Recently, I posted about reputation systems for tracking players. There, I suggested anonymous voting, a thumbs up or thumbs down evaluation, and providing only aggregate results to individuals. Aside from problems caused by players gaming the reputaiton system (at worst, making the system useless or misrepresentative), my wife had some other comments based on her experiences with eBay.

Anonymity is bad
Voting anonymously allows people to vent their feelings. However, voting anonymously keeps people from taking responsibility for those opinions. Every vote should be tallied, and visible as to who voted.

Feedback is essential
The person voting should be able to enter reasons why the vote was cast the way it was; this provides context. More importantly, however, the person receiving the vote should be allowed to enter a reason why they disagree with the vote. This provides a balance for negative votes, and will help to highlight unreasonable negative reasoning.

It only indicates popularity
Darkfury was a well-known raid leader on our DAOC server, Gaheris. He was well known for his reputations of success, intolerance, and set “holy” strategies–and later, for his sexism and unwelcome derogatory comments to female players. He was a polarizing person: in the early days of the server, he actively recruited level 50 characters from other guilds (stealing them away to his guild, Legion), and his attitudes, behaviors, and history left very few people on the server without a strong opinion of him. When my former guild on the server, Trinity, joined the Legion guild in an alliance, some of our best members quit in protest over being associated with him and his practices.

He undoubtedly had two kinds of reputation: as a raid leader, he was viewed as one of the best across all servers. As a person, he was difficult to get along with, had a (generously described) quirky sense of humor, and had incredibly high standards that he expected himself and other people to adhere to. (Aside: during a raid on Tuscaren Glacier, Darkfury warned the raid group the using cold-proccing weapons would heal the mobs. During the fight, someone was using cold-proccing weapons, and he was yelling for whoever was using it to stop or the perpetrator would be banned from going on any more Darkfury raids. During the next fight, everyone on the raid got to see the message, “Darkfury’s sword hits for 53 points of cold damage. Darkfury heals the mob for 500 points.”)

Darkfury would have had a negative reputation because of how he alienated people, out of line with his ability to successful lead raids against the most difficult content in the game. This is why a reputation system can quickly turn into a popularity contest: Muppet, whose motto was “Muppet leads you to death” would have been rated higher than Darkfury because of the humor he brought to the game, even though he was not nearly as strong a raid leader.