No Neg Ratings 'bout Time LL!!!!!

I think its pretty much common knowledge at this point that the ratings system as a whole is on the way out. So even positive ratings anyone is probably also a huge waste of money. Since they started charging 25 per I stopped rating. Thats a bit much tbh, especialy for those who are just starting out. We only realy need ratings in a game anyway.

Mar

I rated Philip Linden the other day and said "New to SL? Welcome!"

I rate people positively if i enjoy them, or their builds if i admire them. I have never rated anyone neg nor received one, however if a griefer or genuine ass deserves it.. report them.. it may not show on their profile but it will come to the Lindens attention if enough people speak up.. damned if id be paying to neg rate someone who doesnt care less anyway.. glad they are gone to be honest..

LMAO

I disagree with the yin/yang analogy, I don't think neg ratings help define positive ratings at all. Perhaps that is how it was intended, but they were absolutly never used that way. In a yin/yang system, a zero sum would be a user in balance, so somebody with a behavior rating of +80 -80 would be an "average person." It's never been this way.

I also disagree with the line of thinking:

Dorkus J. Butterfly: X tends to cause more griefing than good, we should remove it
Mousey T. Cutepic: Well you may as well unplug the servers, Voila! No more griefing!

There are facets of SL that are good and should be nurtured. There are facets that are borderline and should be repaired. And there are facets that show little hope of repair and should be removed. If somebody proposes a rating system that cannot be gamed or abused I am all ears. But from what I hear this is exceedingly difficult to design.

But I do agree that the pos ratings are fairly useless. And I do think you have a fetching hat.

Ratings are OK I just wish they'd time out like what was promised.

Sorry I disagree. That way of thinking/running an online community didn't do much good for TSO.

Mar

What part? Was it the thing about the hat?

I agree about the hat

Well I did not explain that over well.

I kind of meant exactly that; that the neg-rates are kind of like "word of mouth" as to what the average SL'er thinks of someone. I feel that if you can only pos-rate someone, its not really a rating, it's more like a virtual "gold star" to boost the kids confidence.

As adults I think we should be beyond that kind of silly back-slapping behaviour.

The only real info one can glean from someones ratings now is if someone has a blank set (and are not new), then perhaps you can assume that they are a loner or perhaps just terribly dull.

I can't wait until these same dullards start complaining about the "raw deal" they got and how it wont be fair until the pos rates are also taken away.

Bound to happen.

[/I]

I took this to mean that we should keep the positive ratings and all things good and do away with the things that are not just negative. Even tho they also keep things balanced.

I liked the ying/yang analogy someone else wrote. I wouldn't want to see sl turn into tso; meaning it became to sugary sweet and constraining for my taste.

Mar

I see your point, to a point.

I can't depend on word of mouth though, when I meet someone for the first time in RL - if they know none of my friends/co-workers/relatives/acquaintances. Nor do I get to see their "ratings". I have to rely on my social skills and intuition - and most of all - I have to actually take some time to get to know them. I see that as a bit different than meeting a stranger in SL, whom none of my friends/co-workers/relatives/acquaintances know - yet I can see that big Scarlet Letter - whether or not they deserved getting it. That is the issue I saw with neg rates. I am happy to see them go - the only thing they did for me was to tell me who was an abusive neg rate giver. Semi-valuable info, and that is the only thing about it I will miss.

I wouldn't mind at all if the whole rating system was tossed out. It's never been effective. During my tenure within SL, I have seen both pos and neg rates abused to the extreme.

Reporting does nothing though. It puts a litte red tick next to their name, and even if they eventually get banned, they just come back as someone else. There is no one that can be ever permanently properly banned, so whats the point?

Eliminating the neg ratings (pos ratings to follow almost certainly), is just the first step of the big pull-back by LL on having any control at all over who plays and who doesn't or what a "good citizen" is.

I think the idea LL has is that the percentage of greifers is always going to be small, so as they "scale up" SL, the problem will get smaller and smaller by itself. They are basically allowing that there will be a certain amount of assholes in the game and that they are unable to do much about it.

By giving up on ever solving this problem or having any social control over the game they are allowing a kind of anarchistic free-for-all, hoping against hope that smaller, isolated and more self controlled, communities will evolve in "pockets" all over the map. I guess the really, really big dream, is that these pockets will someday join up to form something new, but that's a serious pipe dream at this point.

The trouble with this kind of "no rules" free-for-all, is that there is still a social elite or "monied" class in SL that controls how things go to a large extent, so what you end up with is a kind of feudalistic model. i.e - the absence of controls leave only the market to control the social structure.

I really don't see this as the Lindens giving up, nor does it seem like a step towards an anarchistic free-for-all. Ratings never reflected what they were intended to reflect. -8 -7 -7 could be the ratings profile of a notorious griefer, or FlipperPA.

In the end the ratings were at best an interesting blip before you actually got to know the person to find out if the negs were deserved or inflicted on them by some other vindictive person. "Getting to know" someone was then and still is the only realistic way to determine someone's character, though now we must do it without being biased by the near random marks created by some stranger on their profiles.

R.I.P. ratings and lets move on to designing social tools that actually work.

I guess I have been spinning a bit of my own hyperbole today.

I stand by my (perhaps over-emphasised), comments though. I just think that removing the neg rates only stops greifers "gaming" the neg rates, yet it actually enables more greifing in that one cant tell who the "ass-hats" are anymore. (so much)

The fact that someone might neg rate me innapropriately I didn't see as a problem and folks that may have had the odd neg were not really ever in danger of being "taken wrong" by those they met IMO. So from that point of view I never saw the rating system as "broken" like some did.

