Why Playerep will fail
Oh, you know her, "Miss Groupie Supreme"
Yeah, you know her, "Vera Vogue" on parade
Found at Raph's place: Playerep. Read How it Works and the FAQ , then come back. You know, if you want.
Why game producers don't want to build global player rep systems into their game: Players are more apt to negatively review a player than positively review them. Eventually a global rep system will show a disproportionate number of bad players, and no MMO company wants that kind of rep.
Playerep tries to fix this problem by being an independent system. Why it fails:
- The system is built on trust. As any good game designer will tell you, never trust the player. And for good reason. Any system that can be exploited will be exploited. There are no safeguards in Playerep to stop this from happening.
- Griefing. The system is so open to griefing, it would quickly become nothing more than a playground for asshats.
- The system is unnecessarily granular. Players either like another player or they don't. If I rate you low on "Competency," I'm very likely to rate you low on "Knowledge," "Fairness," and "Sociability" too.
- You have to leave the game to use it.
Player ranking is getting a lot of discussion lately, and it's only a matter of time before an in-game system is implemented into a mainstream game. But I think the problem is being over-thought. A global player rep system is unnecessarily complex, and is always going to lose some players through the cracks. A personal player rep system makes more sense, and doesn't even have to be more complex than a tabbed "friends" list. Let players manage their own reputation lists. After all, the kind of player you like to group with may not be the kind of player I like to group with.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Hmm… I don’t want to cheat by Googling… but Blondie? Atomic? Now to see how far off I am…
Rep systems based on friends lists seem relatively fair. You don’t get to mark anyone down, just up. The people you like may not be the people I like, but it’s a starting point if I like you.
A person who is nobody’s friend has the equivalent of a bad rep. And you can’t run away from having no friends.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:52 am
“Rip Her to Shreds”. Was close. It was Blondie.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:54 am
/agreed
I also don’t think they’ll hit the critical mass necessary to make it usefull.
I think though that they are creating a mod for WoW to use it in game, and probably will try to do the same for other MMOs.
Dr. Richard Bartle had a take on player reputation, not long before playerep was announced. One of the other blogs (I thought it was Lum or Raph) picked it up and there were several more comments from Richard clarifying this, but I can’t find it now.
Richard’s version could possibly still be exploited/griefed, but would take more effort and not be as effective, since it would be griefers aggregated with other griefers.
As far as the tendency to rate people negatively and rarely bother with positive ratings, an MMO could proactively rate people positively for you if you interact with them multiple times, or put them on your friends list. Grouping with the same person multiple times should be good enough to give them a good rating on your behalf.
July 26th, 2006 at 9:47 am
I liked Richard’s version enough to blog about it myself. And I think BugHunter’s got something there too… let the player set a grouping threshold (in instances or minutes, or instances than exceed set minutes), when another player meets or beats that threshold they get added to the “auto friends” list, and make it so that people have to actively rate others poorly to prevent the auto.
Anyway… yeah, I think Playerep is going to fail.
July 26th, 2006 at 9:47 am
@Tipa: Yeah, had to dig deep for that one. I almost went with ABBA’s “He Is Your Brother,” but I kinda like the early “mean girl” Blondie sound for a post on player ratings. Can you tell I’ve been listening to a lot of 70’s/80’s on iTunes radio?
@Bug: Here’s what I see as a problem with automating positive ratings. Every player is unique in the way in which they rate a player. You, for example, might be more willing to hold a player’s hand and overlook some social faux pas in the hope that he or she is still learning how to fit in. I, on the other hand, might be ready to throw out a negative rating at the drop of a hat. But an automated system doesn’t have that built-in variability. In effect, an automated system has the tendencies of a single player, applied across the entire population. So what you wind up with are two different systems which operate under 2 sets of criteria working on one set of data. There’s a math/statistics term for this problem which I can’t recall at the moment, but it’s generally accepted to be “non-optimal.”
July 26th, 2006 at 10:35 am
Its sad that stuff like this is being done outside of games instead of being part of them. Its even more sad that the people doing this can’t be bothered to look at how other rating systems have failed, and learn from those mistakes.
