Negative Ratings (Lindens)

I dunno. I can just click a person and hit 'rate positively' as many times as I want. The game has never told me that I can't or that it's a one-time deal.

actually you will notice that if you click 'rate' on someone you have already rated the dot is already next to where you last rated. Clicking there again doesn't do anything. What you cna do is change your rating of someone from pos to neg or no vote or visa versa.

Maxen's idea is great, and Ama's hybrid method would be even better, Althought, I would want a "Lock" option for ratings, so I don't get rid of a rating that I wanted to keep indefinatly.

I think one of the major points to this discussion, and was sort of lost a while back was the thing with negative ratings being anonymous.

On that topic, keep something in mind. Suppose there is someone out there griefing by giving neg ratings. If this person was able to rate negativly anonymously, then there would be no repercussion for it. Even if the number of neg votes was limited, I still don't think that would fix the potential for griefers, nor excuse such actions and make them easy to get away with.

So, you rate someone negativly for something they did, and they rate you negativly in return. And on a single basis, this doesn't seem fair, but if the person keeps doing the thing that got them the negative rating then they will do this little exchange negatives with other people as well, and while his negative votes are spread around those who voted badly for him, the votes against him will all add up and he'll suffer the concequences for it.

As for numbers? Well, having played some games where I've had to ignore lots of total morons, I don't think 10 and 20 are large nough numbers for the negative votes. I think large numbers, like 100 positive votes and 30 negative votes are more appropriate. Sure, with a small amount of players, that may seem excessive, but with a large player base, it will seem more apporpriate.

Also, you might consider a system where, to vote negativly for someone, you have to vote positivly for someone as well. And you can never have more negative votes than postive votes, up to a certain number of each. Conforming to some sort of ratio.

Okay, all done, hope that was coherant, but I'm kind of sleepy, so there's a chance it means nothing to anyone. Right.. sleep now.
^_^

lol, an I thought 40, 10 was going to be too high. The numbers would have to be adjusted. I'm not sure what would be fair.

The Negitive votes should be much lower though because those are the votes that will be abused the most.

I'd like to think that most people who come to this game would want to get along, but I could be wrong. I don't want to spend my game time handing out lots of negitive votes for petty little problems. I have better things to do.

If some thought has to go into where the positive vote goes I think even more should go into the negitive.

As for the anonymous vote, I really don't see anyway around it.
Knowing who cast the negitive vote wold just lead to all sorts of problems. With a small number of neg votes the griefer would have a hard time of it. Griefers tend to Grief a lot of people. they would run out of votes pretty fast as votes against them keep climbing up.
That's where the idea of a fine for bad behavior comes in.
Griefers would have a lot of negitive votes agianst them. If that actually cost them, then maybe they would stop(wishful thinking )

I do not think think negative ratings is going to be a method of choice for many griefers.

The potential damage is too low. If I get rated negatively, yeah itkind of sucks, but only in that now I have a rating of 24 instead of 25. I go out and put forth an extra effort to be nice to one other person and wow, back to where I was. See what I mean? As far as 'greif' goes there really isn't much 1 player can do.

Now they could have an organisation of 50 or so people who went around ruining peoples reputations. Limiting the negative votes would limit their victims.

On one hand I don't want to run out of negative votes, because I'm not a griefer and would use those votes against griefers.

Oh ... new idea.
Maybe the number of votes you can cast is partially dependant on your ranking.

For example, everyone has 10 neg and 20 pos votes to spend. For every 10 ranking you have you get an extra 1 neg and 2 pos votes to spend. So if I am ranked 100 I would have 20 neg (10 + (100/10)*1) and 40 pos (20 + (100/10)*2) votes available to me. This should work both ways, if I get ranked -20 I should only have 8 neg and 16 pos votes to spend.

I think this makes sense because the ranking system should be a way for people to say they like what you bring to the world and give you more authority to reward behavior you like.

sorta of spreading the love(or hate) around

I actually have a little experience with this sort of rating system on another game. There, we used 'praises' and 'disses' in order to effect changes on a social point system, with the most popular and most hated people going up on a 'Top 30' board.

In it's origin, praises and disses were limited to a certain amount per week. (In that game, the amount was based on a character's social stats - in SL that obviously wouldn't apply) For the first year or so, praises and disses weren't much more than a sort of verbal applause or thanks -- they didn't have the numerical power to really effect the social lists. Then the staff tweaked the system and changed it so that praises and disses were exponential.

IE, 1 praise would net you 50 social points; 2 praises would net you 150, etc. I don't remember the exact numbers involved, only that by the time you hit 20 or 30 praises per week, you were talking tens of thousands of points.

What happened among the players at that point is the interesting part -- praise and diss circles popped up. People started networking to praise one specific person a week, boosting them up the list; then the next week it'd be someone else in the circle's turn.

