I would like to see an addon that allows people to view someone's reputation, as generated by other players.

Right now, there are a host of excellent addons that can keep a blacklist or general notes on players and guilds (Karma (player tracking) and VanasKoS, for example), however they only support limited reputation sharing. Ideally, there should be an addon that, like wowecon, synchs all the reputation data for characters on your realm upon startup. This would allow a reputation to be much more of a factor when deciding whether to group, raid, or do business with someone.

Right now, there's very little in the way of serious repercussions if someone ninjas loot, takes over an instance ID, or cheats someone during a transaction that requires trust (such as asking someone to craft something for you with your mats). People talk about blacklisting these players, but the reality is that we have no way to know that someone is untrustworthy unless we get the info about what they did from someone who was there.

Some tricky planning and design will have to be done to ensure that the system is resistant to manipulation, however I have a few ideas that might help. I'm not a coder, unfortunately. Would this project interest any devs who read this forum? If so, PM me and we'll get started

This is one of those things that everyone on a server would need installed, and the only people who care about doing that sort of thing are roleplayers.

Also these "I have an idea but can't code, someone code this for me" threads are dumb.

Not everyone, only enough people that a reputation could be established. This application would be viable if only a few people used it, but becomes more useful as more people install it. Also, I'm not talking about role playing- I'm talking about griefers. The kind of things that would be significant are ninja looting, instance hijacking, and deliberately wiping raids.

While it would be nice, it would require widespread use to be useful and to make sure there is enough in the community to police itself. I'd see a lot of difficulty in getting enough people on the bus, seeing as it wasn't too long ago that it was common for any random pug to not have a threat meter, for example.

There are a few KoS list (Kill on Sight) mods that people use on PVP servers. I don't see why those mods couldn't be used for this purpose.

Not to mention that any sort of mechanism like this is ripe for abuse.

Doesn't this addon do what you want?

DoIKnowYou - World of Warcraft - WowAce.com

Syncs with guildies, party members, raid members, chat channel members, and characters you whisper or trade with.

It is a good addon, but it's not centralized. Ideally, this would be like wowecon- when you start WOW, you would connect to a central server and download the changes to the reputation database.

SeanDamnit, the addon does not require large numbers of people- it would function with a very small group, but the more people who use it, the more helpful it would be. LucidityAxel, your point is something I have thought about, but like any other peer reputation system (eBay, for example), protecting it is possible. You just need some clever processes built into the idea.

Each person could give another person a thumbs up or a thumbs down, with a centralized service that periodically performs something like the Google PageRank algorithm, where the weight of each person's vote is related to their own weight, and so forth. However, there is a caveat that Google's PageRank is initially seeded with a large number of anchor websites with high values, which would be hard to do for players.

eBay is a bad example, because they have full control over there servers and data, they know you bought an item from someone and to let you leave feedback on that item, you have no way of knowing that the event really happened and if the person is actually involved with it, especially not automatically.

And you don't want a site like WoWEcon, that would be even easier of a thing to abuse, and really you cannot build in any sort of protection unless you had someone who was willing to go through and verify every claim, in which case you might as well not bother using a mod because you're doing all the work manually.

What Dios said is right, you really would need everyone to be using it for it to be something worth turning into a mod that's actually useful and hard to abuse.

I can't imagine a way for this to be purely addon based. It will require some web backend that you'd need to upload your data anoad downld updated database, like lightheaded.

On the other hand being unmoderated it will quickly become vulnerable to intentional abuse much like The Dark Knight (2008) made it on top of IMDB in the first weeks and still being like 7th (despite being quite trivial in my personal opinion, however this is not a point of discussion).
Moderated database will require too much work from the people who is managing it.

You cannot do anything in game attaching to a database outside of wow, period. "When you start wow, you would connect" specifically does not work at all.

That's not true- wowecon downloads data from a server before you start the game. You have to use a custom launcher though. Also, if people don't want to use an addon that updates itself like that, it could be made like lightheaded- when you update your addon, all the new comments from wowhead are included.

In the same vein, Lightheaded downloads quest data and comments on demand from Wowhead. Downloading from a central hub is certainly doable. Whether or not the addon would actually work as intended is much more questionable.

There is nothing impossible, however such a task would require a lot of work and quite some cash to run it for all the servers at once. You should start with creating an engine and polishing it

Besides moderation is still an big issue - check wowhead for an example of "community moderation", in most cases you'll find atleast one downrated comment for no reason. If such rating will affect an ingame reputation, you are having a local WWII on your project.

People will just register multiple times and upload fake data, it's close to impossible to track and will require very strict rules for registration and posting.

I can imagine few more dozens of reasons this just won't work.

Your first problem is getting people to use your addon and run the data syncher. Your second problem would be to manage data integrity, as you do not have control over the data generated from the addon (this can - somewhat - be handled by doing trust modelling). Your third problem is authentication and verification, which you literally can not do.

Since you are not Blizzard, you do not have account information (and trying to piggyback Blizzards authentication system is not really something you should be doing).

Karma lists is also something that was not really appreciated by Blizzard when it was first talked about a while ago since by their nature, such systems are built to exclude people, and are extremely likely to be used to exclude newbies by default.

It is much easier / better to write an ingame blacklist, synch it with your friends and guildies and leave it at that. Using ingame communication provides you with easy ways to handle all three major problem at the cost of restricting the flow of information to yourself, your guildies and friends.

Lightheaded doesn't download on demand, the comments text is stored within the addon, and updated when you update the addon.


Re: Authentication

Just require a level 80 toon on the server in order to create an account and rate players on that server. Have your website verify the toon via armory? Sure it allows people to have multiple accounts tied to their multiple level 80 toons on the same server, but that can only go so far?

The problem is that anyone could claim to be Euripides on Drenden, and unless the real Euripides happened to notice and take steps to claim the character for his own account, nobody would be the wiser. We can't ask for their password (and wouldn't even if we could), and there's no easy way for them to verify their identity.

A workaround is possible. It would involve the player claiming a character having to perform some action in game that's prearranged through the site- like go equip some random piece of gear, and when we see it in the armory, we know that he probably has access to the character.

This is clunky though, so I see it being used more to resolve disputes than verify identity for every account, at least at first.