Would a reputation addon for M+ be allowed?

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

There’s currently a huge issue with people leaving M+ keys (and raids). I believe the main cause of this is that there are no consequences to doing so.

My idea is to make an addon that tracks player reputation.
This is how it would work:

  • Everyone starts at 0 reputation.
  • It costs 5x key level rep when you start a key. You lose this rep if the key is not completed.
  • If the key is completed, you are refunded the entry cost.
  • If someone else leaves, you are refunded half the entry cost.
  • If you leave first, you are not refunded anything.
  • Various “report” and “recommend” options could be added, where anyone using the app can report or recommend a player from their group (after starting the key) to make them lose rep or give them some bonus rep. For example reporting someone for leaving would make them lose 5 rep. Commending someone for playing good would give them 5 rep.
  • A “give up” vote could be added for higher keys where everyone agrees the key failed, no one would lose rep then.

Your reputation would be shown next to your M+ rating somewhere. It would be the ONLY thing visible and it wouldn’t be possible to go below 0.
Reputation would be character specific, but like RIO, it would show your main reputation on alts.

This is different from any sort of blacklist, because nothing negative is being tracked. You get rewarded for playing well and not leaving groups. But your reputation can never go below 0.

The goal would be to have a harsh penalty and lose a lot of reputation if you leave a key first. Maybe if allowed this could be tracked (but not displayed anywhere) and make the penalty even harsher if you leave multiple keys. First time you would lose 5 rep, second time within a week would make you lose 50 rep, 3rd time 500, …

If required this could only work for characters who sign up for it first. So if you never singed up, no one can see your reputation. Once you sign up, you start at 0 and can start building up reputation. You could cancel at any point, remove you from the system, but when you sign up again you start over from 0.
This way anyone using the addon would have agreed to their reputation being tracked.

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2

I’m afraid there is a significant aspect you haven’t addressed here, and that is where the addon would get its information from. The Raider IO addon has always pulled its data from Blizzard’s API. We download an update every day, but rarely does that update contain any change to addon functionality; it just gives us the latest data snapshot.

I suppose it would be possible for this addon to update by constantly propagating information through in-game channels (because the alternative is that players use some client to upload data, which probably few would want to do), but then there is still the verifiability of the information. How do you prevent handcrafted fake data from being accepted? I don’t know that WoW addons have much ability to be cryptographically secure.

For contrast, there is no faking M+ score, because it’s just pulled from Blizzard’s API. That’s why we trust that number, even if we might certainly disagree about what can be inferred from it.

3

(I’m the OP, changed character on forums)

Ah, I’ve never made an addon for wow (though I have a solid programming background)
So I’m not sure at all what the options here would be.

I “know” it will be possible to track the start of a key with an addon.
I’m not sure if it’s possible to send a message to my servers that the key has started with the characters in it from an addon? But it would surprise me if this is not possible, plenty of addons fetch and send information to applications outside of the game not? AH tracking for example?

If this is not possible with an addon, then it would have to be an application.

Filtering out “fake” data might be a problem too yeah.

4

Is this not just the raiderio addon?

Those with higher IO completed more dungeons.

Those with lower haven’t. I’ve never had anyone leave after 2k io. Even when the timer ends

5

Not at all.
RIO just shows the skill level you’re capable of.
You can fail 100 +10’s and then complete one and it will only show you completed one.

6

Nothing that immediately punishes a player will work simply because it can be abused. Only long term data that is analysed and compared to the player base can bring meaningful action.

7

No. The reason is a particularely brutal season.

Every time that was used in other games, it caused so much trolling that it made it unplayable for many toons.

Its like Yelp reviews. 1 salty Karen that drops a 1 star review for no reason can tank a restaurants reputation. Something they did not deserve.

If you apply that to WoW, you only need a couple of trolls to tank your reputation and end the M+ season for you right there and then. Whether you deserve it or not.

So the answer is NO.

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8

You could troll that drivel into unworkability in 5 minutes. And people would go out of their way to do it. For lols.

Hard pass.

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9

:smiley: why isn’t there such addon already?
cause everyone knows that it’s nonsence

I left many of my own keys when i failed to invite competent players.
You never know.
The best thing people can do about leavers is to deal with it.
Just go next.

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10

This post is going to be a bit lengthy, but only because I’ve been pondering the exact same thing lately, as I’m sure a great many players have too.

In my opinion this is an absolute truth and must be addresses if this game is to survive. In its current form M+ runs are almost impossible to start and complete unless you have a fixed 5-people friend group. I dont have hard data on this but I would guess that successful M+ completion rate for pugs is no more than 10-15%. If leavers and rage-quitters are weeded out through such a reputation rating I bet that ratio will quickly rise by a LOT. It would also have the huge side benefit of making the game a lot less toxic (its a guess but I believe those tend to be the same people).

RIO unfortunately doesn’t help at all: it is way too easy to manipulate by just buying a boost and increase rio rating. It would be great to have such a reputation number next to rio.

As for the specific proposal: I think its a solid idea. It can be tweaked but I would love to see this implemented exactly in its proposed form.

Couple technical details:

No addon is allowed to communicate outside the game through code. The way they circumwent it is by putting the data into lua files and have those files picked up by programms running outside of wow to post/pull to their servers. I once used this method to sync a players in-game calendar to their google calendar. Sync client + lua dumps.

There also is a way for realtime communication among clients in-game by creating a chat channel (like general or trade, but only for that addon), write events into that channel and have it picked up by other clients. I believe that is how DBM or details detects that there is a new version out there. Post your version to that channel and watch channel to see if someone else posts a higher version than your own.

Also, dont get discouraged by those nay-sayers above. Any programmer worth their salt can at least semi-secure their communication in any medium, thereby prevent tampering. Sure, bad people are creative, but so are good people. A good first step would be to limit your data-source to game events and not ask people their opinion of other players in the group. (Ie, trust an in-game dungeon-leave-event, but dont trust player vote).

People seem to point out specific cases where they (think) they left legitimately, but they probably dont understand your proposal. Its wouldnt work with one case, it would work over tens and hundreds. The numbers would begin to point out problem people.

As for the business aspect of this; of course blizzard wants the maximum number of paying customers. However by keeping the game as it is they already are losing a high number of players to toxicty and facts like this proposal aims to address. I know such people personally as I’m sure we all do. So as a biz exec, they’d have to chose how many fewer people they would want to lose.

I wish there was a way to turn ops proposal into some kind of petition to blizz to include in-game. If for nothing else to make them undenyingly aware of the problem. Otherwise I fear it will get buried in the depths of this forum and never heard from again.

11

There is? Why didn’t I notice this yet?

12

I’ll go out on a limb and say its because you’re not just mashing the invite button when you see big ilevel, score and a message that say “big dps”.

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13

Yeah, you’re right. By now I use quite a list of points I consider red flags, when it comes to forming M+ groups. A too big ilvl and those kind of messages surely are on it.