sure, they could rate you red, but your rating would only be seen as red by people whose opinions aligned with those of the Sims Mafia.

Randy and Bryce have done an enormous amount of research for this book, and put a lot of thought into it. I’m really looking forward to seeing what their conclusions are.

Richard