Designing a MMORPG Feedback System

Gamasutra is running one of their highly enjoyable 'soapbox' pieces, looking at possible ways you could implement a feedback or ranking system for Massively Multiplayer Online Game players. From the article: "When playing an MMORPG, I should be able to give a positive, neutral, or negative rating to anyone who has been in my group for more than thirty minutes. Negative ratings could be characterized via a multiple-choice list of common gripes (i.e. 'loot theft', 'abusive language', etc) -- a feature now built into the Xbox Live feedback system. However, it isn't clear that a good feedback system requires this level of depth; there's an argument to be made for simplifying the process as much as possible."

I doubt it could work.

[JoeD]

Any such player-run system would be too easy to abuse. If you put restrictions in place to prevent the abuse, people will game their way around them.

For example, a guild could have all of its members give each other high ratings. Or they could band together to give poor ratings to someone that pisses them off.

"feedback" in RPG's out of character?

[alkaloids]

I play Gemstone, an older (to put it lightly) text-based MMORPG. In it, someone's "popularity" or whatever comes from interacting with other characters etc. Having a game mechanic to tell you if someone was a jerk to someone else seems very very strange, and would definetly be out of character. So, for "role playing" games I don't feel like that is something that's useful or good. On the other hand, if the game has on objective, and you are trying to "win" WoW or whatever, I guess having that feedback system could save you time and frustration. I guess one way to rationalize this in character is to have some little cottage where you would go in and greet a jolly fat man in a little red suit who keeps track of who's "naughty" or "nice".

Won't work

[dc29A]

I should be able to give a positive, neutral, or negative rating to anyone who has been in my group for more than thirty minutes

Hypothetical situation. I form a group, recruit people who want to do (insert dungeon here). Halfway through the run I realize one of the member is incompetent. I remove him and flag him "incompetent". Out of spite he returns the favor and flags me something negative. Yet I've only done what was best for the success of the run, I wasn't using abusive language, I didn't do anything wrong.

Another problem is when there are games where you can reach max level fast. Blacklist the assholes all you want, they will remake as different characters. UO murderer system is perfect example where griefers would level throwaway characters and PK until they got caught. Rinse, repeat.

Another problem is with raid guilds. From experience, raid guilds will recruit the biggest assholes on the server under two condition: They obey the raid leaders and have insanely high play time. Raid guilds don't care if you are an asshole. They care only if you can contribute to their success.

Identity verification

[Ruprecht the Monkeyb]

None of this will matter until there are real consequences to anti-social behavior. That requires a couple things. First, you need the people running the game to care enough to *publicly* boot people for being asshats on a regular basis. Secondly, once that is done, you need a way to prevent the asshat from just opening another account or creating another character.

I've thought for a long time what the MM market needed was a third-party identity broker. Call it 'Good Guys, Inc'. You apply for a GGI account. GGI does a check, verifies you are who you say you are, address, SSN, whatever, and issues you a GGI #.

You buy Worlds of Evercrack, and enter the CD key that came with the game into your GGI account. You login to a GGI-enabled game server, and it uses the gamekey to lookup your GGI account and verifies that that key belongs to a member in good standing. Or, if you've been banned (from that game, or anther game, or whatever they want to check), it boots you or forces you to play on a server comprised of other asshats.

Not infallible, but maybe if it booted the jerks (and ninja-looters, and bots, and pro farmers) from not only that game, but potentially other games that used the service as well, things might start to improve. Or at least segregate the people who want to play the game from those that want to beat up on other players.