Maybe a way to fix the volatile nature of the playerbase?

[Vanos27]

What if there was a system put in place where you can rank players you encounter from 1-10. One being the worst player around, do not party or interact with and ten being a true saint in the game. A character can only rank a player if they've been in a party together for at least 15 minutes so you can't just get invites and spam 1's on everyone. Your final score would be an average of all your rankings and this can be visible when inspecting someone or next to their name. So if you have a high score you will be seen as a friendly and helpful person and if you have a low score you would be seen as an avoid at all cost type of player.

Now if you keep your score above a 7 every month you can win a prize of some sort that can have gear, mounts, pets, gold, honor, valor, transmog items, etc etc. Maybe even add things to your garrison? I don't know but I'm sure there could be a lot of things you could potentially get.

Now if your score at the end of the month is less than 4 you have negatives added to your account whether it be more expensive repairs, larger tax on auctions, lower rep gains, less valor and honor gains, maybe even a lower chance of getting items to drop in LFR/Flex raids. Something significant enough to warrant good behavior. Your score would also appear in trade chat and party/raid chat as well as guild chat next to your name if your score is a 4 or less so people will know if you're an ass or not.

The only tricky thing about this system is abusing it. Maybe have it so you can't gain ranks from guildies/real id friends so you can't just have everyone spam 10's on you. Maybe have it so you can only rank someone once every hour to day so you don't just spam a whole LFR with 1's. I'm sure there could be more or better ways to handle this stuff but I just can't think of it right now.

Now I know what you might be thinking "It wouldn't be fair if everyone see's your bad score, they'll just ridicule you", well then you shouldn't have been an ass to so many people.

Every month your score will default back to 5 and start all over so if only one person ranks you and you get a 1 it doesn't immediately put you to 1. Though there could be other ways around this as well.

Anyway, I just came up with this pretty quickly and I'm tired so this might be a completely broken idea but the community has been getting worse and worse and something needs to happen in all honesty.

[Ryve]

You do realize the reason most forums don't use the rep system is it does not work? If a few thousand people can't use such a system without being dicks to those who they fairly regularly interact with, why would you think it wouldn't devolve into everyone giving 1s, or threatening to give 1s if they don't passon loot?

Your system is doomed to fail, please try again.

[lazypeon100]

What stops people from wrongly rating you? For example, let's say I'm a hunter in a group and everyone appears to be friendly. Maybe there's the one quiet guy, but it's cool cause he's not trash talking and he's doing his job for the group.

At the end of said group, let's say quiet guy hates you because... you brought up how you love bunny rabbits (I'm using an extreme/odd example here), so while you may have been friendly and may have even played well, the dude still rates you a 1.

Now imagine that in a scenario where there's a group of people abusing this. How does the system tell the difference between someone who is trying to give a fair rating, or someone who's just screwing with the system for lol's? And what would the consequences of that be?

[Vanos27]

These are the type of problems I kinda want someone smarter than I to come up with lol.

Problem is I really can't think of anything. I'm literally stumped as to how to stop abusers from abusing the system for their "lulz".

Makes me think that there really is no system that would work, but maybe just maybe I'm wrong and someone here might know the answer.

[mistahwilshire]

Reputation systems don't work.

As the games population continues to steadily decline from the big boom in Wrath, a lot of the toxic players will flow out with it and we'll stabilize at a nice population with people that genuinely like the game.

Forums will likely always suffer from people that claim to hate the game but can't stop spending time hating on, however.

[lazypeon100]

Reputation systems don't work.

As the games population continues to steadily decline from the big boom in Wrath, a lot of the toxic players will flow out with it and we'll stabilize at a nice population with people that genuinely like the game.

Forums will likely always suffer from people that claim to hate the game but can't stop spending time hating on, however.

Reputation on individual servers kind of worked in vanilla/BC, as people were not quite as anonymous as they are currently. It still seemed to matter to some extent in wrath but started dying there I think. That's not really that can be fixed easily, as the can of worms between playing cross servers has already been opened for quite some time (not to say it's a bad thing).

[Notos]

Reputation on individual servers kind of worked in vanilla/BC, as people were not quite as anonymous as they are currently. It still seemed to matter to some extent in wrath but started dying there I think. That's not really that can be fixed easily, as the can of worms between playing cross servers has already been opened for quite some time (not to say it's a bad thing).

Reputation can be negative as well as positive. The only people outside my guild I remember from vanilla are a couple of the asshats from trade who got HWL through account sharing.

[Aeas]

I don't think we can be trusted to do anything right with this feature. Especially if the community is that bad to begin with.

[MoanaLisa]

Reputation on individual servers kind of worked in vanilla/BC, as people were not quite as anonymous as they are currently. It still seemed to matter to some extent in wrath but started dying there I think. That's not really that can be fixed easily, as the can of worms between playing cross servers has already been opened for quite some time (not to say it's a bad thing).

