Reputation System

[Iulianx 90]

Any premium player with more than a month of playing time should have the option to leave positive, neutral or negative comments on other players from an ingame menu. The reputation file should be accessible by typing /reputation <insert player name here> or by rightclking him.

The interface could look like this

Player: Dode Reputation (1) Neutral

+ Good village m8. by Player1 (12.11.2012)

+ Trustworthy trade partner by Player4 (17.11.2012)

- He frequently spams global chat by Player 2 (28.10.2012)

Neutral Sup dode? by Player3 (2.12.2012)

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Edited December 4, 2012 by Iulianx

[atazs 965]

So what would this achieve? Maybe for epic this would work but not on freedom.

[BrQQQ 2,854]

I think the idea is nice, but it would probably be abused (people would write mean things or just lie, saying things like 'This guy stole my drake set', and it would have to be moderated). Maybe instead it could simply be ratings and you would have a list of things to choose from, such as 'Helpful player', 'Good villager', 'Annoying player' etc

[Iulianx 90]

Seen it implemented in another game and it worked just fine, knowing what player left the comment also help in sorting out good or bad comments. It would help a lot when trading or accepting a new village member and not only, leaving an unfounded negative comment on someone's profile can work in your disadvantage since he can also leave a negative on his.

Edited December 4, 2012 by Iulianx

[san_tropez 394]

I prefer the current, notapissingcontest system

[yarnevk 257]

-1

Do not want to see this turned into fleabay where people get blackmailed with threats of negatives because they refused to deliver or COD or refused to discount, or the package got lost in a server hiccup, and furthermore getting blackmailed into putting positives with threats of negative feedback retaliation. It does not work there, it will not work here.

A list also leads to lack of community connection with local vendors supporting and bartering with each other, everyone just uses the top guy on the list, as the 2nd guy falls further down the list. Even though you say just local clicks, the next post once you have it is people want the reputation list since the data is there. The next step after that is clicking on the top guy on the list to buy their stuff. Seen that very thing happen in another game when brokers got added to 'facilitate' trade with offline members.

If you want to know what others have to say about others, talk to your local community.

Edited December 4, 2012 by yarnevk

[Garis 210]

My research in graduate school was (almost exclusively) in online reputation and trust networks. If you're interested in the subject, I recommend started with papers on how to "secure" P2P file transfers, start breaking those systems, and go from there.

The proposed system (and, in fact, any online anonymous or pseudonymous system with a global, objective trust or reputation metric) is vulnerable to both sybil and malicious collective attacks. The requirement of a month of playing time slows down sybil attacks, but only for the first four weeks that the system is implemented. It is completely vulnerable to malicious collectives (e.g. goons). Also, pre-trusted peers won't help, they actually can make the system more brittle.

In real life, we do not use a global, objective, and publicly broadcast metric of trust. Trust and reputation are secret, local, subjective, mutable, and context specific (for example, I'd trust my high school buddy not to steal my car, but I wouldn't trust him to reinstall the rear wheel differential in it). There are algorithms for computing and distributing reputation trust in the way you mentioned, many of them published, but they are vulnerable to these sorts of attacks, largely because of anonymity constraints.

Without going into details, if you can build one of these then you're probably already doing research into next-generation secure protocols to replace BGP. Not to discourage anyone, but building one of those is very hard.

Also, negative reputations (including 'dislike' buttons) causes a community to fall under the provisions of balance theory, which almost by necessity leads to factions:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/the-enemy-of-my-enemy/

For these reasons, and more, I strongly discourage the devs to attempt an online reputation system for Wurm beyond what it has. If they do decide to, Zcul can PM me, and I'll show him where the bodies are buried, lest he trip on them while coding.

In the mean time, if you see a threat in the game community, tell your friends about it, tell people in kchat and local, and report abuse to /support.

[yarnevk 257]

Always a 'know it all' in every crowd, grad school in online trust mechanisms, wow is all I got to say. That means you got to play games and chat for school work!