I was thinking about this "project" for quite long time now and yet I'm still not sure if it would be possible / usable to do. I posted it here instead of general because I somehow feel it fits here bit more - but if you think its not worth it or its completely retarded idea, just let it die or move it to banhammer.

The idea itself is to make a centralized information database about players and for players of wow. We could imagine it as a kind of wiki server where you could just select your desired game server and character and get some info about them. Some info can be anything from random comments from other players or guilds, some kind of rating maybe, guild history, armory links etc. The most important part is the comments / rating section.
I understand theres about milion+ ways how you could possibly exploit or abuse this system with the rules that are being presented now, but lets forget it for a moment and focus on what it possibly "could" do right.
In purely utopical vision most players on lots of servers would get some kind of positive / negative comments regarding their actions on the realm, their raiding or pvp history, their attitude in general etc. This way it would provide lots of information which you could possibly use.

Few examples how it "could" work:

- As a guild, you are looking for recruits. Either xrealm or from your own realm. You get some applications and several of the applications there look very promising but you have only one free spot. So far this has been usually sorted with some kind of interviews with the applicants and trial period. However wouldnt it be better solution, if you could just read some comprehensive info about the applicants, see if they got generally positive or negative comments, how is their current server looking at them and so on. This could avoid situations when you recruit someone who had awesome application, in interview looked pretty decent, transfered to your server and then turns out to be a total asshole. Just because you would be able to see a comment from his old guild on his old server which says "This guy transfered to us from server XY thanks to awesome application, took all the loot he can and when three months cooldown was over, he moved to other server again".

- On your alt (or main) you are looking for a 5 man instance and get some pug together. This way you could check atleast rough backround of your group mates for obvious idiots and if the run would be good / succesfull, you could easily add some positive (or negative) comment yourself.

These are the pro's. You could easily get some basic info about pretty much anyone and maybe even more. The obviously negative part is that it would insane flame / abuse fest without proper rules. It would most likely need lots and lots of tuning and thinking to actually make into a system that would prevent most of the abusive / exploitive behaviour (wow general forum trolls come in mind) but I'm pretty sure it would be possible. This brings the first important problem which comes with this - in sake of avoiding anonymity, you would be able to post on level 70 characters only (or other rule in similar manner). But for this to work, it would be needed to actually verify that someone logging in as XY - lvl 70 from server ZYX is really that person. Is there some way to verify logging on a wow account (for example some plugin for armory)?

Theres a lots and lots more issues with this, but I hope that as a general presentation of the idea its enough. Do you think this is worth more thinking (and maybe actually some work later) or is the idea itself totally off?

Thanks for opinions.

Did you reserve wow-facebook.com already?

The idea is for sure interesting. Jumping directly to your last lines.

1. I _personally_ don't like to have too much info about me around the net. If someone would create a wiki entry about me, i probably would make you delete it.

2. I NEVER would EVER enter my Account information into a form that is not directly hosted by Blizzard. This just screams SCAM for a simple reason. Who ensures that you are not intercepting the login info? Who ensures your plugin can't be exploited by OTHERS to intercept the login info i enter.

3. It would probably take Full-Time moderation to keep the niveau above the official forums once the features are generally known, interesting to the wide audience and not only, like EJ e.g., a small targeted audience. And moderating a Wiki/Blog/Forum-style community page is serious business. Just ask the mods over here, at mmo-champion, worldofraids or anywhere else.

I like the idea to get info on applicants beforehand from a 3rd person view, but as in any wiki, who can ensure me he just hadn't asked some friends to add positive comments and get negative comments purged because he claimed they were unjustified. Think Ebay

I hope i didn't discourage you too much by writing that, but i felt it had to be said.

Nah, I expected lots of issues with it and some intelligent critique is what I was looking here for in the first place anyway.

1. I have totally no idea how it is with the privacy rules on net and all that kind of stuff, but I somehow doubt you wouldnt be able to make a page about someone's game character and add comments to it. I mean, how exactly would you force me to delete it (no pun intended, I just really want to know)?

2. Definetely. Only way around which I could think about would be some plugin which could verify you are logged onto your account on armory somehow, completely avoiding inputing any login / passes stuff. I totally agree that any other method yells "SCAM". Too bad some verification method would be needed to avoid abusive behaviour.