We need a way to rate players, and it needs to be simple and easy for the players, but complex and adaptive in the background. That’s not as easy as a simple rating system though, so nobody is going to do it. Instead we’ll end up with lots of crappy slashdot style abominations like this, that end up being abused to punish innocent players.
July 26th, 2006 at 11:19 am
The only way I’d participate is if it were part of the game and automatically prompted me when I ungrouped with a party. Oh, and if it was anonymous and wouldn’t show up until a day later… so someone couldn’t revenge rate me.
On a related note, I’m giving Amber Night an 8.2 on the BlogRep system. I’d score it higher but the thing with the action figures creeped me out.
July 26th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
I’d rather lose a few players in the cracks of a subjective rating system than have the sheer number of ninjas and deliberate griefers in MMOs at the moment. A few players complaining that they got 3 stars instead of 5 because someone didn’t like their jokes pales in comparison to peoples’ entire games being ruined.
The opinion that a friends list is enough keeps getting mentioned, and I couldn’t disagree more. If it were enough, we wouldn’t have so many people feeling their game is great…if it weren’t for all the other people playing it. At the very least we need to try these feedback systems within a game and see how it works. Writing it off from the beginning simply because it MIGHT get exploited (as if MMOs are free of exploitation anyway!) is ludicrous.
Incidentally, if one of these systems was implemented for game content, I doubt anyone would think it was a bad idea. By that I mean, you complete a 4 hour run of Blackwing Lair and up pops a feedback form asking you what you thought of the instance. Over time you get thousands of answers that say X fight is too tough and the loot from boss Y is too weak, and you at least know what the players think. Sure, it’s exploitable, you could try and engineer your guild’s responses to achieve a goal, but would people really hate that system all that much?
July 26th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
“At the very least we need to try these feedback systems within a game and see how it works. Writing it off from the beginning simply because it MIGHT get exploited (as if MMOs are free of exploitation anyway!) is ludicrous.”
No, we have already tried them on lots of social forums. A game is no different in this regard. We already know that doing it wrong will not work. Dismissing the obviously wrong implimentations that have already proven to be bad is fine and dandy.
July 26th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Hate to double dip here, but EQ1 had an extensive out of game rep system. People are still living with the reps of things they did four or more years ago. In the end, all these rep things are a tacit acknowledgement that a game has no strong community.
Community comes on its own with playtime. When you have a game that you can actually finish in a couple of months, like World of Warcraft, there is no chance to form a community. There is a huge churn rate in that game - people leave for other servers to get that same thrill of leveling from nothing, or they quit and come back in a few months — there is no continuity. WoW (like DAoC) displays PvP rankings on its web site; your in-game rep doesn’t matter a bit if you have a good position on the leaderboard. When the character that griefed you today will be gone forever in another month, what is the point of player rep? When all that matters is your position on a standings list, what is the point of player rep?
There is none. It takes time for any player to make enough of an impression on enough people to even get a rep, good or bad, in the first place.
Slow down the pace of the game, and community happens, and suddenly rep matters again. EQ1, which required a year of normal play to get to max level - strong community. FFXI Online, when it came out, demanded you have lots of friends or you simply would not be able to progress. DAoC - semi-slow game, medium sense of community, although the RvR aspect cheapened it somewhat.
Once a game is slowed enough, or hard enough, that reputation actually matters, then it will happen, organically, through player desire. Making it an artificial requirement just adds another game mechanic that will be widely reviled - and rightly so - by the players as a sign the developers are out of touch with the communities in their own games.
July 26th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
I think intra-game Player Rep as an idea could work with a combination of a “positive factor” system (from Tipa’s first post) and you could even have it where people would have the power to go back and remove people from their friends list (if they have been auto added for some certain time threshold of grouping or some manor). I think those both combined might make a great rep system within the confines of a specific game (or franchise of games), but for a third party to succeed in doing it, I don’t think it will happen. I would love for it to happen personally, but to think people are going to honestly rate is a delusion (although it sure makes for great MMO blog coverage and word of mouth marketing).
