3pointD.com

One of my World of Warcraft guildies (not that I have time to visit Azeroth lately; I don’t know how Joi Ito does it) passes along this link, in which a LiveJournal user called MonkeyModulator describes a World of Warcraft plug-in he’s writing: an eBay-style reputation system for use by players within the world.

Somebody up and leave your group in the middle of an instance? Just leave them negative feedback. Find an awesome player to group with? Leave them positive feedback. Before grouping with anybody, pull up their feedback (preferably inside the game.)

Has anyone seen this in action? I love things like user-driven reputation systems, especially if they’ve also been created by users. But I think it’s important that they be supported by a critical mass. For instance, I think it may well be that a World of Warcraft server has too low a signal-to-noise ratio for such systems to be of much use. Alts can generate a lot of noise, especially in a population that’s somewhere south of 6,000 or so on a server. The fact is, reputation systems like these seem to get gamed almost anytime they crop up, unless they happen in a place like eBay, with a vast number of users. And they still get gamed there.

Virtual worlds, though, have it especially bad, for some reason. In The Sims Online, reputation was all. Fierce mafia wars would rage across TSO servers as gang-leaders sought to spam each other with unfavorable reputation links. Second Life has had similar problems with its reputation system, seeing “rating parties” in which people would get together to favorably rate each other all evening long, mostly because higher ratings meant bigger weekly handouts of virtual currency. Linden Lab has now done away with that reputation system, and not replaced it with another — which is the right move, if you ask me.

Can a virtual world reputation system really work? It seems that only large communities like eBay or Slashdot can support reputation systems that converge on anything like a true reflection of how the community as a whole feels about someone. But is that even a good idea? One iteration of Linden Lab’s reputation system had your ratings fade out after six months. If you’d been a naughty boy back in January or had simply earned someone’s disfavor at random, you could repair your reputation by July. Is Azeroth ready for the scarlet tag of a +/- reputation ratings system? I doubt it. But it’s encouraging to see someone try.