3. Yes, thats unavoidable and comes with job, simple as that. Smart rules can limit the amount of thrash posts / users etc to quite minimal amount, but some manual work is and always will be needed.

unwritten4. Yes, the "gimee a good comment" on my page would need to be sorted out by some rules, otherwise everyone would be pimping their "rating" via friends etc. But for example you could have Player comments and Guild comments and by default it would sort out the guild comments higher (with some limitations or options, like having 3 different comments coming from one guild or something similar for example). Actually making and tuning the rules so the whole thing is actually usable is the biggest challenge in it (excluding technical limitations with verifying accounts and stuff).

EDIT: I just gotta keep thinking about the amount of troubles this "project" would save to me and my guild if it would be working one or two years ago when xrealm transfers came. I'm pretty sure anyone can think about several times when you really took some wrong applicant for various reasons etc.

And just as a thought about sorting of the comments a bit. There could be two version of the whole system in place. First would be just about rating comments -

Venomia posted - Player XY played several heroics with me and always did a very good job as a healer. (Rate + / Rate -)

This way each comment would get some numerical rating which could move it up or down on the page or make it more or less visible (minus rating could make the comment more and more transparent etc.) The same could be done for guild comments. This way you could look on the top of the page for most positive rated comments (positive rated as in "true", not positive as in "good player") and further click could show who rated that comment.
Other version, which could work on its own or could be connected to the previously mentioned one could be about rating the players themselves rather than just the comments. As an example, Gurgthock would most likely get shittons of positive comments from all sides, which would make his own comments very high rated by default. On the other hand, trolls which would manage to pass the anti-troll measures would get their rating stomped in dust, so noone will really care what they post.

Again, just very rough ideas from the top of my head right now.

Cool idea

As pointed out before the biggest problem would be ensuring the person is who they say they are. Only thing i can think of is sending mails to their in game characters, though this could mean a lot of hours spent logging onto lvl 1 alts and spamming mails to people if the site became popular.

Im not sure how feasible it would be but could the same thing be acclompished with a mod? Have this wiki page set in-game as it were instead of on a website. This would make the verification much easier and people might be more willing to install a mod rather than register to a website.

However, i have no idea if a mod can access a web hosted database from within the game, though it seems feasible to have the mod update or gather information from a database outside of the game, through a windows app for instance. Then you would have the ability to view player profiles from other servers etc.


Edit: im surprised Blizzard hasnt already though of this actually, even in a simple form of having comments on an armoury page. Maybe pitch it to them?

Got a PM suggesting that the verification process could be done with planned gear swap on armory ("Hi dear webpage, im person XY playing on server ZX and in next 10 minutes ill change 3 pieces of my gear to these (da,da,da) three pieces - do this twice in a row and character is connected to your account there - not sure how feasable it is, but sounds quite ok).

I'm guessing Blizzard avoided it intentionally on armory after the experience with wow general forums + crying about privacy.

Awesome idea. And I guess its not that bad to remove few pieces of gear two or three times in a row just to verify your account, which you can normally use after without all the hassle.

As for lower level characters, im actually not sure if it would be worth it to use any other characters than level 70's only, purely for anti-troll reasons.

Some of the things you want to implement sound like features of Rupture.

The first thing that comes to my mind reading this is more how this would be exploitet not so much what benefit it would give.

Don't you think it would be a bit unfair if everyone could post any (I mean any, needn't be true) info on you that he wants and prevent you from finding a new Guild just because he - dislikes you?
There are always some people who you come across and you just dislike each other, or even people that you don't really know but they are jealous because of equip/raidacievements etc. (I remember those nice flame posts on the Guild homepage from "Unknown" who oviously couln't deal with the fact that we downed Illidan someday).
And the first who would use such a database would be those people if they are immature enough. So for example you didn't invite one guy into your Guild and now you have a nice "info" on your char that prevents you from finding any new raid/guild if yours would break up? I think very little people tend to post on forums if everything goes well, look at all those whineposts in WoW Forums, you would just collect negative feedback, sometimes legitimate, but just as well unjustified comments just because someone dislikes you.
Maybe it costs more time to speak to applicants and give them a trial period, but at least you get a real impression from the people rather than childish flames from some nonames. The really bad thing about this is, that even if you yourself and hundreds of people on your server or in your Guild know that you didn't do something wrong, the damage to your reputation is done and you will have worse chances when applying further on and can't do something about it.

This looks more like a wow myspace, which can have some features in common, but in general it has different purpose.

