*This post repeats and expands upon my comments to Amber Night’s article, Why Player Rep Will Fail; her response to the third-party player reputation site, Playerep.com.
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Rep based on who considers you a friend
Rep systems based on friends lists seem relatively fair. You don’t get to mark anyone down, just up. The people you like may not be the people I like, but it’s a starting point if I like you.
A person who is nobody’s friend has the equivalent of a bad rep. And you can’t run away from having no friends.
Players make their own rep systems
EQ1 had an extensive out of game rep system. People are still living with the reps of things they did four or more years ago. In the end, all these external rep things are a tacit acknowledgement that a game has no strong community.
Community comes on its own with playtime. When you have a game that you can actually finish in a couple of months, like World of Warcraft, there is no chance to form a community. There is a huge churn rate in that game - people leave for other servers to get that same thrill of leveling from nothing, or they quit and come back in a few months — there is no continuity. WoW (like DAoC) displays PvP rankings on its web site; your in-game rep doesn’t matter a bit if you have a good position on the leaderboard. When the character that griefed you today will be gone forever in another month, what is the point of player rep? When all that matters is your position on a standings list, what is the point of player rep?
There is none. It takes time for any player to make enough of an impression on enough people to even get a rep, good or bad, in the first place.
How to make rep mean something
Slow down the pace of the game, and community happens, and suddenly rep matters again. EQ1, which required a year of normal play to get to max level - strong community. FFXI Online, when it came out, demanded you have lots of friends or you simply would not be able to progress. DAoC - semi-slow game, medium sense of community, although the RvR aspect cheapened it somewhat.
Once a game is slowed enough, or hard enough, that reputation actually matters, then it will happen, organically, through player desire. Making it an artificial requirement just adds another game mechanic that will be widely reviled - and rightly so - by the players as a sign the developers are out of touch with the communities in their own games.
Hated by “The Man”
Devs, or third parties, are never going to peg someone as accurately as the players do. Again, if the game is such that reputation means something, then the players of that game will pass the word, whether through a community message board, or through popular chat channels – by some means. In many games, the guild a player joins tells volumes. There, they are self-selecting their reputation to some degree.
The game developers will have their own opinions about reputation. Through complaints from other players, the devs will know who the troublemakers are. It’s also a no-brainer who the leaders of the server are. Right now, black marks are hidden away on some CSR form somewhere. Why not make it a little more fun. Turn their armor into rags. Works the same, just looks like rags. Merchants charge them double for items and repairs. The boatmen won’t carry them anywhere. Griffons will refuse to fly. Public channels won’t work for them. Their name appears on wanted posters. Tiny dogs yip at them. Only by redeeming themselves and pleading to the gods will this curse be lifted.
It’d be easy enough to just boot them from the game if you were sure they were a bad seed. But how much more worth it to put them in a low place from which they can return?
You can’t make players rate someone fairly
If you try to make a system for the players, it will be abused. Check out what they said about two of my former guildleaders in Urbandictionary.com. Rely on the players to make their own, if they care. But these are roleplaying games, after all - the game masters are well in their rights to make people who can’t play well with others hurt a little.