Dissing also became a situation where people would form syndicates and diss assigned targets -- even if they'd never met them. The combined power of these two styles of play shook the social system upside down the first few weeks, before things stabilised.

Er. Back to the relevant point of SL -- the last tweak we put into the social system was a randomized notice of who was dissing you. Basically, we ran into the problem of griefers dissing people into the negative points, and used notification as a means of coping with it. Anonymous negatives really wouldn't work well, IMO, especially once we get into wide release. The capacity for really mean 'lam3rz' to flood a previously-happy beta community is infinite.

Just my .02.

I think everyone should have equal say in what behavior is acceptable in the community, even the newest newbie. I'm not fond of dictatorships, and wouldn't want to see the groundwork laid for one. Maybe I'm being a Pollyanna about it, but I do believe that if everyone has equal say, that good will win out. I hope so anyway. But if more 'say so' is given to a few, well... power does strange things to people. And if those few with more 'say so' collaborate, our second lives could become miserable.

My 2 cents -
Kerstin

I agree and disagree, Kerstin.

I think that some people (greifers etc.) should not be allowed to shape the world as much as you should be able to.

I agree that everyone, even the lowest newbie, should have the potential to shape the world as much as anyone else. I just also think they may have to work at it more.



Each person can still only cast 1 vote for each person. Someone who works hard to get a high rating could go around and give a negative rating to a lot of undeserving people. So you get the Guild of Annoying Ten Year Olds, 50 people all go and get really good ratings so they can go hurt a lot of people. How long berfore word gets out about what they are doing and every (decent) person who sees them rates them negatively, reducing their influence and the harm they can do?

The more I think about it the more I like the idea of Rank acting as an Influence system. It gives the people who add to the world the most the largest influence, but they are still only able to effect any 1 person as much as a newbie can. At the same time it reduces the influence of those who cause trouble.

I think we are now getting into an area where you'd have to see it in action to be able to tweak it. There may be flaws in the system that we can't see unless a lot of people are using it. I'm hoping the Lindens are reading and that it gives them some ideas for changes to the rating system.

I tend to agree with Kerstin on the last point, besides the people with the high ranking are already being rewarded with extra money. That should be enough for their effort. Although Maybe people who have very bad negitive records would lose their ability to cast negitive votes. It would send the message that they should be more concerned with their own negitive status rather than running around judging others.

how about we avoid the whole thing and just kick out the people who suck (there's like 2 or 3, right? lol)

I'm all about quick and easy solutions! Even if they are vastly stupid and relentless!

I do not think negative ratings should be anonymous. Being anonymous would protect people who give negative ratings to those who deserve them, but it would also protect those who do so maliciously. Not being anonymous should make people more responsible for how they rate others.

I am not in favor of a limit on the number of people we can rate. In the past, this kind of limit has been a problem for me. I was always apologizing to people that I wanted to reward, but couldn't. Instead of a fixed limit, the value of the rating could be based on the number of people someone rates. If someone rates only a few people, the rating would affect the rank and bonus more than a rating by someone who rates many people. For example, a positive rating by someone who has only rated five people might increase the rank by twenty points, while one by someone who has rated a hundred people would only rase it one point. This would allow each person to decide how selective they wanted to be with ratings.

Having ratings expire after some time is a good idea. However, to avoid the bother of having to keep renewing ratings, it would be better if they only expired when people did not interact for a certain length of time. If there was no contact (chatting, IM, etc.) between the person who did the rating and the one who was rated for this time, the rating would be set back to neutral. I am not certain how long it should take for the ratings to expire, but it probably should be at least a week and no more than a month.

I agree with Tweke although I think the minimum should be two weeks. People do have rl things (vacation?) that can keep them away for a couple of weeks. No need to have them have to start from scratch because of RL.

I think this method will also encourage the casual user to play at least that often to keep there ratings through play and interaction.

As a side note, if this is implemented it'd be great if calling cards of players who weren't playing expired & fell off too. But of course thats a whole other deal.

Lets see I was rated negative the other day by Rivn Epoch. I sent him a message asking why and he had no idea and said he had everyone IMing him the same thing. So he accidentally did a global negative rating...

Yes, when I see Rivn I sure as hell will return the favor.

So I really like to know when I'm rated positive or negative.

Xavier

xavier if you read the other threads you'd see that rivn actually experienced a bug, and that you might not have been rated negatively after all.

Once again,

I have to agree with Kerstin.

And IMHO - I don't think a decay system is a good idea. Once I rate someone, I would like it to stay that way. If it is to change, I would like to be the one to decide so.

I also don't agree with any type of limitation of how many I can rate either way. This would be the similar to decay in that I would be forced to change a rating that I do not wish to once I hit my limit.

So far the ratings seem more of a pleasantry, and a way to help newbies along more than anything else. Which is fine...




fen-