As for the exploitability - thats the biggest challenge about this to tune the whole system in such a way that it would prevent this behaviour in larger scale (because you can never prevent this behaviour on 100%).
As mentioned in few previous posts, some kind of rating system (or even several linked systems) would be needed to balance this whole thing. That way worthless posters will have less "posting / commenting power" than positively rated users. Generally speaking though, the little bracket (player commenting on players) might be still too uncontrollable. But that makes the bigger bracket (guilds commenting players, not reversed) sound way more reasonable and accurate. Guilds usually have the reputation to keep and cant really afford go around and troll random players, unless its really some small guild made just for this purpose (again can be partially prevented by smart system of rules in place).

I think most people wouldn't know about it so there would be a lot of misinformation left up there for a long time. I'm also not sure if yet another separate site for info is a good thing, maybe consider doing it as a greasemonkey script to add notes onto the wowarmory?

Make it so that you have to log into your account to post a comment. Have each account only be able to post one comment per day. A user can remove one comment from his/her armory per day. Thus no spamming bad/good things on a page. The user can only remove 1 comment per day so if many people agree then he/she cant remove all the bad comments. And even if no one posted on that person's armory for a while and he/she removed the bad comments, the date can tell a person how old the good comments are.

Also, you can only post one comment on a person's armory. Thus you cant put multiple bad/good comments about a character. Have new comments overwrite old ones.

Furthermore, you could have a verification system. When a comment is posted, there could be a button that one could push that would consume your daily comment count. It would then make that comment semi-permanent (character that it pertains to cannot remove the comment). A comment that had been "protected" could still possibly be removed by having a button that allowed other users to use their daily comment to remove the protection.

The currently unacknowledged problem is how to get this information out.

1) You wouldn't have the backing of Blizzard. They certainly wouldn't want the headaches of an official "rating" set up- or of acknowledging one unless it became a massive success.

2) There are over a million accounts in the US set of servers, same in Europe... and that's just counting the English speaking public. In order to have the saturation necessary to make it a viable tool- you've got to be assured that when you search for someone- you're more likely than not to receive some valuable input about them. Even if you chop out all of the "casual" users and promote your site as a friend finder for raiding guilds- you're still looking at a character list in the hundreds of thousands to populate with information. to achieve even the basic saturation necessary to get the project off the ground and worth your beta testers time.

3) Say you mysteriously accumulated 250,000 characters worth off reviews- all moderated and vetted and perfect- a solid start. How would you get that information out to the people who want to look it up.... and how would you get the site out to the people who you want to populate further characters. You could start with a forum like EJ- but even as broadly recognized as EJ has become- it's till only accessing a fraction of the raiders out there. You'd need a heavy advertising campaign just to get it used- much less updated.

4) Server space/Costs/Development. It's expensive to host a heavy use website. Until you have a functional/popular product, however, people aren't going to want to advertise or donate. Can you afford the costs of getting such an ambitious project started- even if you aim for an initial population of 250,000- you'll have to host a site capable of dealing with thousands of concurrent users. You'd also have to create a site that's functional, user friendly, and visually pleasing. That's surprisingly difficult work.

5) Even if you overcame all of the technical hurdles- you'd still be left with the administration, verification, and moderation of hundreds of thousands of accounts. Even with strict rules, you must enforce heavily and moderate heavily to cut the good from the bad. If you want an example- spend some time in the Banhammer here. EJ has several moderators and admins who donate their time to keep the forums clean- where will you find *your* administrative staff? How will you keep them from being bribed or tricked into false verifications and lazy moderation? Say you manage to find 5 guys willing to do it- what happens when their real life interferes and you have to replace them?

It's a pipe dream. Would it be good if you could overcome the technical hurdles, of you could overcome the administration hurdles, if you could find a way to advertise, if you could develop a verification program that wouldn't leave you whimpering, if you could moderate heavily enough to make it a worthwhile place to look rather than a worthwhile place to troll....

Maybe. In the end, though, it's just a bunch of people who have felt strongly enough about someone to take it out of game. That rarely happens when people are *happy* with each other.... so in the end it degenerates into WoWForums2.0 with the trolls throwing feces around and everyone involved- good or bad- getting painted with the same brush.

Rating systems populated by the public as a mass, rarely achieve even a fraction of what they are intended to achieve. No one respects HotorNot as a reputable place of unbiased opinions of attractiveness.

Instead, spend time with your recruits and applicants and get to know them as best you can- try to make an informed decision (including checking references if that's your cup of tea) and accept that sometimes- even the best recruits go terribly terribly wrong somewhere between the application and the eventual guildkick.