July 26th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Care to give examples, and ways in which they didn’t work? Because just saying “It didn’t work” without anything to support the statement seems a bit dodgy to me. I mean, I can certainly give examples of it working for literally hundreds of commerce websites, from eBay to Amazon, and I think it works pretty well for social networking sites like Myspace and Friendster. So can you counterpoise that with examples of it not working, please?
July 26th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
[...] This post repeats and expands upon my comments to Amber Night’s article, Why Player Rep Will Fail; her response to the third-party player reputation site, Playerep.com. [...]
July 26th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Dom; marketplace reviews are fundamentally different from rating people and their behavior.
eBay does rate people, but it’s an easier chore; they either shipped you the stuff or paid on time; or they didn’t. They did what they were supposed to do, or they didn’t.
The stuff works or it doesn’t. It’s black and white.
Player rating is entirely subjective. Some people love lots of lewd and crude language; others can’t stand it. Some people are hardcore and expect same from everyone they group with; others are casual and chatty and are put off by people who treat a mere game so seriously. There was an EQ1 guild on my server that was filled with griefers - they would have rated very highly someone who trained all of Bastion of Thunder on a group, or Bestow Divine Aura’d some raid’s main tank in Plane of Fire?
How can you rate such ephemera meaningfully?
You really can’t. And in the end, that’s why you can’t put a objective rating on a subjective experience, nor expect someone else to do so.
July 26th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Tipa: In response to a statement you made in your earlier comment, it does not take a while for someone to make a bad impression. It takes roughly 5 seconds for someone to make a bad impression, a flung curse word, drerogitory insults that aren’t humorous about someone’s mom, etc. On the other hand it can take minutes, if not hours for someone to actually make a lasting good impression.
We should probably worry more about finding a game that is actually based upon skill, rather then time invested, before we worry about player ratings so much. When any immature, middle school brat can level endlessly on his summer break and max-out PvP rewards it doesn’t matter what his player rating is, he’s still going to have teh phat lewts in the end.
July 26th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Ebay doesn’t work. If you get a broken piece of crap instead of what was advertised, and you mark them negative, you will get marked negative. When getting ripped off gets you labelled as bad, your rating system is broken.
Amazon is product reviews, and even there you get people making up total nonsense, and leaving useless reviews. And worse yet, people replying to earlier reviews as if it were a forum. Amazon is not a good example since it has nothing to do with rating people, but even still, it doesn’t work.
Social networking sites don’t rate people, they are simply a network of “friends”. A more refined version of this sort of idea is what is needed, as has been pointed out. But that’s not what people are doing. People are doing simple slashdot style “this is good, that is bad” ratings. Those are bad, and make things worse instead of better.
Slashdot is the most obvious example. You constantly see people with no clue what they are talking about post some complete and utter nonsense, and get modded +5 informative. People who are new are punished, simply for being new. People are punished for pointing out simple facts, that happen to contradict what the popular opinion is. A few dedicated people can mod someone down for no reason, thus giving them a negative karma, and making it very hard for them to ever get modded up again, since nobody will even read their posts.
These problems all apply to games. In games where you need to play with other people, having a way to rate people like this will make it very hard for new players. Even if they don’t get rated down by griefers right off the bat, making nobody willing to group with them, people will develop the habit of not grouping with people with no rating or not high enough rating. You can see this in guild wars for example, where you can’t get on a team for PvP arenas unless you have rank 3. Rank is gained from winning in PvP arenas. How the hell are new players ever supposed to be able to play?
July 27th, 2006 at 3:59 am
Gotta go with Amber on this. A personal player rep system (i.e. based on what you think about a person) is the only way forward. As interesting an intellectual exercise as defining the functionality and design of a inter or intra game player rep system is, the use of such a system seems, to me, to be fundamentally saying “I let other people make my mind up for me about how I percieve other players”.
