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[Melly]

I've been thinking about this for a while now, and decided to put my thoughts on a post for you guys to give me feedback on it.

Warning, a wall of text cometh!

A community-moderated online gaming service

Online gaming, in many games, is a potential and sometimes estabilished social cesspool. The main reason for that seems to be the impunity of the system's users, who can be jackasses all they want without serious repercutions, and if there are often just a bit of clever subterfuge will keep them going for a long time. Unlike in most social places in real life, where being a total jackass gives you a good chance that you won't be accepted there again.

One of my first ideas about this was a system in which you had some personal data that you could divulge, like name and e-mail address, and you were only allowed to communicate through chat if you chose to reveal that data. That idea didn't stick for the obvious reasons that many people would generally feel unconfortable releasing even small ammounts of personal data, even if they have nothing to hide, and it seemed too easy to cheat.

A better idea, that I really want feedback on, is a system of players grading players tied to public chatlogs.

It works like this: You're playing a match of whatever game, when in the match is a player who's simply a gigantic ass, saying truly uncalled for nasty shit based on flimsy reasons, homo/xenophobia, misoginy, for the lulz, and so on. In most online games, you might be able to report this person, or block him/her, but it often does little, as the first option puts you at the mercy of a moderator that may already have a backlog of a thousand complaints to sift through, or the fact that simply blocking chat with the person doesn't stop him from being an ass with everyone else at every turn.

In my system, once the match ends for whatever reason, you're given a screen with the names of all players that participated in it, allowing you to give them 3 grades. Green, for nice, helpful people. Yellow, for people that you don't really have an opinion on, and red, for jackasses. You can only give one grade to each person, even if you play with them more than once. However, while you can give green and yellow grades without issue, red grades will always be followed with the full chatlog of the session attached to them. This only works for public chat, private chat is not recorded. When you give a red grade, you'll also be prompted to place marks on key lines of text chat or times of a recorded voice chat for people to be automatically sent to if they choose to view the log. However you cannot simply send those parts you find offensive, the full log is always available, to allow people to see the whole context.

This is still not enough to have the red grade stick. It'll still be a 'soft grade', and will require confirmations from other players to really stick to a player's profile. Players in the friends list of either the reporter or reported player are not allowed to weight in, to keep it impartial. If a certain number of people confirm the grade, it sticks, possibly permanently, possibly for a month or two. If enough people contest the grade on grounds that it was unfair or somebody trying to persecute another for stupid reasons, the grade vanishes.

All this information is easily accessible to all players and cannot be hidden. To make sure the friend list limitation is effective, you can only private-chat and do a series of other activities (like hop directly in the game/match they're currently playing) with people in your friends list. And removing someone from your friends list prevents them from being re-added for a week.

To prevent people from creating alternate accounts to remove bad grades from themselves or make grades stick to people they don't like, you must have a certain ammount of playtime in your to even be able to use the system, and you must play with regularity. This may seem unfair to casual players, but I imagine the more serious players would be the ones to want to use these features most.

The main idea of this system is to create an online gaming community where jackassery has long-term consequences, where the community itself moderates its numbers, preventing the company that created the game from relying on an expensive and large number of moderators to try and deal with all the complaints, which as the game grows in popularity will invariably be innefective, and all this could create a greater sense of community, as the players themselves are working together to make the game better. And if Wikipedia has shown me anything, if you give a community the tools, some amazing things can come out of it, and people are often more willing to cooperate than most people think.

Well, I'm done. Do fire your criticism at me, I can take it.

[Chromanoid]

maybe this system would spawn rating wars between rivaling clans/player groups. bullying would be easy too... just mark the enraged responds of the target person and nobody will recognize...

i would prefer a default ignore system, where all text that is posted by strangers will not be shown in the normal chat... everybody is default ignored. when you start playing and there are not more than two accepted players in the game, your chat switches to raw mode where you see all messages (by strangers). with one click on their name (in chat, scoreboard etc.) you can add them to your accept list. the accept count of every player is shown in brackets after player name in the chat log. autoignored players have the color yellow in the chat system, explicitly ignored have the color red and accepted players have the color green. one can ignore somebody explicitly by rightclicking the name. after a match (when the game is sessionbased) all players are marked as accept automatically if not set differently during the session. default ignored strangers (previously unknown) that are accepted by an accepted person are auto accepted.

[gimymblert]

If you google there was plenty talk around this idea, implementation and conclusions. Except i can't remember links to any of them. I know it was also a famous case in sims online: The things is that negative marking lead to abuse and griefing by the formation of mafia like organisation. It is generally best to reward person for bonding and acting well (positive marking and friend list)

[SirNiko]

This seems reasonable.

Another point would be to create some sort of value to a name, so that players are unlikely to simply throw it away. On something like Kongregate or NewGrounds, you have levels for completing badges and rating and making games (Not to mention, the badges). On Gamefaqs, you accumulate Karma over time and gain posting privileges and titles. Because of these, making a new account is less desirable, and therefore, you're likely to be a little more careful with your account.

What would this service provide to make players want to keep up a single account and not just cycle in alts when they get rated down?

-SirNiko

[agj]

You might find this an interesting read.

[Derakon]

I'll admit to not having read the entirety of your idea, but it seems to fall under the general "How do we moderate a community without having to have designated moderators" problem. One approach that seems to work pretty well is Slashdot. The way their system works, as I recall, is that everyone occasionally is given moderation points, with which they can vote on whether or not a particular post was interesting, informative, trollish, etc. <i>Everyone</i> can then vote on whether or not the moderation was a good one. Depending on how the crowd feels about your moderation choices, you may get more moderation points, or you may never get them again.