I disagree with this. At best people were aware of perhaps a few dozen people on their realm that weren't in their guild. That's out of many hundreds or thousands.

Reputation systems are prone to abuse. Simple mistakes in play can get you downranked. Excellent play that embarrasses someone else can get you downranked. Not to mention that outside of flex groups there's very little in PVE that requires you to be grouped up with someone for 15 minutes. It certainly isn't dungeons. Flex takes care of itself as bad behavior or play is usually swiftly dealt with by the group leader. In any case a community that's bad to start with won't get better by giving them a tool to create mischief.

True incentives to behave well are one approach although I don't think this is it. Anything at all that allows players to punish other players in some way is going to be a non-starter with Blizzard anyway.

[Deleted]

You do realize the reason most forums don't use the rep system is it does not work?

It works really well for Reddit.

[metasine]

People are only going to do bad things if they know they can get away with bad things. There is your starting point.

[lazypeon100]

Reputation can be negative as well as positive. The only people outside my guild I remember from vanilla are a couple of the asshats from trade who got HWL through account sharing.

That's typically what happened with it. I'm not saying I support such a system, but at that time it felt (at least to me) that it worked. Not the best system for sure.

Might be because at that time I was only like, 12 and really only knew who were known ninjas and who were not. Although I will say that throughout wrath from personal experience on my server that reputation stood out for those who were good players/ nondicks.

[Sam the Wiser]

It works really well for Reddit.

This couldn't be further from the truth.

[Llunai]

Simply make it so the votes of people with high rep count more than the votes of those with low rep. Douches will inevitably get low rep, and their vote will count for shit. People who play decently and are friendly will get higher rep, and their votes will count for more.

[Krommm]

Nope. The only non-opinionated way that would use rep rating would have to be objective criteria set by Blizzard, and even then many people do not care even a bit about any of that. LoL claims to have reduced many of the negatives of random matchmaking, but I assure you people are still as fucked as always. So, the only response you're going to get here is how it is open to abuse. (You would see a massive decline in foul play in PvE if there was no matchmaking. PvP, regardless of preform or a group finder will generally have a lot of negativity, after all it is competitive. Competition usually leads to tons of BM.

[Captain N]

There's no system that can make people play nice on the Internet. However, Mistahwilshire did make a good point about how the toxic players will eventually leave on their own accord. This is what FFXIV is currently going through. With it's "Hardcore Elitists" who thought they were going to get FFXI-2 and failed to heed the warnings of the Community and the Game Developers that the game was not designed for their "Now Now Now!" mindset. They spawned a toxic community at end-game but thats slowly going away as they return to whatever they did before playing. When you have a subscriber base like WoW does it's much worse because of the time it takes for those cancerous people to either leave or do something to get banned.

[Windfury]

Doesn't this just give the trolls and assholes more power because they can downrank you if you stand up to them?

[Mifuyne]

Talk about beating a dead horse with a stick.
There is no fix for douchebags/whatever as it is easy to manipulate any system to your own liking.
I applaud you for trying but it's not worth the effort.

[Deleted]

Reputation systems are prone to abuse. Simple mistakes in play can get you downranked. Excellent play that embarrasses someone else can get you downranked.

I don't think that's necessarily true; a lot of reputation systems have negative consequences for negative voting - e.g. on StackExchange, you can downvote someone for -2 points but you take a hit of -1 point, because negative actions should be seen as negative for everyone.

Similarly, positive upvotes weigh more heavily than negative ones, since most people's default attitude is apathy; so where you might take a hit of -2 points for being downvoted, somebody upvoting you would be a higher gain; perhaps 3 or 4 points.

Afterall, the point of systems like that is "what does the community think of me?" - if you're a good, polite, helpful player and someone comes along and downvotes you because they're having a bad day then that's still an honest reflection of how someone else in the community feels (And you'd be free to downvote them in return). But isolated incidents like that won't actually make a huge difference in the long run - half a dozen downvotes isn't going to alter the fact that someone has hundreds of upvotes.

Rep systems can also have other blocks in place to minimise any 'tactical' voting - e.g. prevent players from voting someone more than once per week, prevent players voting others in their guild or friend list; auto-add someone to your ignore list if you downvote them, etc.

True incentives to behave well are one approach although I don't think this is it. Anything at all that allows players to punish other players in some way is going to be a non-starter with Blizzard anyway.

I agree that a reputation system should be just a reputation system, without any other in-game rewards. IMO having players able to give each other a black mark or gold star for good/bad behaviour is a good way to incentivise behaviour.

One of the things about the 'unofficial' realm reputations which existed around classic/TBC is that players were actively punishing each other; if you knew someone was a toxic player who had been accused of stealing loot, or they originated from a well-known troublemaker guild, you probably wouldn't invite them to your dungeon group.

[Deleted]

There is no magical "fix".

People themselves should realize that they don't have to be unpleasent and can also respect others and still have fun at the same time.