July 27th, 2006 at 6:31 am
Tipa said:
Joe said:
Joe is right. I bought a cello on eBay for my wife. Before purchasing, I emailed back and forth with the seller to ensure that even though the cello was an “off brand” that I’d be able to get it serviced/tuned/repaired/etc at local music stores. He said yes. After getting the cello, more than a dozen stores said they wouldn’t do work on the cello because it was an off brand. So, I gave the seller a neutral review (not negative) and said “seller assured me off brand item would be supported by local stores, local stores don’t support”, to which he responded “Never exchanged emails with buyer, he is a liar”. He then rated me negative with “clueless ebayer! do not do business with this person!” Sure I get to defend myself by stating that the seller assured me of something that wasn’t true, but I suspect the negative rating I now have has factored in to my inability to sell items myself, and some of my bids on items have been refused.
July 27th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
So make the player feedback similarly black and white. At the end of an instance or raid or whatever, ask “Did this player steal an item from you? YES/NO”. Or something similar, you know? Don’t ask them if you thought their jokes were funny, or if they have good taste in music, just ask them if they unequivocally stole something. That’s at least as black and white as eBay is, and it would go a long way to showing people the player’s reputation.
Sure, some people might think an item was ninja’d when it wasn’t, but I think it’s important to realise that the playerbase will adapt to the system. I don’t know about you, but when I use eBay I don’t really care if somebody has one or two negative feedbacks, because I EXPECT that from a seller. I don’t limit myself to sellers with no less than 100% feedback, because I know full well there are idiots out there who vindictively sabotage people’s ratings. However, if the seller has less than, say, 90% positive feedback, that’s getting a bit close for comfort. If so many people are leaving negative feedback, it can’t be a one off incident.
People’s expectations shift with what is normal. If it’s normal for people to leave negative feedback, then everyone has it, and you still end up going for the person with the LEAST negative feedback.
That’s just an absurd thing to say. It’s one of the most successful websites of the last decade for crying out loud. Because a few people slip through the cracks you think the entire system doesn’t work? Insanity.
So? Perhaps you haven’t noticed but people can rate the reviews, too. Only the reviews which have gained a general consensus as accurate and helpful are shown on the main product page. It doesn’t matter if someone wrote “ZOMG JAMES BLUNT IS SUCH A FAG LOL” because it gets pushed to the very bottom of the reviews by other users. Unless of course most people agree he’s a fag (quite rightly), in which case it gets pushed to the top as it’s deemed to be a useful and accurate review. There’s nothing majorly bad about that system and it works bloody well for almost every single commerce site on the entire internet. You’re just being a grumpy pessimist and assuming the worst.
Yes they do.
Prove it.
July 27th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
“That’s just an absurd thing to say. It’s one of the most successful websites of the last decade for crying out loud. Because a few people slip through the cracks you think the entire system doesn’t work? Insanity.”
Ebay works in spite of itself. It works because it was the first, and it advertises like crazy so that people who don’t know what email do know what ebay is. It is in no way good at any aspect of what it does, it is simple good enough to function. And I didn’t say it wasn’t a successful site, I said their rating system doesn’t work. Anyone who has used ebay knows this is true. Arguing over how broken it is simply proves my point. And if you had 1 negative rating from a lying cheat, and 5 good ratings, and people were deleting your bids and refusing to sell to you, you might realize that dismissing it as “falling through the cracks” is absurd.
“So? Perhaps you haven’t noticed but people can rate the reviews, too.”
So reviewing a product and rating a person are very different things. Reading the opinions of people on an inanimate object and assigning an arbitrary numeric value to actual people aren’t even similar. Rating systems like the one proposed do not work, and giving completely irrelivant examples of totally different systems for totally different purposes isn’t a good way to convince people that simplistic and exploitable people rating is good.
“Yes they do.”
Which social networking site is this? Maybe there are some that do add ratings as well, but the concept of a social networking site is simply extending a friends (and possibly foes) list between friends. That’s not rating people, its an extended and useful friends list, which is what we’re saying games should have instead of naive and easily exploited ratings systems.
“Prove it.”
I already told you to look at guildwars. This already happens in guildwars, and its not like 50% of people do this, or 75%, its well over 90% of people refuse to group with unranked people. Its almost impossible for a newbie to get into guildwars PvP if they don’t already have a friend who’s in a decent guild.
July 28th, 2006 at 2:15 am
And you’re wrong either way.
