Have people's social rating be an indicator of how NPCs should treat them.

ArchivedUser

So the idea here is that if there were a social toxicity prevention mechanic similar to that of Overwatch's voting system, where every day you can rate your interactions with people, and your vote is limited to a few people to the match, the very edge cases where someone was very cool, or very negative would stand out, and those people would begin to climb the social rating ladder or fall down and be negatively scored.

There are probably flaws in how the concept would carry over from overwatch to say an MMO, but it would effectively make your personal interactions with people, and your overall social perception a perceivable part of the world through the NPCs and anchor you into being either nice neutral or negative.

It could totally be gamed, but in aggregate you would find that how you treated people in the game would also trickle down into how NPCs feel about you. Maybe doing a couple quests would improve this attitude or maybe it would take a lot of quests in the entire node to shift this attitude etc.

ArchivedUser

I'm not too familiar with how Overwatch handles it, but maybe this could be translated into some kind of reputation system, discouraging players from being "toxic" with social consequences rather than bans and reports.
I guess it could potentially be a good idea, but I'm not sure on how it would be integrated: would your vote only influence NPCs? Keeping it limited to NPCs and make it solvable with quests would honestly make it kinda weird, as they should also react this way to evil characters, whose players do nothing wrong community-wise; and is it even allright to make bad player-to-player interactions "amendable" simply by doing NPC quests? In this case, since they affect other players, they should be redeemable through some kind of public utility service, to avoid mixing up "player stuff" with other stuff related to the in-game world. But, as a developer, how would you regulate it in that case?
Also, most importantly, how do you prevent people from abusing the system? Limiting the amount of votes one player can give would not solve the situation, as entire guilds could downvote the same person.

ArchivedUser

It's an mmo there is bound to be toxic players, as long as it's not outright abuse I don't mind what people say, I mean I can't vote my interaction irl either

ArchivedUser

I believe this would be a great implementation.  They have already talked about how leaders (Mayors) can be elected... why not have a system like this so that players who have a great reputation are easily spotted and put up for election.

It also helps players decide who may be a welcomed companion into their party and who may not be.

I believe a reputation system would have many beneficial uses.

ArchivedUser

Any type of social interaction system that is based off of feedback from players can and will be gamed by those looking for advantage. A perfect example of this is Activity Leaderboards here. Points are awarded based on Likes and Lols. Certain people have created dummy accounts to like their main account posts, thus driving up their rating, or have had concerted efforts by their guildmates to boost their Activity score. Doesn't mean anything, but people still do it, because they can.

ArchivedUser

That's exactly the point of having a guild of friends... people who back and support you.  Now the issue of multiple accounts etc. is a true issue, but probably wouldn't be a huge issue as that would require a person to buy multiple versions of the game and create multiple accounts with multiple monthly subscriptions... and the feedback system would have to be based not only on total count of feedback but the timeline of that feedback... say a person with a consistent history of positive ratings rather than someone who gets all of their ratings in a short period of time.

Just a thought...

ArchivedUser

UnknownSystemError said:

Any type of social interaction system that is based off of feedback from players can and will be gamed by those looking for advantage. A perfect example of this is Activity Leaderboards here. Points are awarded based on Likes and Lols. Certain people have created dummy accounts to like their main account posts, thus driving up their rating, or have had concerted efforts by their guildmates to boost their Activity score. Doesn't mean anything, but people still do it, because they can.

I wonder who you are talking about ^^

ArchivedUser

I was using as an example, bony one. But you can guess from the total.

ArchivedUser

The only difference is, on here, there is no barrier to forming an account.  Whereas when the game releases a person would have to buy multiple games and pay multiple monthly subscriptions in order to cheat the system... even then the social feedback system could be based not only on total count of feedback, but the timeline of feedback.  That way people with consistently good social feedback are more noticeable than someone who gets a ton of feedback, but gets it all at once (someone who is trying to cheat the system).

Just a thought

ArchivedUser

UnknownSystemError said:

I was using as an example, bony one. But you can guess from the total.

was that a sense of hummer I just detected? and here I thought you were a bot 

ArchivedUser

Like i said in other posts, id totally love some kind of "Karma"-System that would give you the opportunity to be either on a lighter or darker side of life. Theres people, enjoying to be the generous, giving and helping hero to everyone around and theres people who want to play as nobodies darling, and maybe some playing something in the middle. Theres a lot of possibilities how to implement such things. Think of the opportunity to have rather good players be known as helpful guides in towns (town cryer respects them as such e.g.) and the "Bad Karma Boys and Girls" have to live outside the usual towns and have to do their business in "neutral"  towns or pirate nests, so they dont get killed by town guards in the non-neutral towns. There could also be Headhunting where players offer a price on people with bad karma (or in pirates nests/neutral towns you can set a price for any player at all - good or bad karma).

The interesting part is, that if you have something like a karma system, life can get easier or harder - depending on the playstyle you prefer. I bet its really tempting to visit a major city, slip past the guards and kill someone right in a non-neutral town and kill some "good" player for a reasonable price that was set on his head - or even just for fun. If theres no risk, theres no fun, aye?

I really liked the Karma feature in Ultima Online those days back. But i know, that it isnt easy to implement such things without opening the doors to exploit stuff here and there... or have the system used in a manner it wasn't planned to be... *sigh*

ArchivedUser

This really seems like a good idea to have in a game like this that's so focused on community. It might be beneficial to have two separate systems though, one for player interactions and one for NPC interactions.

They could have a reputation system that plays into elections and the like based off of player feedback. This could help players understand who they are electing or trading with.

The other system could be a good/evil system that's based off of in-game choices that influences how NPCs interact with the player.

ArchivedUser

I'm going by the Topic in which you can build reputation with NPCs and only NPCs by how helpful and how involved you are in the local community.  This I would support and it sounds immersive.  However, I would not want any player involvement at all.