It's true that their system tends to reward groupthink, but at the same time you don't see the horrible trolls/spammers/etc get anything remotely approaching a good moderation score. Basically it does a good job of downmodding the things that people don't want, but it doesn't necessarily do a good job of upmodding the things that everyone does want (preferentially upmodding those who match the groupthink).

The way I'd see this working in a gaming context is that you designate a moderator for each session, and each player gets to vote on how good a job they think the moderator is doing. Moderators that the consensus feels do a good job are more likely to get to be moderators again. To reduce abuse, you should probably require a quorum of moderators to take any action.

[TwilightVulpine]

There is a possibility that such system could alienate newbies, since they would have few positive grades and could earn negative ones just by not knowing how to play. Another possibility is that a group of bad players notorious enough would receive far more positive grades than negatives. They also could award good grades for bad behavior and deny bad grades among themselves.

A further problem is that bad behavior in games is not limited to chat. The log could also contain relevant actions, like attacking and picking items. Yet analyzing those logs wouldn't be something most that players would do.

[Melly]

maybe this system would spawn rating wars between rivaling clans/player groups.

I mentioned that players within the friends/clan group of either the reporter or reported individuals could not weight in on the bad grade. And that adding/removing the same player from your group to do this would be cumbersome enough that most people would be discouraged from trying.

bullying would be easy too... just mark the enraged responds of the target person and nobody will recognize...

And I ALSO mentioned that while you can mark specific lines for people to instantly go to, you cannot omit the rest of the chatlog. Everybody would have plainly visible to them all the chat history, so bullying would be obvious. The marks are more like breakpoint in code. They aren't the only code you see, just key parts you want people to see, but the last line of the code is right there, right above it.

i would prefer a default ignore system, where all text that is posted by strangers will not be shown in the normal chat... everybody is default ignored. when you start playing and there are not more than two accepted players in the game, your chat switches to raw mode where you see all messages (by strangers). with one click on their name (in chat, scoreboard etc.) you can add them to your accept list. the accept count of every player is shown in brackets after player name in the chat log. autoignored players have the color yellow in the chat system, explicitly ignored have the color red and accepted players have the color green. one can ignore somebody explicitly by rightclicking the name. after a match (when the game is sessionbased) all players are marked as accept automatically if not set differently during the session. default ignored strangers (previously unknown) that are accepted by an accepted person are auto accepted.

The system you mention seems like it'd make things very impersonal. This can be a solution to problematic players, but it also undermines the feeling of a community. My goal is to design a system that allows a community to be open and at the same time friendly.

@ neoshaman

I'm aware of that, which is why I mentioned that people inside your friends/group/clan lists can't weightin on the grades you give OR receive. Obvious not a perfect system, but added with the fact that removing and then readding people to your lists is a hassle by design, it would discourage people to do this sufficiently to prevent that issue, I believe.

And I agree about rewarding good behaviour. I also put thought into that, but I haven't found good solutions that are generalized to every game. Perhaps people with many good grades are given more and more power within this moderating system. I could also limit people based on that.

@ SirNiko

The ideas you mentioned are good. I don't enjoy exploiting the treadmill concept, but maybe in this case it could be used for good. Having things you took a good time to accomplish tied to your current username would discourage people from abandoning it, and from being such assholes that everybody grades them like shit and they're forced to lose all they got or stick only with their small group of friends.

I think that's a good enough way to encourage people to maintain a single account properly.

You might find this an interesting read.

thanks, I'll have a read once I have more time.

@ Derakon

Yeah, there would be a smaller team of official moderators to deal with special cases, of course.

About what you mentioned, I could incorporate that points system into my idea. Giving grades that are widely accepted nets you points, and you're also netted points by being given good grades, though not as much.

The prevention of the group-thinking and formation of mafias I already touched on, with the friend list limitations.

@ TwilightVulpine

The bad grades would be given related to chatlogs. How you play the game is not an issue, there would be other systems to remedy getting players of roughly equal skill to play together, like matchmaking. If you give a bad grade to a newbie player, but the log you attach has nothing that shows that player as a jackass, my hope is that the rest of the community would downplay and remove the complaint on grounds of being unfair/newbie bullying.

And your other concerns are also a bit gameplay-centric. Diablo 3, for example, will have a system in which everybody has their own cash/item drops inaccessible to other players, and they can trade stuff fairly afterwards. Those kinds of problems would be upto the game designers to solve. And the problems that CAN'T be solved, those can be dealt with by the smaller moderator team, as they won't be bogged down by complaints about people calling your dad who's playing a game with you a pedophile.

[DeadPixel]

Just thinking about this very loosely, if I were to implement a community-driven moderation system I would want it to be very simple while still being flexible for the individual player who utilizes it.

For my example, I'm thinking in terms of somethig like an MMO, or something where you have a persistent player profile.  Anyway, I might go with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down that you could apply to said player's profile as an overall score, with the option to break that score down into constituient parts (plays well with others, vulgar language, mature language, shares loot, etc, etc). 

Basically you'd wind up with two things, a very general meta-score for a player ranked on a numerical scale of whatever fits your game (let's pretend 0 - 100% for this), and more precise scores for important social-related activities in your game.

So as an end-user playing the game, you can determine who you want to interact with based on thresholds of weighted averages.  So say for instance in a general chat you may not care for vulgarity, and so set your threshold for players who tend to do that to very low.  You are now far more unlikely to see that.  Or say you are forming a PVP group, and are milling around in the PVP LFG channel.  You can set your threshold to exclude people who don't play well as a team, who farm rather than go for battleground goals, etc.

These different thresholds could be mixed and matched to help you find the perfect people that you want to interact with (if they even exist ).

You could of course explicitly whitelist and blacklist individuals, akin to the typical friends and ignore list.

Being automatically excluded based on community participation could form a really unique social meta-game above and beyond the game you initially design.  Could be fun.