Haha. Okay, dude, whatever you say. Everyone I’ve ever met has felt pretty confident about the eBay feedback system because they’ve come to accept a few negative comments. But clearly you and all your grumpy friends know better. Maybe it’s something unique to Los Curmudgeonles or wherever you live.
Mm, nope, that’s still just one person falling through the cracks. I maintain that it’s unlikely people would be randomly targetted, out of the blue, without any provocation, to be given negative feedback like that. Even if it DID happen, it would still be rare enough to justify the system as a whole. With a userbase of 6 million people, I doubt WoW would really give a crap about one person in your given scenario. They’d probably point you to the 5,999,999 people who enjoy and benefit from the feedback system. And thus, the system as a whole is a good idea.
Yes, they are! People still have subjective opinions on inanimate objects. And it isn’t even always inanimate objects. People give ratings to music, films, games, restaurants, podcasts, even fricking news stories. You’re not just decrying ratings in games, you’re decrying the entire concept of peer review, and that’s absolutely batshit crazy.
Even if you were right that subjective review of non-objects was impossible, I’ve already said that the important information is whether or not the player ninja’d an item from you. That’s a simple boolean answer. Either they did or they didn’t. There’s very little room for subjectivity. How is that not a good idea to at least test in an MMO?
Yes, but clicking the “Rate User” button is probably considered rating people. A little site called Myspace has one. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?
The game has sold over two million copies. I’d say the system works just fine. If it was as gamebreaking as you make it out to be, the whole game would be dead and buried by now, wouldn’t it? Indeed, the number one attraction of Guild Wars is PvP, so surely the system as a whole must be pretty good to attract that many people, even though you seem to think it’s the worst thing in all of Christendom.
July 28th, 2006 at 8:34 am
there’s some good points here. Let me try and make a couple of notes:
1. The system is built on trust. As any good game designer will tell you, never trust the player. Well true, but all we do is trust the player to give their opinion and to continue to give their opinion. Nothing is static. All votes decay. And all voters who help get a scoring set can be seen by anyone (not how they vote, but who they are).
2. Any system that can be exploited will be exploited. There are no safeguards in Playerep to stop this from happening. I don’t really understand this without an example, but I get the point. If you mean alts, then that won’t work because every member in Playerep has an influence weight and a hidden stability score for how they vote. Meaning, if you used a 100 new accounts to vote for someone, each of those accounts have to already have some integrity, otherwise their scores won’t be around for long. If you mean voting blocks, we catch that and don’t reward homogeneity. There’s a lot of novel work in the scoring and voting behavior monitoring that’s being reviewed and is invisible to the user. Check out the FAQ for a lot of the custom problems our algo set deals with.
3. Griefing Any score you have is temporary. It takes time to build a reputation, whatever it is. No one can suddenly be maxed out. A drive-by negative vote, just like a random endorsement won’t stay long if the person voting doesn’t themselves already have much integrity and stability in the system. Can you let me know what else you mean?
4. The system is so open to griefing, it would quickly become nothing more than a playground for asshats. Anyone who votes for someone is visible — there is zero anonymity. If someone purposively votes one way all the time, their own scores will reflect that homogeneity, and they won’t have as much credibility (their own scores will diminish). And again, if someone you feel is voting for you unfairly (however you arrive that conclusion) you and your voting list can reciprocate. In fact, the whole service can see their voting behavior.
5. The system is unnecessarily granular This is somewhat subjective (some people like data), but the point was to offer people advancement. And the ability to change. Reputations should not be hit or miss or one time events. I think you should be able to allow that some people have bad days or RL stressors that have them act a certain way. Likewise, you should be able to allow that someone can suddenly become abusive and reveals their real behavior. For instance, I should be able to persuade others on my own that I am worth grouping with even, if they don’t know me, and I should be able to show that I am serious about a game even if I’ve been in hospital for 3 months and can’t play and no one is able to vouch for me. I should be able to persuade Amber, for instance, to think about Playerep in a different light:) But to do any of that I need time. In short, to show credibility of any reputation or attribute I think you need to show consistency. So having granularity is really just allowing for a time increment. And again, it allows you to change your mind and your own voting behavior if you want temporarily or for a longer period. It just reflects how MMO’s have advancement over time, and analogously how we build up personal relationships in games over time.