IMO the only neg rates that anyone ever really paid attention to were folks that had a lot of them or people who were almost exclusively neg rated. This was the "badge of the griefer" and now it is gone so we cant tell they are griefers, but I know I probably have overstated the utility of that feature.

Possibly the amount of work it was was to keep the rates going was not worth the return, but why not just get rid of both positive and negative as well all as some have suggested? A positive only system had no value as a social tool, so it's really only there as a sop or something which I find it a bit offensive. What are we, ... little children?

Dianne Mechanique, what utter bosh. You evidently know squat about designing enjoyable interactive experiences populated by anonymous Avatars, which can be scrapped, logged off, or replaced, on a whim.

Negs were abused by far, far more than "a few people". They were used primarly as a retaliatory, or reactionary, mechanism for the disgruntled or disciplined. I have been neg rated for having a locked front door, and a hill people didn't like. I've been registered since 2002, and am telling you, they had to go then, and it's way, way late, but finally, Linden saw the light and now they are gone.

In real life, you can not see somebody you don't know, dislike their sneakers, and walk up to a public board and register a "bad word of mouth", which everybody can draw conclusions from, because if "the board" says so, hey, it's possible it's true, so better to err on the safe side and assume the person is an idiot.

But, people get far too caught up in this "SL is not a game" thing. I used to think that too, but eventually realized, yes, it is. Or no, it is not, in the same sense that any game that allows non-linear play is...we just have a new kind of game. People say the Sims isn't a game. In my years in EQ, many of the more hardcore said the same. It's a matter of perspective. Did you know that EQ has been used to conduct online meetings? That now there is an emerging open source version of it as a "platform"? SL has rules and ways to succeed. To do so, you go through the motions. Acquisition of clothing and bling. Money. Social standing. Dwell. These are competitive elements, and qualify as goals to pursue.

Games.

There's also plenty of word of mouth in SL that we don't need negs. Just ask anybody about me, you'll see.

Good bye and good riddance. Who the hell are YOU ( pointing at entire populace ) to neg ME, thus impacting my numeric social standing, and stipend, for having a god damn locked door, or for living on a hill, or for building an FPS in a sim that you decided to move into a year later and now think you own? And what's my reliatory option set...

...to triple neg you back, or beg you to remove it!

Pfft.

All responses to predictable and pointless rebuttal, waived. Enjoy the thread, and your unread last word!

nods understandable Tcoz and excellent point on sl perception.

How do you feel about pos ratings also being removed (not that they have been but I believe that is the next logical step)

Mar

I'm not as passionate about dumping pos rates as their abuse is not quite as instantly harmful. But everything I said about neg rates applies to pos rates too, so I wouldn't be opposed to dumping them.

The assumption for pos rates are that well rated people are more trustworthy, well behaved, more attractive, and are better builders. In reality this isn't even remotely true. Most of the best builders and scripters spend much of their time in isolation and rarely enjoy high pos rates. People who work within large social networks can have high bahavior ratings without necessarily being a very nice person at all ("my mafia rates me good. You got a problem wit dat?!"

Alternatives would be great. One of my suggestions was to reflect the Lindens diciplinary point system in a user's profile, or better still some kind of mark on the title floating over their head. Green=little or no diciplinary action, Yellow=borderline, and Red=frequent suspensions. There are Pros and Cons to this idea (some people have claimed to be victim of frivolous diciplinary actions by the Lindens) but maybe this is a good direction to go in.

This is what I would have preferred:

When you look at someone's profile, you see positive and negative rates. When you click on the rating section of the profile, a guestbook of sorts open up and you can see who exactly induced each rate, as well as read the comment that went along with each rate or set of rates. From here you can open the profile of each person who has given a rate, and glean a little information from them.

This would give you a more accurate account if the ratings were legitimate or not. If you looked at someones profile and they had a series of uncommented negrates by people who have excessive neg givings in *their* profiles, it would seem more likely that the initial person just neg griefed and it wasn't for any legitimate reason.

You would know that uncommented negs wouldn't count as much as a neg like "- 1, Verkin Raven, "Ignored multiple requests to stop firebombing Cordova"

Of course, this system would have you writing the comments for others to read in their profile instead of making the actual comment to whom your negging.

Also, this wouldn't stop some people from filling other people's profiles with crap, but needing to actually bring up the "guestbook" window first and possibly not seeing the comments unless you click on each individual would cut that down a bunch.

Rates were never transactional. They were completely arbitrary. You could neg someone because their object was in reach.

Rates weighted the situation towards the griefer:

- People who care about their reputation were harmed by receiving negs.
- People who didn't give a crap about their reputation were not harmed by receiving negs.

Because of this,

- People who did care about their reputation never GAVE negs because they worried about retaliatory negs.
- People who did not care about their reputation FREELY gave negs because they were NOT worried about retaliatory negs.

So, the ratings system was slanted towards people who didn't care about (the negativity) of their reputation in the community.

I ask you this: Who cares more about having a good rep in SL?

-A griefer who is on only to get a rise out of people, cause trouble, chaos, and rile people up?
-A long-time SL member who has stake in the community and possibly a business or social reputation to uphold?

Now that negs are gone, the weight is back in the 'non-griefing' person's hands. Why?

We still have abuse reports. Griefers have --- their griefing actions.

Before, griefers had their initial actions *and* retaliatory negs.

I would honestly say that people who used negative ratings (or positives for that matter) PROPERLY were in the MINORITY.

Would I know that comments such as "This business owner is a liar and a cheat, and rips off his customers" wouldn't 'count' if they were put there by a competitor's alts who had never done business with the person?

They are still non-transactional indelible arbitrary marks that have no guaranteed basis. Your solution would simply make them that with a storyline tacked on.

Trust me. We will do fine without neg ratings.

Nice post, Tcoz, always good to hear from you.