The reason we have scores is that they are just signs of the voting opinions of other people over time for someone. They don’t guarantee anything, but the scores just indicate how long they’ve been open to do this. It’s just extra information for someone.
6. You have to leave the game to use it. Actually, that’s not true. We have a mod and patcher for voting within WoW. It shows scores and allows you to vote automatically with scores that are verified and saved on an external host. We have a fully compliant website for Eve coming (so you can use Eve’s in-game browser to vote and search normally on the site), and similarly I’m working on a widget for SecondLife so you don’t have to open an external web browser, and at least for EQ2 we’re planning to build a viewer people can call up. Everything we’re trying to do this year is on our Dev Roadmap.
We’re trying to do more, and we are going to add some things from this kind of feedback. But I’d just note this is a 100% homebrew and we’re doing it in our spare time. The reason we think it’s useful is that it’s for any game. It’s not exclusive and we don’t try to tell people what is a good or bad behavior. We don’t try and dictate what’s a worthwhile or a griefing transaction in a specific game, because like you said, players can ably decide that for themselves. We’re just letting people create their own records of their experiences of who they play with if they want. Thanks for letting me note all this.
July 28th, 2006 at 10:44 am
“Yes, they are! People still have subjective opinions on inanimate objects. And it isn’t even always inanimate objects. People give ratings to music, films, games, restaurants, podcasts, even fricking news stories. You’re not just decrying ratings in games, you’re decrying the entire concept of peer review, and that’s absolutely batshit crazy.”
I don’t know what to say here. Are you on drugs or something? This is very simple, reading a review can give you insight into why someone feels how they feel. Seeing someone with “6″ beside there name does not give you any such insight. How did they get rated 6, by what people, and why? If you cannot see the difference between a (possibly lengthy) text describing your feelings about something, and a numeric score assigned to a person, then there’s really no point discussing any of this with you is there?
“A little site called Myspace has one. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
Heard of, yes. Used, hell no. Explain how the ratings work for those of us who aren’t 14 year old girls or guys trying to pick up 14 year old girls. Like I’ve said over and over, the social networking model is what they should be doing instead of silly rating nonsense.
“The game has sold over two million copies. I’d say the system works just fine. If it was as gamebreaking as you make it out to be, the whole game would be dead and buried by now, wouldn’t it? Indeed, the number one attraction of Guild Wars is PvP, so surely the system as a whole must be pretty good to attract that many people, even though you seem to think it’s the worst thing in all of Christendom.”
Maybe you should try it instead of just making up random nonsense. Yes, many people bought the game. And early on before everyone got established things were ok. But now that everyone has been playing for over a year, new players are screwed. This is why guildwars has so few new players, and why the ones they do get are almost exclusively the real life friends of people who have played since launch, who can actually get into the game.
Why do you think the game would be dead because its hard for new people to get into PvP? Those of us who’ve been around since launch are still there, there is no horrible guildwars demon that eats players after a set amount of time or anything. Because you can easily hit the level cap on your first day, the game doesn’t rely on people maxing out and quitting, and having new people come in to replace them. Everyone is maxed out, the game is about having fun, not levelling.
“The system as a whole” as in the CCG style PvP does work well, and that’s why we play it. Hell, that’s why I run a fansite for the game. But that doesn’t mean the rank system doesn’t hurt newbies. It doesn’t even exist for the purpose of deciding who to group with, it was just put in so people could have something to brag about. Look, I am rank 7, I have won alot of matches. But the players use it to decide who not to group with, and who not to let in their guild. Its a totally unintended consequence of the system.
I’m sure its really handy to just dismiss easily verifiable proof that such a system screws new players because you don’t want to go try it yourself. But it won’t change reality. Ignoring the facts don’t make them dissapear. You should grab a copy and try it out quick, this weekend is a preview for the upcoming expansion.
July 28th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
When did I ever say that you would just give someone an arbitrary ‘6 out of 10′ rating? I’ve already said that a system could simply keep track of whether or not the player in question ninja’d an item, and I’ve already mentioned the univeral internet review system of giving a short review which users can agree or disagree with. How do either of those not fulfill what you’re talking about?
This is the main problem I have with your stance, and the stance of people like you. You’re not debating the correct implementation of a Playerep system, you’re arguing that every single possible incarnation of a Playerep system is fundamentally doomed. You’ve clearly come up with some horrible and patently flawed Playerep system in your head and you’ve just magically assumed that that’s the one game developers will implement. You don’t even acknowledge the fact that developers could alter any Playerep system to make it less griefable or less subjective or whatever. You’re just being an obstinate jerk.
Factions was a phenomenal success. It was one of the highest selling games. I don’t believe that only the hardcore players still have any faith in Guild Wars and therefore bought the expansion. For that to be true, the hardcore would have to account for 90% of the playerbase, which would be at odds with every other game in existence. Guild Wars also wouldn’t be one of the top ranked MMOs by user votes (see MMORPG.com for example). Quite frankly I think you’re just plain wrong.
I’m sure it’s really handy to just dismiss EVERY SINGLE REVIEW WEBSITE IN THE FREAKING WORLD because you have some stubborn idea that peers can never, ever be trusted, with anything, ever.
July 28th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
“You’ve clearly come up with some horrible and patently flawed Playerep system in your head and you’ve just magically assumed that that’s the one game developers will implement. You don’t even acknowledge the fact that developers could alter any Playerep system to make it less griefable or less subjective or whatever. You’re just being an obstinate jerk.”
No, they came up with it. Its linked above. Maybe you should at least be on the same subject as the conversation. Or do you just want to be offended? I’m very sorry that I talk about the system as presented being flawed, instead of talking about how wonderful the magical version that lives in your head is.
“Factions was a phenomenal success. It was one of the highest selling games. I don’t believe that only the hardcore players still have any faith in Guild Wars and therefore bought the expansion. For that to be true, the hardcore would have to account for 90% of the playerbase, which would be at odds with every other game in existence.”
Yes it was a success. Kinda like the original was huh? Yes, almost everyone who has the game bought the expansion. Their whole model was about selling expansions, everyone who bought it knew they were going to be buying an expansion every 6 months instead of paying a monthly fee. And you need the expansions, you cannot compete if you don’t get them, you need the new skills to add to your deck. Here’s a spoiler for you, the next expansion is going to sell just as well. I don’t know what your definition of “hardcore” is, but if its “people who buy the expansions” then yeah, I bet it is 90% of the playerbase or more.
“Guild Wars also wouldn’t be one of the top ranked MMOs by user votes (see MMORPG.com for example).”
Why not? People love the game, its really the only decent PvP game out there. Its one of the only online RPG style games where you just play and have fun. There’s no “grind for 6 months before I can even try the game”. Its amazing to me that you would try to tell me, someone who has spent the entire day playing the game, plays the game almost every single day, has since release, and runs a fan site, that rank doesn’t hurt noobs even though you’ve never tried the game. The question is, how do you equate being hard for newbies to get into it with being unpopular with the millions of existing players? Yes, lots of us like the game. That doesn’t mean its perfect, nor does it mean that rank doesn’t hurt noobs.
“I’m sure it’s really handy to just dismiss EVERY SINGLE REVIEW WEBSITE IN THE FREAKING WORLD because you have some stubborn idea that peers can never, ever be trusted, with anything, ever.”
Obviously this is pointless. Enjoy arguing against imaginary nonsense that you wish I said, I’m sure its WAY more fun that actually bothering to read and understand my point. Yep, playerrep is exactly like amazon product reviews, I don’t know how I could have gotten so confused. *sigh*
July 30th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Apologies for the delayed reply, it was my birthday yesterday. Anyway, the only part worth replying to is:
Dude, my entire point from the very beginning wasn’t that they were similar systems but that the concept of peer review is useful and worth trying in an MMO. I never even said I like the Playerep system, simply that I think the use of peer review systems is worth pursuing. You were arguing that every single incarnation was flawed, which I disagree with.